Pioneers through the years

When I was a boy, we used to enjoy stories about the pioneers who settled the Old West, as we called it. Western movies were really popular, as were Western comic books, radio shows and early TV shows. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were a regular part of my days. I'm not fully sure whether the appeal of the Lone Ranger shows were the drama of law enforcement in the wild, wild west, or if the appeal of the great music was the key.

In my days of listening to the Lone Ranger on radio, the voice of the Lone Ranger was done by Brace Beemer. When TV came along, the TV Lone Ranger was Clayton Moore. I don't really like to compare people, or to diminish anyone's talent, natural or otherwise, but the radio Lone Ranger was hands down better than the TV version. Brace Beemer had a voice to beat all voices for portraying the Lone Ranger. Clayton Moore's voice was too light. Brace Beemer was like listening to the solid powerful voice of Trace Adkins today.

The Lone Ranger exposed us to the great orchestral harmonies of the William Tell Overture. It was always amazing to me how the music could match the scene and the situation. If the Lone Ranger and his great horse Silver were chasing crooks across the wide, wide spaces of the West, there was earnest galloping music to go with the action; and when the crooks were all in jail and the Lone Ranger and Tonto were riding away, the settling music just made you feel like everything was right and good with the world now. But the Lone Ranger and other Western shows kept us in touch with the idea that our western pioneers were great people, courageous people, people who dreamed great dreams of a prosperous Western country, as they rode the stage coaches out west, and braved the dangers of desperados and outlaw gangs and hostile Indian attacks to establish new homes and ranches and towns and cities in the West.

Then I get to thinking about the pioneers who settled our own country here in what is now northwest Arkansas. We had our own settlers who came here before there were towns and highways and other elements of civilization. We now call the old road which passed by Elkhorn Tavern east of Pea Ridge the Old Wire Road. That name comes from the 1860s, when telegraph wires were strung along the old military road coming from Missouri into Arkansas and reaching on to the southwest toward Fayetteville and Fort Smith. But the old road goes back even before the marvels of telegraph communications.

By the late 1820s the road was a very passable road, fit for horse and wagon traffic. Beginning in the mid-1850s, about the time that Pea Ridge was getting its first Post Office, stage coach lines began operating through our area, running from St. Louis to Springfield, Mo., into Arkansas, stopping at Elkhorn Tavern and other similar stage stops, changing teams for fresh horses for the trip to Fayetteville, Fort Smith and points westward to California.

By the 1880s, our northwest Arkansas counties were becoming a great apple country, with widespread orchards in all our communities, which led in 1881 to the building of the Frisco Railroad line which still serves our area under the ownership of the A & M Company, running through Garfield, Brightwater, Avoca and Rogers. All these things meant that people in their day were doing pioneering things, braving their way into new ways of doing things, creating new ways of traveling and getting around, and establishing new ways of communicating with the wider world.

I'm thinking sometimes that we in the 21st Century, looking back on the stage coach days and the early railroads, may think of those times as primitive, and even backward. Strange, how in conditions that today we might view as too barren to endure, where almost nothing of the things we take for granted were available to them, these pioneers were seeing tremendous potentials. They were ready to tackle enormous tasks because they were moved by a great vision of the future.

Could we be pioneers now, as our early Pea Ridge settlers were pioneers 175 years ago? We are so accustomed to advanced creature comforts that it seems unlikely that many would take on the challenges of new things and the possibilities of uncertain hardships in order to set up new homes and communities in previously untouched places. Yet in a way, we too are dealing with changes through the years, pioneering new ways of communicating and interacting, finding ways to wade through the unpredictable changes of technology. I'm thinking that to live in today's world, we still need to be thinking like pioneers, whether we are old like I am, or young as a teenager.

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 01/22/2014