Biography of Andrew Scott, Arkansas

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        Date: 16 Dec 2007
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BIOGRAPHICAL AND PICTORIAL HISTORY OF ARKANSAS.
BY JOHN HALLUM.
VOL. I.
ALBANY: WEED, PARSON'S AND COMPANY, PRINTERS.
1887.

Entered according to act of Congress in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-seven,
BY JOHN HALLUM, 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

NOTE.

  [The following sketches of Robert Crittenden, Samuel Hall, John Taylor, the superior
court, including judges Benjamin Johnson and Thomas J. Lacy, Edward Cross, David Walker,
William Cummins, James W. Bates, Archibald Yell, Terrence Farrelly and Francis Hubbard,
in the order named, were written by General Albert Pike, at the request of the author,
for this work. Such an accomplished author needs no introduction to the American reader.]

PREFATORY.

  What one may now be able to say with knowledge of the men who lived fifty years ago in
Arkansas cannot be expected to be of interest to most of those who live in Arkansas
to-day. The new Arkansas is not the same Arkansas as the old one, but another. There has
been a conquest of the State, peaceful, indeed, by detachments of a great invading army
of men from other States and lands - peaceful, but none the less as much a conquest as
those of England by the Saxons and the Danes were, which almost obliterated from the
memories of the Britons the names of their old heroes.

  It is for this that I have been reluctant to write down what I remember of those men
whom I knew fifty-five years ago, or soon after, and whom I then esteemed worthy, or came
to esteem so afterward, when the animosities and dislikes engendered by political
differences had died out. There are so few now of the descendants of these men left, to
whom such reminiscences can be grateful! There are so few now to whom it is of any
importance or interest that the men of that remote day lived at all!

  One with difficulty brings himself to write of any thing, knowing that what he writes
will be read with indifference or impatience, and, to the larger part of those now living
in Arkansas, the names that I should have to mention will be as strange and unregarded as
those upon the monuments of Assyria and Chaldaea. "The life of the dead," said Cicero,
"is in the memory of the living;" and, if this be true, it is not in my power to bring to
that life again those whom I knew in the early days.

  Neither is there in this any thing to be with reason complained of. For, also, to those
of us who went to Arkansas no earlier than 1832 or 1836, the men who had lived and died
there before us were but the mere shadows of names, in the history of whose lives we felt
no interest. We put ourselves to no trouble to have the names kept in remembrance, but
unconcernedly permitted them to glide away from us into oblivion, no record of their
words or deeds remaining; and with what right can we complain, if we, too, the dead and
living alike, are to the men of to-day only as those are who lived and died in other
lands, when the world was not by a thousand years so old as it is now.

  Moreover, there is not much of adventure or action to be told of these men, that can
make what may be written of them otherwise than wearisome to read. The things that
chiefly interest us in our daily lives are of no interest afterward to any one, and if
recited they seem tame and trivial. When one has but little to tell and that little is in
regard to those for whom most of the living care nothing, it would be wiser to be silent;
yet if what lie may write will give pleasure to one or two, here or there, to whom the
holy Dead are of consequence, he ought not to let the general indifference prevent his
writing.

  WASHINGTON, May 25, 1887.                            ALBERT PIKE.


TERRENCE FARRELLY.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  This worthiest of men resided five miles from the Post of Arkansas, a mile or two below
the plantation of his warm friend, that king among men, Ben. Desha. They were very unlike
each other, both in appearance and character, but they were like brothers. Desha was a
large, stately man, fitted to be an emperor. I never saw such eyes in any human head as
his and those of his brother, John R. Desha, large, luminous, brilliant, terrible in
anger. I saw Ben. Desha once at the Post of Arkansas drive a faro-dealer, who menaced him
with a bowie-knife, out of the room by advancing upon him with a penknife, his eyes
blazing like those of an angry lion, clear and piercing as a hawk's. I was talking with
him in 1835, on the pavement at DeBaun's corner, when Wharton Rector came up and spoke to
me, and then a few words passed between him and Desha, when Rector, flaming with anger,
said: "Colonel Desha, this is the second time that we have had words together. The third
time ___"  "By God. sir," said Desha, coldly and sternly interrupting him, "make it the
third time now." But the days of personal conflicts in Arkansas were over and nothing
further was said.

  Terrence Farrelly was an Irishman, some fifty years of age in 1833, when I met him at
Little Rock and at once became attached to him. He was of plain features, unmistakably
Irish, with heavy eyebrows and clear, frank eyes, as loyal, true and pure a man, of as
kindly feeling and ready sympathy as any man I ever knew. When Henry Clay was defeated in
1844, he was so overcome by emotion that he wept like a child. I have had many friends,
and I love the memory of many, but I have had no such friend, and no one's memory is so
dear to me as his. He was not a lawyer in 1833, but had studied, and many years afterward
was admitted to the bar and practised for some years. Always ready to serve his friends,
his services were always in demand and always efficient. "Terrence!" exclaimed his friend
James Scull, the territorial treasurer, "I shall go crazy over these infernal accounts.
For God's sake, come and straighten them out for me!" and with infinite patience Terrence
"straightened" them. Everybody confided in, everybody honored, everybody loved Terrence
Farrelly. No man ever had a nobler troop of friends than he. He certainly never had one
that he did not deserve to have; and I am sure that he never lost one.

  Neque solum vivi atque praesentes tales homines docent, sed hoc idem etiam post mortem
assequuntur.-CICERO.