Prince Fred on the Geological Survey Map
I just
returned from a short trip to New York City.
I had an appointment late on Monday afternoon, and had taken advantage
of circumstances to plan an overnight with Rich, Katie and young Ruby in Red
Hook. It had been a while since I was there. Rich, my eldest, is a man of various
profitable skills, among them expertise as a sound-recording engineer. Still, I was taken by surprise when he asked
me whether I would be willing to spend a while recording my reminiscences of
some family experiences of his earliest years.
What he
wanted me to talk about specifically was “Prince Fred,” also known as “Prince
Fred’s Knob”. This is the place name for
a small, conical mountain in Marion County, Arkansas, now a part of the
wilderness above the Buffalo National River.
I can trace this name back only to the 1890s. From a long-defunct title deed for the
forty-acre plot of land I owned for some years in the 1960s and 1970s I can see
that it was part of a larger parcel recognized in 1892 as a valid mining claim
by the Prince Fred Placer Mining Corporation—an enterprise of which I have been
able to find no other record whatsoever.
I know that there were some active lead and zinc mines in the Ozarks in
earlier times, but Prince Fred cannot have been one of them. There was some modest evidence on the
property of an ancient feint at excavation, including perhaps a single dynamite
blast, but to label the results a mine would be to allow the imagination to run
riot.
No, for us
Prince Fred was simply a wild, remote, beautiful and challenging place where
over a period of several summers Joan and I, I together with two small children
and a shifting crew of undergraduate friends, pitted ourselves against the
elements in the ostensible effort to erect a log house. As parents we have long been convinced that
the adventurousness, the practical competence, and the wanderlust of our two
elder children flow directly from this early experience. They think so too.
miles of green
In my own
childhood years I had always vaguely hoped that I might own a piece of my own
land in “my” mountains, but it was only when I was married with children and a
professor of medieval literature at an institution twelve hundred miles away—that
is to say, when the hope became entirely impractical and quixotic—that I acted
upon it. My beloved aunt Louise, who at
that time was working for the Baxter
Bulletin in Mountain Home, Arkansas, knew of my land-lust. One day a man walked into the newspaper
office with a “for sale” ad: forty wilderness acres, two thousand dollars, in a
virtually inaccessible part of the neighboring county—Marion. That
was the first and only time in my life that I enjoyed the shady advantage of
insider trader’s information.
Prince Fred was perhaps six miles
from our old home farm, from which its top was clearly visible, but to get even
near it by motor vehicle you had to drive for probably thirty. It is in the high ground above the
river-front that briefly in the 1990s became nationally famous in the
Whitewater Land Development Deal featuring among others Bill and Hillary
Clinton. The Ozarks are, from the
geological point of view, very ancient.
Geologists conjecture that in eons past they might have been the size of
today’s Rockies, worn down like old boot heels over millennia of mysterious abrasion. Sometimes from a distance the hills present
an aspect of strange regular verticality like a pencil point—the shape favored
by Al Capp in the old “Li'l Abner” comics and in other hillbilly cartoons. My aunt pointed it out to me from the road to
our house—a misty green pyramid in a vastness of misty green. I could snap up a good chunk of the far side
of it for the pittance of my life’s savings.
Today I marvel that my younger self was capable of such an act of
brilliant improvidence.
In yesterday’s interview we didn’t
get all that far into the story. The
moment I began thinking about it, details came flooding back, but along with
many uncertainties of dates and narrative sequences, anecdotes, and
personalities. These will need sorting
out. The interview will have to be
continued and so also, perhaps, the narrative in this blog. But I can tell you the ending in
advance. Sometimes our government does
good things. In the early Seventies the
Buffalo was declared a “national river”—our nation’s first. The valley side along its confluence with the
White River became wilderness parkland.
The Government began a process of forced purchase of all private lands
within the proposed park. I stalled for
a while but didn’t even think about seriously resisting. They were compensating at a rate of a hundred
dollars an acre. That means I doubled my
money—almost as good as the Whitewater investors would do—and still ended up co-owner (along
with three hundred million fellow citizens, of course) of one of the most
gorgeous tracts of land God ever made.
