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Caddo Indians To Be Topic Of Meeting, Wendy Bradley Richter

Articles

For thousands of years, the land that is now known as Arkansas has been inhabited by native peoples. For much of that time, the Ouachita River valley and much of southwest Arkansas was home to the Caddo Indians and their ancestors. Because of the significance of this pre-history to southwest Arkansas area, the Clark County Historical Association will host a special presentation featuring Caddo Indian sites along the Ouachita River, the Caddo people, and their artifacts, at noon on Tuesday, Sept. 6, at Western Sizzlin in Arkadelphia.

Dunbar Expedition Stopped In Clark County: Public Invited To Attend Program On Expedition Today, Wendy Bradley Richter

Articles

In 1804, a cadre of explorers left Natchez, Mississippi, seeking to learn more about the Ouachita River and the celebrated hot springs of the Ouachitas at the request of President Thomas Jefferson. This meant that Lewis and Clark were not the only explorers of the United States’ huge, newly-acquired parcel of land called the Louisiana Purchase. William Dunbar of Natchez and George Hunter of Philadelphia led the excursion up the Ouachita, constituting the first American investigation of its new territory. Their reports pertaining to the river’s environs provide some of the earliest descriptions of the Ouachita River region, including the …

Ouachita River Frozen At Arkadelphia, Wendy Bradley Richter

Articles

Severely cold weather visited Clark County many decades ago. The years of 1918 and 1899 included some of the lowest temperatures on record. It was so cold that the Ouachita River froze here in Arkadelphia! Photographs from 1918 illustrate that some area residents seized the rare opportunity to walk across the river.

Interestingly, the Southern Standard newspaper had relatively little to say about the extreme temperatures. On January 17, 1918, the paper did, however, recall 1899 as the year of the “big freeze” and characterized current conditions as being the “coldest weather during past week we have had here for …