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Travelling in this fashion, the travelers entered Arkansas Territory by the Military Road from Missouri about November 1, 1834.
Featherstonhaugh spent all of two months in the Arkansas Territory, November and December, 1834. In that time he travelled across Arkansas from northeast to southwest by the new Military Road from Hix's Ferry on Current River to Fulton on Red River. Meanwhile, he spent, perhaps, two weeks in Little Rock, looking about him, as he said, and gathering all the information he could. He made several trips into the country round-about Little Rock for the purpose of getting the lay and structural formation of the land in the vicinity of the capital. He talked with people, any whom he chanced to meet, as he went about the town and country. Some of the people then living, whose names are familiar to the history of Arkansas, he sought out and interviewed in his eagerness to get all the facts he wanted for the journal he meant to write.
- In due time, on the 27th of November to be exact, he left Little Rock
and pushed on towards the southwest. One of the main objectives of the
southernmost leg of his journey through the territory, "the Hot Springs
of the Quachita," as he identified it, necessitated the making of
a detour from the route of the Military Road. Two days of travel from Little
Rock took him to Magnet Cove, which place, because of its well known curious
effect upon the magnetic needle, made a geological problem that stirred
his imagination. The Military Road from Little Rock south, to the place
where he left it, about 12 miles southwest of the present town of Benton,
he describes as sadly out of repair. From the point of his departure from
the Military Road into the trace to Hot Springs, however, the going was
over a trail wherein the "sturdy" little wagon which he counted
on to take him through safely was frequently in danger of being overturned
and destroyed. Even so, the dismal and difficult trail, which had been
described to him as the best route to Hot Springs, was no worse, perhaps,
than most byways which, nearly everywhere in Arkansas in the year 1834,
were the sole dependence of travelers for moving about the Territory from
any place to almost any other place at all.
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