For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas and Frontiersmen.
When it was established and for many years afterward, the Territory of Arkansas was on the frontier of the United States, and Arkansans have always been proud of their frontier heritage. The Bowie knife, developed by James Bowie when he lived here, is famously nicknamed the Arkansas Toothpick. Bowie, of course, died in 1836 at the Alamo, as did Tennessee frontiersman and U.S. congressman Davy Crockett, who had traveled through Arkansas with great fanfare on his way to his death at the San Antonio mission. Some hold that the Arkansas County town of Crockett’s Bluff was named in his honor but, more probably, it was because many early residents who settled there in the 1840s were named Crockett. And we will see that Daniel Boone, perhaps the quintessential frontiersman, is – unlike Crockett – immortalized in several Arkansas place names.
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello, this is Dan Boice.