(Union Reenactors at the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Prairie Grove.)
While traveling through the Ozarks during the Civil War, Union soldiers commented about Arkansawyers, who continued to live the hunter-farmer lifestyle alongside farmer-hunters. “You have no idea how miserably poor the inhabitants of this section of the country are,” concluded one fellow. “They have barely enough to keep body and soul together which I supposed they make by hunting and I do not think they are fit for anything else,” observed a northerner. Some Arkansawyers showed evidence that they also pursued some agricultural endeavors but, not commercially. An Iowan remarked about the agrarian-hunting lifestyle, depicting those he saw as “backwoodsmen, half hunter and half farmer, with seeming little industry at anything, living in rude cabins located in the narrow valleys along the creeks, cultivating a few acres of ground to corn, potatoes, and pumpkins.”[1]
[1] William P. Black to his mother, March 5, 1862, and S. S. Marrett to his wife, April 13, 1862, quoted in Shea, “A Semi-Savage State, 314; Black, A Soldier’s Recollections, 11.
Arkansas Wildlife History 