Life on the White River: Two Revealing Images from the 1920s and '30s

Undated photograph of a family on their houseboat, presumably along the White River. Ark Post Museum State Park  

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     This image was posted on Facebook by Denise Parkinson who, like me, remembers houseboats up and down the White River in our younger days.  I have become fascinated, largely thanks to her and a fellow Crockett's Bluff descendant Jim Prange, with the photographer Dayton Bowers who maintained a studio in DeWitt from the 1870s to his death in 1924.  Clearly, one of the pioneers of the art form: more skilled (better cameras?) than Mathew Brady and with a more artistic eye.   This image, like the one below of Helen Spence and her father Cicero and others, which was made by Bowers,  has a number of the same details, particularly in the attention paid to its composition.

     Both images have been carefully staged with captivating attention to detail.  Both designed to reflect a lifestyle.  Would that the houseboat gathering above had been just a bit closer to the camera.  How interesting would be the details of the clothing, particularly those ties worn by men on the roof, two seating in a semi-yoga position, with another squatting to their right  and two others standing behind in casual positions with a leg crossed.

     Below on the lower porch, the elders? or parents? with two young girls, one standing between the elders and another perched on the railing.  Everyone in his or her place.   Randomly balanced.

     And, unlike the image below,  the houseboat leaves everything to the viewer's imagination.  Is this the White River? All one family?  An extended family?  Since the men on the roof appear to be about the same age, were they both family and friends?  Sunday afternoon?  Holiday?  And that relatively fancy boat tied at the right?  And what's the story of the second smaller houseboat in the right background?

     What is clear, however, is this dwelling is several cuts above the houseboats of the ordinary inhabitants -  depicted in the image below - who made their living from the river.

L-R: Cicero Spence, Helen Spence, John Black and others at fur trading barn at St. Charles.  Circa 1919

     Unlike the image above of the houseboat gathering, this image is much closer to the camera and therefore more revealing in its detail.  Although intriguing in its detail of life on the White River in the early decades of the twentieth century, it is even more astonishing as a virtual glimpse of the prehistory of Cicero Spence and his daughter Helen at the left.

     In her Daughter of the White River, Denise Parkinson includes an expanded view of this image that includes the unidentified figure with a rifle at the right of the black dog: "Expanded view of Cicero and Helen Spence and John Black, as well as unidentified boys and a hunter, at a fur trading barn in St. Charles, possibly circa 1918."

     A staged collection of related objects, in addition to the array of furs, are displayed on the wall.  Mostly "hides" of raccoons, with perhaps those of mink - far left behind the rifle next to Cicero - and a single one of a deer, with its  head and antlers at Helen's left.  Everyone kneeling or sitting, everyone dressed appropriately - Cicero with his pistol and vest of shells, the boys in their hats, the powder horn hanging over the deer skin - and every object significant to its theme.  The Brown's Mule chewing tobacco can/box along with angled

Brown's Mule Tobacco Box

wooden beam at the right foreground serve as perfect objects to add balance to the image.

     Obviously, the photographer had more in mind than a simple recording of some folks and some furs.  Hunting and trapping and fishing were the mainstays for survival on the White River in those days - especially during winter months - activities that for survival required killing and slaughter.

     None of those present when this image was captured, certainly not the photographer Dayton Bowers, could have dreamed that by the time this young Helen Spence in her white leggings reached her late teens Cicero would be killed and she would use perhaps the pistol, held here casually in her father's hand,  to kill "her daddy's" killer at his trial in the DeWitt Court House.

Parkinson, Denise, A Treasure Comes Home, May 2015

The Henry Prange Family Residence and Barn: Crockett's Bluff's Oldest Surviving Structures

My recent visit to Arkansas County was more hurried than I had hoped but it did include stops at DeWitt for a book signing event,  at St. Charles for a stop at the cemetery and several old and abandoned structures that were alive and significant in the 1950s, and at Crockett's Bluff for a visit to the old family home site.

