Not only would it be cheaper but it would be a pleasant outing for him and a good ride. Instead of going to Fort Smith by steamboat of train, Papa decided he would go on horseback and walk the ponies back all tied together.

I attended the funeral and visited in Memphis with my brother, Little Frank, and his family. To this day I have never met anybody else names Yarnell, white or black. We exchanged letters every Christmas until he passed away in the flu epidemic of 1918. Yarnell was a good man, thrifty and industrious, and he later became a prosperous house painted in Memphis, Tennessee. He was born of free parents in Illinois but a man named Bloodworth kidnapped him in Missouri and brought him down to Arkansas just before the war. Yarnell and his family lived just below us on some land he rented from the bank.

He was hurt in the terrible fight at Chickamauga up in the state of Tennessee and came near to dying on the way home from want of proper care.īefore Papa left for Fort Smith he arranged for a colored man named Yarnell Poindexter to feed the stock and look in on Mama and us every day. I think I am in a position to know the facts. He was a Cumberland Presbyterian and a Mason and he fought with determination at the battle of Elkhorn Tavern but was not wounded in that “scrap” as Lucille Biggers Langford states in her Yell County Yesterdays. Frank Ross was the gentlest, most honorable man who ever lived. If Papa has a failing it was his kindly disposition. But Chaney set us a fuss to go and after a time he got the best of Papa’s good nature. Papa intended for Tom Chaney to stay and look after things on the place while he was gone. Anyway, it would be cheap enough investment to start with, and we had a patch of winter oats and plenty of hay to see the ponies through till spring when they could graze in our big north pasture and geed on greener and juicer clover than they ever saw in the “Lone Star State.” As I recollect, shelled corn was something under fifteen cents a bushel then. He thought he would buy a small string of them and if things worked out he would breed and sell them for that purpose. Papa has an idea they would make good deer-hunting ponies, beign hardy and small and able to keep up with the dogs through the brush. They had never had anything but grass to eat and did not weigh over eight hundred pounds. People in Arkansas did not think much of Texas mustang ponies. He was getting shed of them at bargain rates as he did not want to feed them over the winter. He had heard that a stock trader there named Colonel Stonehill had bought a large parcel of cow ponies from Texas drovers on their way to Kansas and was now stuck with them. In November when the last of the cotton was sold Papa took it in his head to go to Fort Smith and buy some ponies. He was a bachelor about twenty-five years of age.

True grit book cover