Wherever I look, there's Josiah Hazen Shinn. For delicious notes on early Hempstead County, his "Pioneers and Makers of Arkansas" (1908) is invaluable; but when a Baltimore publishing house issued a reprint in 1967, Walter Brown cautioned readers in his review for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly that the book is "more an antiquarian record than a history, and yet it is not totally unusable by the historian, although every fact and every view in it bears careful checking."
Shinn was born in a log cabin near Russellville in 1849. He taught himself to read from papers on the walls of the cabin. He recollected that when he was 6 years old, "I presented myself at the doors of the Louisville, Ky.,
