Like a well-planned time capsule, Arkansas is a fascinating picture of the state’s evolution: from a wilderness explored by Hernando de Soto to a rowdy and often lawless frontier, a partner in the shameful dislocation of Native Americans, a state in the Confederacy, a source of homegrown populists, and always a land of opportunity.

As Harry S. Ashmore states in his introduction to this third volume of the John Gould Fletcher Series, “Arkansas still stands up as its author intended, a poet’s imaginative treatment of a ‘history both tragic and comic—with its deep legendary roots going far back into the remote prehistoric past.’ It has earned a permanent place among the books that must be read by those who seek to understand the matrix in which new forces of economic and social change are reshaping Arkansas’s traditional society.”