I don’t remember anymore. Was the man who looked like a crow the same as the hitch-hiker I saw just down the road from a sign saying WARNING: HITCH-HIKERS MAY BE ESCAPED CONVICTS?

It was a hot summer day. I spent the morning at Spiro Mounds. Around the parking lot, near the benches and paths that had been made during the Works Progress Administration, a man was cutting new grass. Inside, in the office, a woman greeted me. There wasn’t much to look at in the display cases. I thought of jaguar and eagle priests, remembered that there had once been panthers in Arkansas.

I drove on to Fort Smith, through Little Rock, Memphis, to Atlanta, where my sister lives.

Later, I discovered that Etowah, just northwest of Atlanta, is one of the most important sites of the Mound Culture people. Spiro is another. Creek, Natchez, and Chickasaw, descendants of the mound builders, were relocated westward in the 19th century. They are now scattered throughout Oklahoma.

I realized that I had traveled the same route as these tribes, only in another time, and in reverse.

So “who goes there,
hankering, gross, mystical,
nude”?
WALT WHITMAN?
APPARITION OF THE HIGHWAY
WARNING -Don’t get lost
Don’t try to fly as the crow.
We are not birds.
Think about the road,
the time it takes to find a path,
to know who it is by the side of the road.

 
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”.

It was the depression that forced some out of work miners to lease the Spiro site to see what they could find of marketable value within those intriguing mounds of earth found near the Arkansas River, just west of Fort Smith, Arkansas. The miners “strike” was one of the richest yet known in all of North American archaeology and the fantastic collection of embossed copper plates, engraved shell bowls and even elaborate wooden objects came flooding onto the market.

Elaborate artifacts of copper and stone had been known from the Southwestern United States since the 1860’s.

With Spiro, a triad was formed, from Spiro to Etowah to Moundville, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. These sites demonstrated that there was a ceremonial group that existed in association with platform mounds. This complex occurred chronologically late, into our historical times, because European trade objects were found in a related site in Tennessee.
 
Compiled and written by the Writer’s Program of the Works Progress Administration, Oklahoma Guide to the Sooner State, Norman, Oklahoma, 1941, p.264.

Atlanta is first mentioned in Revolutionary War Records dated August 1, 1782, stating that a secret emissary had been delegated to report on rumors of friction between the Cherokee and Creek Indians at The Standing Peachtree. Named, according to legend, for a fruit-bearing tree that grew on a near-by Indian Mound, the Standing Peachtree was a Creek settlement on the southern bank of the Chattahoochee River, approximately seven miles from the present site of Atlanta. The Creek are said to have acquired the region south of the river from the Cherokee in a series of decisive ball games, with the land rights at stake.
 
George Hornby, editor, Your National Parks, New York, 1980, p. 5.

Until 1908 convicts were leased to private individuals or companies for work on railroads and other enterprises. After the abolishment of the system in that year the state for a time used convict labor in road construction, but now uses it only for the maintenance of highways…

Recent road development by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the farm-to-market road program under the Works Progress Administration have done much to expand and improve intra-state highway transportation and consequently to raise the standard of living in rural districts.
 
Introduction to Antonio J. Waring, Jr., The Waring Papers, Cambridge, Ma., 1968, edited by Stephen Williams, p. 5.

Darkness comes. Sounds creep out: whippoorwill, tree frogs, roar of alligator back in the pond…the scream of a cat in the swamp. Sounds like these weave in and out…pulling in hearsay tales…

Sometimes as you sat there, crazy Miss Sue would walk down the road giggling to herself. You’d say, “Howdy, Miss Sue,” and she would hurry past breathlessly as if to keep a late appointment or maybe she would stop, turn, look at you gently as if you were a childhood dream and then float away in the dusk. And you would watch her, bemused, not certain whether it was Miss Sue or your own strange notions walking down the road with you.
 
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, New York, 1963, p. 140.

On the fifteenth (January, 1820) we again arrived at the post of Osark, or as it is now not very intelligibly called, Arkansas, a name by far too easily confounded with that of the river, while the name Osark, still assumed by the 224 lower villagers of the Quapaws, and in memory of whom this place was first so called, which would have been perfectly intelligible and original.

It was to this Cherokee settlement that Sam Houston came in 1829, after his designation as Governor of Tennessee. By a special act of the Cherokee Council in 1829 at Tahlonteeskee, Houston was formally adopted into the tribe. He took an Indian wife and lived in the vicinity of Fort Gibson for several years.

State 10 passes through a section dotted with the cabins of an isolated group of Indians. The majority of these people are full-blood Creeks who became members of the Cherokee tribe. While yet in their eastern homes, they opposed removal to the new Indian Territory and fled to the Cherokee Nation. Later, when the Cherokees were also forced to move, these adopted sons and daughters continued to live with them. Scattered among them are a few Natchez, members of a tribe usually regarded by ethnologists as extinct.

At 1.0 is the junction with another asphalt road.

Leaving State 10, this road passes near the ruins of an old SALT WORKS on Saline Creek that operated in 1820. From the one hundred huge kettles of salt water kept boiling most of the time, the refined salt was taken to a warehouse just about the near-by falls, where it was stored until keel boats could carry it down the river to Arkansas and Louisiana.
 
Thwaites, “Early Western Travels, 1748-1840,” Cleveland, 1905, Nuttell’s Journal, p. 291.

The end of the threats of Indian raids did not bring peace to the Indian territory. Now there were other threats. Lawless bands rode to the Territory, which by now was a curious island in the nation’s expansion. The rugged terrain and the legal entanglements caused by the Indian’s treaty rights created a vacuum in law enforcement. Only the Western District Court at Fort Smith had jurisdiction over the crimes involving persons not subject to the tribal courts. Into this vacuum swarmed hordes of horse thieves, bandits, and fugitives from justice. A handful of US Deputy Marshalls and the tribal Light Horse struggled to keep order. This was the situation when Judge Isaac C. Parker arrived at Fort Smith in 1875. He brought to the Western District Court personal dedication, incorruptibility, and sympathy for the Indian. These qualities soon won him respect at Fort Smith and in the Territory. During his 21 years on the bench he saw more than 13,000 cases docketed in his court. More than 9000 defendants were convicted or pleaded guilty. Of these, 344 were tried for capitol offenses and 160 were sentenced to hang. Only 79 were hanged, but they were cited as “proof” of Parker’s severity. Few detractors took notice of the tremendous load of the Western District Court or to the savage nature of the crimes committed.
 
The Fort Smith National Historic Site, Fort Smith, Arkansas.

I don’t remember anymore. Was the man who looked like a crow the same as the hitch-hiker I saw just down the road from a sign saying WARNING: HITCH-HIKERS MAY BE ESCAPED CONVICTS?