NEW ALL-TOO-TRUE-BLUE STATE HISTORIES (CREATIVE HISTORIES – ARKANSAS)

Excerpt from “The New All-too-True-Blue History of ARKANSAS”

Time Immemorial – The Ka-Pow

The first people in Arkansas were the Ka-Pow people. They caught the attention of Hollywood, who used their name in old Batman television serial dramas, along with Ka-Blooey and Wham-O and similar high-falutin’ words that fit the action on the screen.

This fame went to the Ka-Pow people’s head, and they took it upon themselves to change the spelling of their State to “Arkansaw.”

Nobody remembers why, but they thought this was cute.

When these original inhabitants weren’t goofing around, they were hunting the woolly-headed mammoths clean out of existence. The aborigines had made special pets of the cottony mammoths, and were afraid the woolly-headed ones would scarf up all the goober peas that both types of mammoths loved to eat, so they got rid of the woolly-headed ones to ensure the survival of the cottony mammoths, which still roam all over the swamps of Arkansas (at night, when there’s a full moon).

Here’s a reflection of a herd of woolly-headed mammoths in prehistoric Arkansas, provided by Mauricio Antón:

1541 – De Soto The Looter

In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto arrived on an official looting mission in Arkansas. Later, people from Michigan found this humorous, and named a car after him.

They still drive them in Cuba, as you can suss out here:

1673 – Marquette and Joliet

In 1673, a century after De Soto, French explorers Jacques “Big Daddy” Marquette and Louis Joliet arrived in the area.

Here they are, in a tintype of the era, being given a tour of the region by the then-ubiquitous Ka-Pows:

1682 – A Hermaphrodite Claims Arkansas for King Louis

In 1682, a French hermaphrodite named Renee Robert Cavalier was messing about in boats along the Mississippi River. He strolled into a Ka-Pow village and claimed the area for King Louis. The Ka-Powies had never heard of him (not having seen or even read The Jungle Book), so paid scant attention to this wild assertion about their land belonging to someone else.

They obviously failed to realize that Cavalier was really talking about the king of France, shown here on a bad hair day:

1762 – The French Get Arkansas from Spain

France ceded (gave, for an unspecified consideration) the Louisiana Territory, which included Arkansas, to Spain in 1762.

Some of the French soldiers performed a reverse-AWOL, though, and remained at Arkansas Post. They thought they would make a fortune picking cotton there (or contracting the work out), but instead got bitten by cottonmouths.

Here’s the area they temporarily refused to give up, as photographed from a cold-air balloon:

1783 – The Colbert Incident

The Colbert Incident took place at Arkansas Post in 1783. Stephen Colbert -17th (Stephen Colbert the negative seventeenth was the great-great-etc. grandfather of plain old Stephen Colbert of the 21st century) donned some fancy duds and shadow-boxed with some scarecrows he had dressed up to look like redcoats. In spite of these shenanigans, SC-17 claimed to be a very stable genius. Like wow, man!

For his meritorious service, SC-17 was pensioned to this mansion:

1800 – The French Get Arkansas Back from Spain

Confused about how badly they wanted America, France and Spain kept passing the place back and forth to each other. In 1800, the French got Arkansas back from Spain.

The confused residents of Little Rock milled around the city square, asking each other whether they should now learn French, or stick with the less hoity-toity Spanish:

1803 – Jefferson Buys Arkansas

In 1803, recognizing the scenic beauty of the State, T. “Tommy Boy” Jefferson (who invented the airplane in San Francisco in the 1960s) bought Arkansas from the French. Being distracted by scratching his itchy navel, Napoleon had developed an aversion to scenic beauty, and so wanted to divest himself of Arkansas.

Here you see how distracted he felt by his itchy belly button:

. . .

Each Tuesday an excerpt of one State’s (parodied) history will be posted here, in alphabetical order (from Alabama to Wyoming).

The (32-page) complete book “The New All-too-True-Blue History of Arkansas” is available here.

The regions of the U.S. have also been combined into volumes; Arkansas is included in the volume The New All-too-True-Blue History of the American Midwest featuring Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin

You can listen to this (Arkansas) excerpt here:

Blackbird Crow Raven is also the author of the book “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle”