Biography of Andrew Scott, Arkansas

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Submitted by: Joy Fisher < >
        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.


ARCHIBALD YELL.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  I never met Archibald Yell but once in a court-room, and cannot speak of him as a
lawyer. I did not know that he was a mason until four or five years ago, when I learned
that he had been grand master of masons of Tennessee, for I was not made a mason until he
had been dead nearly three years. I knew him as governor and as representative in
congress, and I served under him in Mexico.

  He was a lawyer in the days of the territory, and was in attendance as such at the
court held by Judge Benjamin Johnson at Crawford Old Court House, in the winter of
1835-6.

  He was killed in battle at Buena Vista, on the 22d of February, 1847, a little more
than forty years ago, and yet I remember him well, and all his looks and ways, as if I
had seen him only yesterday. As a democrat I disliked him; in the service in Mexico we
had disputes, but the dislike and the disputes have for forty years seemed to me like
dreams. What follies most of our piques and resentments, our contentions and wranglings,
seem to have been, when we look back upon them, and cheerfully admit that those whom we
disliked and felt enmity toward were good and upright men!

  Archibald Yell was a worthy and honorable man; an officer of the government, of
unblemished integrity; a sincere devotee of the interests of his country; a man of a
kindly nature, amiable and obliging, and of heroic bravery. Frank, open, free-spoken, he
harbored no secret malice.

Ex iracundia ejus nihil supererat: Secretum et silentium ejus non timeres. Honestius
putabat offendere, quam odisse.

as Tacitus thus said of Agricola, so it could truly be said of Archibald Yell, "of his
anger nothing survived; his secret thoughts and silence were not to be feared; he thought
it more honorable to be aggressive than to hate."

  And, as the same great writer said of the same great Roman: "Although he was taken away
in the prime of life, he had, as to glory, lived the longest of lives."