Clinton Owen Bates
Chapters
Introduction
Clinton Owen Bates
Clinton Owen Bates was born in 1857, and grew up on a farm in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The Bates family had split loyalty among the North and South, and even as a young child, Bates remembered the tension that the War brought into their home. Bates’ father worked as a surveyor, which required the family to move throughout the region. Living near Mound City, Kansas, Bates’ father surveyed land in the developing territory. Bates recalled the bloody conflict along the border of Missouri and Kansas and encounters with runaway slaves.
My earliest recollection was that the rumours of a war — slavery pro and con — was a serious matter. When in your little village you are aroused in the night with the arrival of a farmer’s wagon filled with runaway negros seeking food and shelter for a part of the night – a part of the night because the home had become the underground railway station for runaway negros who have to be out of the vicinity before daylight. John Brown was in that region conducting the affair. On the streets of the little village there was much fighting by club, knife, pistol — one party seeking to make the territory of Kansas a slave state, the other seeking to make the territory a free state.
Clinton Owen Bates – Old Age
For the Bates family, the War brought many hardships and ingenuity amid desperate times. “Every commodity of the home was scarce,” Bates recalled. Salt was leached from the dirt of the smokehouse floor, and parched wheat was ground and boiled as a substitute for coffee. “I do not recall that I ever went hungry, but I know that my mother did.”1 Bates’ father saved every bit of money he could to send his son to college. Bates attended the University of Arkansas, which was established in 1872, and graduated in the eighth graduating class.
After graduation, Bates taught at the Cherokee Headquarters at Tahlequah Indian Reservation. There he met John Ross. Ross had been an advocate for the Cherokee Tribe his entire life. He contested Stand Watie’s support of the Confederate States of America, and later met with President Andrew Jackson to discuss treatment of the Cherokee people. Bates greatly admired Ross, and noted the affect Ross had on young male Native American students. Bates commented on a speech Ross gave on moral character, in which he compared students’ lives to a young growing tree.
If you commit evil now, he pointed out, you are likely to injure the tree, and when the storm comes the tree will break at that particular point, so build your character so you will stand the storms that await you in the future.
Clinton Owen Bates – Old Age
Bates eventually left Tahlequah and took a teaching position in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Throughout his life Bates met many historical figures with connections to the Civil War. He believed meeting these men helped the understanding and context of history. “It puts new life into history when we get it from people who have been in touch face to face with the active men of their age.” “Old Age” was written in 1949, in which society experienced several major developments in the field of science and technology. In his concluding remarks, Bates commented on the vast expansion of knowledge that still holds true today.
Today, teachers are being instructed and informed about new discoveries and new methods of investigation in the physical world and thereby developing new sciences. Pupils leave their teachers and, in a few years, are becoming the instructors of their teachers.
Clinton Owen Bates – Old Age
- Clinton O. Bates, Old Age, MC 594 Clinton Owen Bates Memoir, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, 2.
