Fishing for History

We met Ella today, the Administrator at Primrose UMC. She was off yesterday getting some tests she had some worry about so we are asking all pray-ers who read this blog to lift up Ella for peace about her health.

We then drove back about 1,000 years in time to the days when the local Indians of the Mississippian Culture built their earth mound community along the banks of an ox-bow shaped lake called Blue Bayou that once had been a curve of the Arkansas River below Little Rock. 

They are called Toltec Mounds, and now Toltec Mounds State Park, because the farmer who first thought they should be excavated scientifically incorrectly believed they must be Mexican Indian in origin. However there is no evidence that any of the Indian nations below the current US border ever came into America’s midwest or east to build the many mound communities we still have with us.

  

In the past 100 years 50% or so of these mounds have been saved from destruction by farmers unaware of their historical significance.  Today the state park offers very well prepared guides and field interpreters to assist the interested  tourist in discovering for him and herself just what may have happened here between about 700 and 1200 AD.

With no written record of any kind speculation on who these people were who built a 500 year complex civilization here, and why they left so suddenly is all we have to go on.  Drought, enemies, disease, or fear of something did it.  And we don’t know if the Indians white men encountered here later on, like the Quapaw,  were descendants or replacements of these mound builders.

The mounds are built along a beautiful bank with old cypress trees and tree knobs standing in the swirling, thickly green waters of the lakeside.  Standing through 1,000 years of floods, rain and wind these ancient towers of earth are both calendars for keeping track of the seasons, they have also have been worship centers, and burial places for the thousands of people who lived in small villages without mounds for miles around this site.

Imagine all those Indian people who lived around what is today the tiny village (population 256) of Keo, just four miles south of the state park. Would they have stayed if they had known Charlotte’s Eatery was going to be open for lunch every day until 2 pm?  We would have, and we did.

  

Keo is an old Cotton Ginning town, which shrank to its present size as the area farms (still called plantations regardless of their changed labor force. No slaves and no share croppers) left king cotton behind for rice, corn and soybeans.  In fact, the biggest industry in town 

                                           today is antiques.

 Morris’ Antiques is one of the largest antique dealer families in the US and reminded Mona and I a lot of the former size of Merritt’s Antiques of Weavertown, Berks County, Pa. A sign in the restaurant promoted the newly arrived shipment of European antiques for sale at an astounding 50% off!

A sign along any road that says ‘Civil War Marker >’ gets my attention so we made a right turn to a small creek and a sign describing the skirmish at Ashley Mills.  The battle was a presage to the fall of Little Rock and all of 

                                     Arkansas to Union General Steele’s army.

Today the mill is gone and replaced with a collection of Scott, Arkansas, plantation buildings from the turn of the last century.  They also have the oldest remaining log cabin in the state, built in 1840, which stood just a few hundred yards south of its present location before being moved for a time to a plantation several miles west.  The sounds of the skirmish which was fought on its present site were clearly heard by its owners in 1863, if they were 

                                          home.

We closed the afternoon with a relaxing several hours of reading and reflecting  along another of those ox-bow lakes which are so common where the old man rivers have changed course in flood times of the past.  Now the Corps of Engineers manages the water flow of the Arkansas River here with dams and the use of these lakes for irrigation of crops.  This one, Willow Beach Park, has no willow trees that we could see and definitely no beach.  But its got great catfish fishing as one woman we met can attest to.

 

Theodorus told us she’s been cat fishing these lakes and the river for 36 years for fun, food, and therapy. I think our daughter Jenn’s family would agree with all three reasons to go fishing.

Today, as we read our books on the lake shore she caught a 5-6 pound catty with one of her several rigs and chicken livers for bait. She and a friend had been there all day without catching anything thus far but Theodorus said that’s the way fishing is. 

I think you have to have a lot of patience to catch fish. I’ve never thought myself able to sit still so long for possibly no reward.  But I believe my daughter’s and Theodorus and friend know what I do not; that the reward isn’t just the fish.  It’s the peace. But then that’s why Mona and I love to sit and read so quietly.

So we came home, turned on the two air conditioners to full high and I blasted the final knights, picts, and saxon battle scenes of the Jerry Bruckheimer movie ‘King Arthur’ out of all 5 surround sound speakers.  Mona closed both doors between the living room and the bedroom and I think plugged her ears as she read as well.

-Ken