Arkansas: A Different State For many people the mere mention of the word "Arkansas" conjures up unflattering and certainly not very flattering images. To suggest that Arkansas is “a diverse state” is to guarantee almost immediate agreement from any audience, but that agreement usually concerns the negative aspects of the state rather than those that make an actual difference. These negative aspects date back to the early days of the territory. When Cephas Washburn was traveling to Arkansas in 1819 to serve as a missionary to the Cherokee, he stopped at the present site of Vicksburg, Mississippi, to get specific directions to the territory, only to be told that "the way to get there" was known.”1 Other observations relating to Arkansas are even less positive; it was stated that “Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died”2 and as late as 1989 a writer was still able to describe Arkansas as “the least known of the fifty states”.3 One of the most famous What helped give Arkansas a negative image was Thomas W. Jackson's On A Slow Train Through Arkansas. Published in 1903, this book contained many descriptions of life in the state, including a pitiful account of a traveler who “stopped at a place where there was a doctor, two shoemakers, and a blacksmith. The doctor killed a man. They didn't want to be without a doctor, so they hanged one of the shoemakers."4 Jackson's book helped convince many readers that people in Arkansas didn't wear shoes.5Among the best-known national writers who commented on Arkansas was certainly H.L. Mencken of Baltimore Sun was very memorable. In August 1921, his acid-tipped pen described the state of Arkansas as “trace…middle of the paper…Kansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XXXVIII (Spring 1979), 63.7 Ibid., 68.8 Harry S. Ashmore, Arkansas: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), xvii.9 Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist: The Facts of Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century England (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1993), 75.10 Imogene Wolcott, ed., The New England Yankee Cook Book (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1939), 161.11 Ibid., xiii.12 Williams, et al., 9.13 Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (New York: The New Library of American Literature, 1963), 223.14 Ibid., 228-229.15 Ibid., 333.16 Helen McCully and Eleanor Noderer, eds., The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking, II (np: American Heritage Publishing, 1964), 537.