As the state's number one historical attraction, Eureka Springs has a right to be contentious. The town's ongoing political free-for-all is merely preserving Arkansas history.

  An 1819 act of Congress established a new Territory named Arkansaw. Nobody here paid much attention to the spelling. They wrote it, and anything else, as they pleased, like Arkinsas, Arkansa and Arkancas, which mostly sounded sort of, kind of, the same.

  Even William B. Woodruff's best efforts in his 1819 newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, didn't make an official dent in the goofy spellings.

  Finally, in 1881 the state legislature decreed the spelling as Arkansas and the pronunciation as "Arkansaw." Huh? Okay, maybe the intent was to emphasize our being Arkansawyers, not Kansans.

  Oh well, naming the State was actually easier than getting the Territorial capital named and located.

  Keeping in mind that land scams are not a recent invention, and lawyers haven't just jumped out of a dark closet, consider this: an 1822 map carries the name Arkopolis, not Little Rock, as the Territorial capital.

  In 1820, two land speculators, manipulating two different kinds of government land grants, wound up with overlapping property at a point where the Arkansas River bends abruptly south toward the White and Mississippi Rivers.

  A little rock, as opposed to a larger rock further upstream, marked the river's bend and the radical change in landscape from mountains to flat land.

  Across this point ran a prehistoric trail between St. Louis and Mexico, via Texas, that by 1820 had been improved, slightly, as the Southwest Trail, which in Arkansas today vaguely approximates, north to south from the Missouri border: SR 166, US 67/167, and I-30.

  Even disregarding the site's central location, this was primo real estate.

  One of the speculators, William Russell, held title to land along the river, including the site at the little rock, which he named, barring other inspiration, Little Rock.

  The other speculator, William O'Hara, thought he set his town at the south side of Russell's, and in a fit of self-importance he named the site Arkopolis, which, when tortured, gives up a Greek translation of something like City of Arkansas.

  Unremarkably enough, when the overlap of the two properties was discovered, both speculators began suing each other.

  O'Hara, grasping the idea he was on the short end of the legal yardstick, jacked up his buildings (and allegedly Russell's, too) and dragged them 200 yards to his townsite. Reportedly, one stubborn building was simply blown up.

  Meanwhile Russell established a post office named Little Rock, which was dramatic one-upmanship because post office names were harder to come by than town names.

  Before the close of 1820 both speculators were forced to compromise by consolidating the two sites. O'Hara's Arkopolis never made it into the official records. The federal post office name of Little Rock prevailed as the consolidated towns' name.