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Arkansas Travelers: Geographies of Exploration and Perception, 18041834. By Andrew J. Milson. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 277. Acknowledgments, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)
As a pioneering monograph devoted to explicitly comparative cultural-geographic examination of Arkansas's best known early travelers' accounts, Andrew Milson's study builds upon an era of prior scholarship focused upon the production of modem editions of the original reports and inaugurates a period of more ambitious analysis.
The initial phase took a long time, and is even now not wholly complete. The first of Milson's Arkansas travelers to be newly edited was Thomas Nuttall, whose 1821A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory during the Year 1819, ably edited by Savoie Lottinville, was issued in 1980 by the University of Oklahoma Press. William Dunbar and George Hunter, whose 1804-1805 ascent of the Red, Black, and Ouachita Rivers to the Arkansas hot springs, already reputed to hold curative powers, is the earliest expedition addressed by Milson, waited another twenty-five years for a comparable edition of their journals. The Uouisiana State University Press issued The Forgotten Expedition: The Louisiana Purchase Journals of Dunbar and Hunter, edited by Trey Berry, Pam Beasley, and Jeanne Clements, in 2006. In between, in 1996, the University of Arkansas Press published Milton J. Rafferty's updating of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansas ... in the Years 1818 and 1819, originally published in Uondon in 1821, as...