CURSES! Foiled again!

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Set out yesterday morning on the pilgrimage to Buffalo River to get the stamp that we didn’t get in 1990 when we were camping there, because in 1990 we didn’t yet have our first National Park Service Passport. (We are closing out our third one on this trip.) Three hours and 90 miles later, we were right back where we started, having not made it anywhere close to the target. Despite a forecast that the weather would be warming steadily up into the 50’s, the meteoric rise halted at 31 degrees, which might have been all right, if it had not been raining. Ice was piling up on the roads, and vehicles were piling up right along with it. We went around one roadblock, made our way over a slushy mountain that trucks were skipping (they were just pulling over on the side of the road), decided to take a break at the Clinton Huddle House (THAT sounds like a joke just waiting to be made, doesn’t it?) for hot chocolate and toast (Carrie) or coffee and chili (Tim) in the hope that things would warm up and thaw out.

When we saw that the trucks were coming through, we headed out one more time, only to be halted less than ¼ mile down the road by the local sheriff, who was turning everyone back because the main highway was closed. He said that there was a solid sheet of ice up the mountain and there had already been a great many accidents. He did not anticipate the road opening until at least noon (an hour and a half later).  We took a gander at one additional alternate route, but the ice there was too heavy for comfort, and we did an about face and retraced, Buffalo River-less and stamp-less. Plan B: We’ll see if we can give it another try on the way home.

"...if you killed him in the effort, you had to bury him at your own expense."

Never occurred to either one of us that we might need four-wheel drive in Arkansas. Isn’t this SOUTH of where we live?

After another lengthy delay due to an overturned 18-wheeler on the Interstate, we finally rolled into Fort Smith about 2:30—6 hours after we left the hotel in the morning. Ye ha. The NPS site there is pretty interesting; it’s the fort itself, which served not only as a military fort but, more famously, as a jail and courthouse on the frontier of Indian Territory for a great many years. The judge was Isaac C. Parker, famously known as the “Hanging Judge,” and he did, indeed, sentence something like 180 people to hang during his 21-year tenure. (I have a list, if he’s still available….!) Most interesting thing to me: all that stuff you see on television in westerns is pretty much true. The treaty between the Five Tribes and the US Federal Government forbade the Indians from arresting any US citizen in Indian Territory (I did not know this), so, naturally, a whole raft of criminals headed straight for Indian Territory and set off on a veritable binge of raping, pillaging, and murdering. One exhibit said that of the 20,000 white people living in Indian Territory, only 5,000 were law-abiding. Go figure. So in response, the US Government set up these courts, assigned a slew of U.S. Marshals to the judge in charge, and set about prosecuting. It was a terrible job, being a U.S. Marshal: it paid 6 cents a mile and $2 a criminal for ever warrant successfully issued and criminal returned to court. If you didn’t get the guy, you got nothing, and if you killed him in the effort, you had to bury him at your own expense. And 65 Marshals were killed in the line of duty during the 21-year Parker tenure. Crazy.

Most perplexing bit: the girl at the desk at Ft. Smith invited us to head down the hall to see the "ojo."  "'Ojo,'" I thought to myself.  "What the heck is an ojo?"  But she kept talking and it shortly became apparent that what she meant was "old jail."  As opposed to "new jail" ("newjo") which was upstairs.  The English language is endlessly flexible.

Tomorrow we’re headed out to Arlington to spend a few days with David and Michele. Weather supposed to improve (we’ll see if that prediction is any better than today’s!), so other than holiday traffic, rush hour around Dallas, and garden variety stupidity, we shouldn’t have too much trouble!