Arkansawyers, like all Southerners, are known for their hospitality, within limits. We are always willing to bend over backwards for a guest but as a whole we have never been known to bend over in any other direction.

  Hernando de Soto was the first guest to understand our limits of hospitality. He was, without doubt, the original Show-Me-The-Money man.

  De Soto landed near Tampa Bay, Florida in May 1539 with about "600 men, a few hundred horses, packs of goods, and a large herd of pigs." Yes, Wooooooo Pig! Sooie!

  The army set out northish in a loopy sort of way from "La Florida," an island according to his maps, cutting cross-country westish (mainly the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee) to the Mississippi River, looking frantically for gold while gathering Indian slaves by bribing them with the incentive of a lingering death if they couldn't prove up. In fact he wasted at least 2,500 locals on his way to Arkansas. (De Soto's routes are still debated.)

  He crossed the Mississippi in the fall of 1541, and came to ground at Sun Flower Landing, just south of Helena. Sticks were issued to the troops, and from then on, whenever his men would throw a stick, it invariably hit a large village chock-full of corn but no gold.

  Okay, the stick gag isn't really true but Arkansas did support an extremely large and sophisticated mound culture at that time. The Cahokia mounds in East St. Louis, Illinois had a population which topped out at around 20,000 between 700 A.D. and 1300.

  The Great Communicator: Despite de Soto's emphatic hand gestures, no local had a gnat-sized notion of what this raving white man was asking. To lift the veil of their ignorance, he beat, cut, stabbed, shot and, had the technology been in place, nuked them.

  The word spread: "Look out for the guys in the stupid suits, they ain't so funny as they looks."

  Unfortunately for de Soto, the locals immediately understood that men in metal suits waist-deep in wide water were lousy swimmers. By the time he reached Caddo Gap in the Ouachita Mountains, everybody was taking turns kicking his cast-iron butt across Arkansas.

  There are a couple of theories about what happened after de Soto ran from Caddo Gap. The short version is he died in 1542 of "anguish" (extreme anxiety or emotional torment) near Lake Village, and he didn't find any gold, and only half his army lived long enough to advise other people about being more polite to the natives.

  Today most Arkansawyers are less violent about rude guests. In Eureka Springs the locals have a Zen attitude about correcting poor manners. When asked, without any magic words, "Where's the Christ Statue at?" the obtuse jerk is sent on down the line to the sewage treatment plant.