Brothers Andrew and Richard (Dick) Tate and George Anderson arrived at Ecore a Fabre in keelboats soon after and plied their trade along the river, carrying goods and pelts. By the mid-1820s, steamboats made their way up the Ouachita River and brought a faster route from Ecore a Fabre to the New Orleans markets. More people came. Soon, someone built a trading post, with “several families [in the vicinity] living in good log homes, then there were a number of campers, boomers, trappers, and hunters.” Many natives visited and traded often. Before long, a road connected Camden to Shreveport, Louisiana, in the southwest, and then east to Pine Bluff and Washington, Arkansas.[1]
[1] J. B. Nunn, “Early Days in Camden, Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly Winter 1949, Vol. 5, No. 4, 330-340; “Jesse B. Bowman,” https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/175235139/person/332274759228/facts, June 14, 2021; See also Dallas T. Herndon, Annals of Arkansas (Little Rock: Department of Archives and History, State of Arkansas, 1947). Jesse B. Bowman crossed the Red River from Arkansas into Texas in 1833 and died at the Alamo in 1836; H. M. McIver and Clark Ward, “Reminiscences of an Arkansas Pioneer as Recorded in 1890,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 17 (Spring 1958): 57.
Arkansas Wildlife History 