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"There is not that attention paid to schools there is in many places," Amanda Trulock wrote to her mother from Jefferson County, Ark., at the beginning of September 1845.
"The night after the death of our baby, Elizabeth had a little Negro born, which was named by some of the Ladies Mississippy, Virginia, after the river and boat."
Up in Connecticut, a famous piano teacher preserves a rare artifact of Arkansas history: four letters from Reuben and Orrin, most likely father and son, who were enslaved on the Trulock plantation in Jefferson County from 1845 until the early 1860s.
"I am impressed with how much of my grandparents' life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun."