About This Book
A Hunters' bivouac under the shadows of a Mississippian forest, in a spot where the trees stand unthinned by the axe of the woodman. It is upon the Arkansas side of the great river, not far from the town of Helena, and in the direction of Little Rock, the capital of that State. The scene is a small glade, surrounded by tall cottonwood trees, one of which on each side, conspicuously "blazed," indicates a "trace" of travel. It is that leading from Helena to a settlement on the forks of the White River and Cache. The time is a quarter of a century ago, when this district of country contained a heterogeneous population, comprising some of the wildest and wickedest spirits to be found in all the length and breadth of the backwoods border. It was then the chosen home for men of fallen fortunes, lawyers and land speculators, slave-traders and swindlers, hunters, who lived by the pursuit of game, and sportsmen, whose game was cards, and whose quarry consisted of such dissolute cotton planters as, forsaking their homes in Mississippi and Tennessee, had re-established themselves on the fertile bottoms of the Saint Francis, the White and the Arkansas."
