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Where It Is and How It Started
Prairie County sits in the heart of central Arkansas, taking its name from the Grand Prairie — the great flat expanse of bottomland and upland prairie that stretches across the Arkansas River lowlands, drained by the White River and the Cache River and the system of bayous and sloughs that makes this country some of the most complex wetland terrain in the interior South. The county seat is Des Arc, on the White River, a town whose name is French — "des arcs," meaning bow or curve or bend — a linguistic remnant of the French colonial and Creole presence in the lower Mississippi valley that preceded the American settlement by decades. Creole trappers and traders named the river bend at Des Arc long before any American surveyor drew a county line around it.
Prairie County was formally organized in 1846, though settlement along the White River had been underway since the early 1800s. The White River was the road into the interior — navigable for steamboats well into the Ozarks, providing a commercial connection to the Mississippi and New Orleans that made the river-bottom farms accessible to markets in a way that inland farms were not. The families who came were mostly from the upper South — from Tennessee and Kentucky and the Carolinas — following the same current that brought the Foster family and families like them across the Appalachians and into the trans-Mississippi West, always a little further, always looking for ground that wasn't yet claimed.
The Trail of Tears Through This Country
The removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations from their southeastern homelands in the 1830s and 1840s was not a distant event for Prairie County. Arkansas was the corridor through which the removed tribes passed on their way west, and the White River country was directly in the path of some of those detachments. The Northern Route of the Trail of Tears — the path the Cherokee wagon trains followed from Tennessee and Georgia toward Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma — ran through northern Arkansas, crossing the White River and its tributaries at multiple points, passing through country that was in the same general drainage as Prairie County, if not always through the county itself.
The Choctaw removal, which preceded the Cherokee by several years and followed more southerly routes, moved through central and southern Arkansas in the early 1830s in some of the worst conditions any of the removal detachments experienced — December marches through flooded bottomlands, inadequate food and shelter, and mortality rates that shocked even the Army officers overseeing the operation. The land these people passed through in their misery was the same land that the American settlers were simultaneously claiming, and the collision of those two processes — removal and settlement happening simultaneously in the same geography — was the defining violence of the Arkansas frontier.
The Francis Marion Foster whose birth in Prairie County in 1846 is recorded in the family papers — the youngest child of Jared Foster and Dorcas Moseley, twin of a child who did not survive — was born into a county that had been organized, literally, in the year of his birth, on land that had been Cherokee and Choctaw traveling country within living memory.
The Road West from East Tennessee
Prairie County sits on one of the natural corridors that connected the upper South to the trans-Mississippi frontier. Families moving from East Tennessee, western North Carolina, or the Carolina Piedmont toward Missouri, Kansas, or beyond would have found themselves, at some point, crossing the river-and-road country of eastern Arkansas: the White River drainage, the Grand Prairie, and the lowland routes that connected the older South to the opening frontier.
The Foster family’s presence in Prairie County — even briefly, even only for a birth — is evidence of this transit corridor. They were moving, always moving, and Prairie County was a place they passed through or paused in on the way to the Missouri they would eventually call home, the Kansas they would eventually be driven to, and the Pacific Northwest that would eventually absorb the last generation of the journey.
Jarrett Foster may have known this kind of country from a different angle. While living in Tennessee, he had served in Captain John Elliott’s Company of Tennessee Volunteers during the Cherokee removal of 1837–38. The main Cherokee water route did not pass specifically through Prairie County; it followed the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers toward Indian Territory. But removal was not only a river story. It was also a story of roads, ferries, supply lines, crossings, camps, and forced movement through the same broad westward corridor that later carried settler families into Arkansas and Missouri.
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