I had been asked by Denise Parkinson to write a foreword to her Daughter of the White River, an updated defense, one could say, of Helen Spence, the subject of one of the great county legends who was secretly buried in the St. Charles cemetery where, though I was unable to find her grave I did find the one of the Knowlton family that included Bob who was a friend and classmate for many years.  The walk around the old home place - all remnants of the old house now gone - was strange but satisfying, memories emerging at every turn like pop-up notices on my mobile phone.

After turning northward from Rt. 1 on to Rt. 153 that afternoon the image that emerged just above the skyline was that of the Prange Bros water tower that was clearly visible from that five mile marker to the bend of the White River where it stood.  Apparently it was removed about the time Schwab's Store that it looked down upon closed.  Fortunately, the structure of the store still stands, and I find it near to impossible to pass without stopping.

"Hey there! I was just thinking of you the other day."

Lucky for me, Darrell Gardner, the son in law of Eddie Schwab who established and managed the store through its many decades, was holding the fort.

He had recently found some interesting inscriptions written on the rafters and walls of the old Prange barn that rests just a hundred yards or so from the store, and he thought it might be fit material for this web site.  An hour or so later I completely agreed.

Prange barn constructed about 1900 (Vickie Gardner photo)

Clearly, along with the once spacious home of "Miss Cora" Prange, apparently married to the barn fifty yards or so to the north, Schwab's Store remains one of the oldest structures still standing in the Bluff, and for me associated with the center of activity during my childhood and teenage years.   It has, however, become fairly certain, thanks in part to Darrell's keen observations, it is not the oldest.  

  This original Henry Prange family barn rests solidly still - half its roof visible on the Google Earth image - a few yards west between Schwab's Store and the Prange residence.  It was the scribbled inscriptions within it on its walls and rafters that caught Darrell's eye, particularly the 1916 dates and autographs posted there with brushes in apparently the black stove-polish-like  that was used to mark the Prange logo on the rice sacks stored there in the early decades of the 1900s.  If it was a functioning barn at that date, it had to have been built somewhat earlier, and there's no other structure of any kind in the area known to date back before 1900.

Carl Heinrich Prange in the cement floor of his barn.

There is, however, a potentially enlightening clue resting literally at the end of the lane from the Prange house on the east side of Rt. 153, an historical marker noting that Henry Prange, the builder of both the house and the barn, grew in his front yard the first - apparently miniature - rice field of the area in 1906.

Grand Prairie Historical Society Marker

    It is known that Henry Prange lived southward out Rt. 153 from the Bluff on what is now known as Wiedner Road, near the old Lutheran Cemetery, before, one can assume, the present dwelling was constructed.  Was the barn built for practical reasons before the house?  If by 1916 or a bit afterward, rice was being grown to the extent that it was being stacked high enough in this barn to allow Henry's son Theo and their friend George Kline to write (in 1919) their names at the rafter level, then he had indeed become, as Jim Prange has noted elsewhere, "the rice guy." But here's where the minor mystery re the barn and the house begins, says Jim Prange, the  "official" Prange Family Historian: "Since Henry Prange (or someone did) put his name and year inside the barn, I am curious . . . as to whether or not he did something similar on the house. . . . At this point I think we are safe in saying that the house is 'about' a hundred years old.  Which comes first, the house or the barn. "

By the late 1920s or early 30s there would be a warehouse constructed only a few hundred yards east across the irrigation canal on the bluff at the bend of the river visible in an early photograph, along with a chute for sliding sacks of rice on the barge of a steamboat. 

Sturdy construction with shingled roof originally.

George Kline signature "Fall 1919"

Unknown initials.

Incomplete 1916 signature.

Later modifications around sturdy beam.

One has to walk inside to appreciate the space.

Rice bags being loaded from a warehouse more convenient than the original barn near the Prange house.