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But negative as observers like Nuttall and Schoolcraft could be, both men found counterbalancing virtues to admire in the pioneer families who sometimes cared for them out of their own meager stores. A more thoroughgoing critic, however, was on the horizon. Fifteen years later, in 1834, Arkansas was subjected to the cold eye of the English geologist George W. Featherstonhaugh. The account he wrote and published in London ten years later was hostile enough to make Nuttall and Schoolcraft look like boosters. Featherstonhaugh's book was called Excursion Through the Slave States, and in it he established a claim to being Arkansas's most implacable critic that would stand for nearly a century. Not until 1931, when Henry L. Mencken's "The Worst American State" appeared, would Arkansas get another such ink-lashing.
Featherstonhaugh was perfectly suited, both by birth and temperament, for his role as an Arkansas hater. A London-born Oxford man, he came to the United States in1807 as quite the eligible young gentleman---Tory in his politics and flamboyantly aristocratic in his bearing. Playing the piano and quoting classical authors, he speedily courted and married (in 1808) Sara Duane, daughter of a former mayor of New York City. He then settled down for twenty years as a gentleman farmer in the Mohawk Valley, managing 1,000 acres at Duanesburg and interesting himself in scientific agriculture, purebred livestock, and the promotion of railroads.
The 1820s brought hard times to Featherstonhaugh. His wife and his two daughters died, he quarreled with his associates in the railroad business, and finally, in 1829, his manorial house burned to the ground. Featherstonhaugh gave up on farming and moved to Philadelphia, where published a translation of Cicero and a play called The Death of Ugolino: A Tragedy , and also gave lectures on geology. In 1831 he remarried, and soon was back in business as founder and editor of the Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science.
And it was here, as a geologist, that Featherstonhaugh made his most lasting mark, even though his magazine soon failed. Geology was an exciting new science in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Scotsman James Hutton had published his Theory of the Earth in 1785, insisting that the earth's features were not static results of a unique cataclysmic event, but instead were constantly changing effects of ongoing geological processes.
