Amanda Trulock was thrown from a carriage in July of 1846. Traveling from her plantation south of Pine Bluff with her husband, three children, sister-in-law Elizabeth, and enslaved servant Caroline, Amanda arrived at Dardanelle by steamboat before heading southwest by land to Sulphur Springs, a health resort to the southwest.
"In passing from the river to the springs some 10 miles, she was thrown out of the carriage and considerably hurt," James Hines Trulock reported to Amanda's mother, "but [she] was better next day able to walk about the house."
Amanda's account is more severe. "I like to have gotten my neck broken," she wrote to her sister, "which confined me to my bed nearly two weeks, whilst there."
I have wondered for 20 years about the place that James Hines Trulock referred to as "the Dardanelle Springs" and have just discovered Meredith Martin Moats' entry on Yell County's Sulphur Springs in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. (Moats is a tireless cultural preservationist--"folklorist" is too narrow a job description; she cares for old places and old ways.)
The Dardanelle Sulphur Springs were known by the early 1800s in locations as far away as New Orleans and Boston for their healing waters with the purported ability to treat kidney and stomach ailments.
The date of their discovery is unknown, as is the exact date of the establishment of the resort, but Moats found an advertisement from the Arkansas Gazette of May 1, 1841, in which the proprietor announced that the "resort has opened for the season for entertainment for those in search of health and pleasure."
A similar advertisement ran in 1851; new manager John R. Harris claimed that the springs included "both black and white sulphur water, cool and pleasant to the taste." He continued by stating that it is "one of the best, cheapest and most picturesque watering places in the known world."
The search for health took Amanda and her family to Sulphur Springs, though only because their doctor insisted. "Our Family physician thought that it was infinitely necessary on my part," Amanda wrote her mother after the trip. He believed "that I had been sick so long that if there was not something done for me, it would ultimately lead into some seated disease."
Amanda's primary complaint, her husband wrote to her mother, was enlargement of the spleen. ("It is not the nine month spleen," he added in parentheses.) The spleen is affected by malaria, which had afflicted white and Black members of the Trulock household since their arrival in Arkansas in 1845.
Trulock explained to his father-in-law that the waters at Sulphur Springs "are celebrated for curing the enlargement of the Spleen, fever and ague, liver complaints, dyspepsia, &c &c."
People who survive their first bout of malaria tend to experience less severe symptoms during later infections, which happen again and again in mosquito-rich climates. The process of initial exposure followed by "getting used to it" is what Amanda Trulock referred to as "a thorough ordeal of climatising," since it was not yet understood that the sickness came directly from mosquitoes, only that it seemed to emerge from swampy climates. "Malaria" refers to the "bad air" believed to be the source of the disease.
In 1846 there were no doubt fewer mosquitoes at the bottom of Mount Nebo than on the banks of the Arkansas River below Pine Bluff, so Amanda's summertime removal from the plantation alone might have accounted for the diminishing of her malarial symptoms. The good, clean sulphur water couldn't have hurt.
James Hines Trulock liked to move around a lot. He left Amanda, Elizabeth, Caroline, and the three children in a boarding house at Sulphur Springs in mid-July and returned to the plantation on July 26. It appears that he returned in late August to retrieve them, and the whole party arrived home on Sept. 2, after what Amanda described as "a tedious journey of 7 days," during which the Arkansas River "was so low that we got on sand bars and stayed sometimes half a day at a time."
"I suppose that you are anxious to hear whether I have been benefited by the waters," Amanda wrote to her mother, "I think I have. My spleen is much smaller and I think that my general health is improved."
On the other hand, "I do not think it has been any advantage to the Children, or Elizabeth either, for she was very sick most all the time we were gone, and Van Buren had a very severe attack, Burton has had some slight fevers, Victoria well. The fatigue of traveling and anxiety has produced the fever on Mr. Trulock ... I think that we might have gotten along equally as well if we had remained at home."
The trip cost Amanda and James Hines Trulock about $100 and Elizabeth Trulock $50. Caroline took in washing from "some of the Gentlemen" and earned $7, though Amanda does not make it clear whether or not Caroline got to keep her earnings. Her health, Amanda wrote, had improved.
"There were but very few to the Dardanelles this season," Amanda wrote. "I understand that some 3 or 4 years since there were about 400 there, but the place I think will be entirely deserted in a few years, unless someone moves there of some enterprise, for there is no accommodation there at all."
In fact, the Dardanelle Sulphur Springs thrived through the rest of the 19th century. A 36-room hotel was completed in 1872. A community grew up around the resort, complete with a church and a school. Fire destroyed the hotel in 1926 and now only the cemetery remains.