ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 32, Winter1973, p. 312

The Salt Industry in Arkansas

Territory, 1819-1836

 

By DANIEL F. LITTLEFIELD, JR.*

The Johns Hopkins University

"SALT IS A NECESSARY OF LIFE WHICH CONIES HIGHER TO THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY, THAN ANY OTHER ARTICLE." wrote a citizen Arkansas Territory in 1826. (1) Today, it is difficult for one to imagine a time when such a common item was expensive, but, in fact, it was particularly so to the frontiersmen who were obliged to buy salt which had been transported over long distances. Those settlers who resided in the Arkansas Territory from 1819 to 1836 were fortunate in some respects. Within the bounds of the territory were some of the most productive salt springs known at the time. Since salt was so necessary, and therefore precious, to those who resided on the Arkansas frontier, the men who knew the craft of salt making, competed for the right to lease the salt springs and to produce salt for public consumption. So important was the salt industry to the territory that the government refused to relinquish its right to the salt springs on public lands. Those springs figured prominently in negotiations with various Indian tribes. Thus, the history of the salt springs and the salt works which fell under the jurisdiction of the Arkansas Territory at various times was often stormy.

In the absence of modern geological and technical knowledge, salt makers had to rely on natural springs for the supply of water from which to make the salt.
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* The author is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Southern History at The Johns Hopkins

University, Baltimore, Maryland.

2. William Noland to George Graham, Dec. 19, 1826, in Clarence Edwin Carter, comp. and ed., The

Territorial Papers of the United States (Washington, 1954), XX, 336. (Hereafter cited as
Territorial Papers.)

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