The United States established its line of factories, or trading posts, throughout the Mississippi River Valley to build friendly relationships with the region’s Indian Nations. Influence with the Indian Nations was so crucial to American officials that they often conducted business at cost to court friendship and create more financial control over the nations. In 1820, Colonel Matthew Lyon established one factory at Spadra in what is now Johnson County (near Clarksville) to trade with the Cherokee. If visitors visit Spadra Park on the Arkansas River, they can see the historical marker at the west end of the drive (south side of the parking lot). [1]
“The Arkansas Gazette, in the month of May, 1822, published an account of this journey, and Niles’s Register for June 29, 1822, copied it as a memorable performance. At the beginning of that year, Colonel Lyon built a flatboat at Spadra Bluff and loaded it with furs, peltries and Indian commodities, and on the 14th of February launched it on the Arkansas river, bound under his own charge to New Orleans. The long trip was successfully made, and his collection of furs, peltries and Indian commodities was exchanged at NewOrleans for factory supplies, storekeepers’ goods, various utensils for the Cherokees, iron ware, such as he used to turn out at his Fair Haven forge and Eddyville foundry, and the machinery for a gigantic cotton gin which he was erecting, the largest one up to that period ever seen in Arkansas. The return passage was begun in the roughest weather of an inclement season, but it did not chill the fires of the old pioneer, for on the way back, like another Daniel Boone, he longed to thread once more the Kentucky forests, and after ascending the Mississippi to the mouth of White river, he there stored his cargo and set out for a flying visit to his old hearthstone and friends at beloved Eddyville. He soon returned, having gone through a journey within three months, in his seventy-third year, of over three thousand miles. All this was accomplished in wintry weather and against currents so adverse that oftentimes on his trip down the river from Arkansas his boat ran aground, when he was the first to jump into the water “to shove her off; ” and again in ascending the stream on his return to Spadra Bluff he guided the hands while they dragged along the grounded boat, and always insisted upon doing his share in “rowing, steering or cordelling.” The editor of the Arkansas Gazette saw Colonel Lyon as he ascended the river and could not discover that the long journey had, in the least, affected his health. ” He died soon thereafter. (From J. Fairfax McLaughlin’s Matthew Lyon: The Hampden of Congress.
[1] J. P. Young, Standard History of Memphis, Tennessee (Knoxville, TN: H.W. Crew and Co, 1912), 66. Fort Assumption under the French. For more information about United States Factories in Arkansas, see Wayne Morris, “Traders and Factories on the Arkansas Frontier, 1805-1822,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 28 (Spring 1969): 28-48.
Arkansas Wildlife History 