It was mid-winter in 1870 when George W. Miller’s travel party reached the hamlet of Newtonia in Southwestern, Missouri. They were not even a third of the way from Kentucky to their destination of California, the location he sought to begin a cattle ranch in a time when livestock raising had become a principal livelihood during the country’s Westward expansion.Miller’s plan was to follow the Arkansas-Indian Territory border and then take the southern route, but first his travel party, which included his wife and young son Joe, would temporarily delay the journey for a brief break until Spring. He soon realized, however, that his dream of becoming a cattleman was possible without going farther west because he was seeing cattle country all around him, but without the cattle.Over the next few days, Miller spoke to locals and cattle drovers who passed through the region headed north and learned there were enormous cattle herds in Texas that could be purchased for food and other trade goods. Although Southwestern Missouri was widely known as hog raising country, the creative Miller, then only twenty-nine-years-old, decided he could barter for Texas cattle.Miller bought land, began raising hogs and then processing them, and by early 1871, he was ready to make his first trip to Texas. The travel group included his brother-in-law, George Carson, fellow Kentuckian George Van Hook, former slave Perry Brinton, and hired hands Frank Kellog, Luke Hatcher and James D. Rainwater, the latter a fourteen-yearold Arkansas boy who would soon turn fifteen. Miller also enlisted some teamsters who loaded ten wagons with twenty thousand pounds of cured hog meat to swap for Texas Longhorns. They left Newtonia on February 16, 1871, and as fortune would have it, young James Rainwater kept a diary of some of the events that would come.Initially, travel was slow as the Miller caravan headed nearly due south across the steepening terrain of the western Ozark Mountains. At noon they stopped for dinner at Rocky Comfort, Missouri, and then pressed on to camp for the night near the Missouri-Arkansas border. The second day’s travel took them by the Pea Ridge Battlefield site where Union and Confederate armies clashed in 1862. There, splintered trees and limbs still bore evidence of the heavy fighting, and that night they camped at Nubbin Ridge near present-day Springdale, Arkansas. It was the seventeenth of February and Rainwater’s birthday, but he made no mention ...
