“Cooper Hollow,” half a mile northwest of the city limits of Eureka Springs is now owned by Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Woolery. Their modern home is on the same site as Major Cooper’s log cabin. The barn stands on the old mill site. The beautiful spring continues its abundant flow as it did in the sixties and seventies when it supplied water for Cooper’s pioneer milling enterprise.
[Illustration: The Old Rock House was a haven for hunters in the early days. It was the site of Dr. Alvah Jackson’s hospital during the Civil War.]
During the half century before Eureka Springs was settled and named in 1879, settlers trekked in and built homes in the valleys and along the streams of the western district of Carroll County. The region was popular with hunters because of the abundance of game. The virgin timber attracted men who set up peckerwood sawmills to supply the pioneers with building material. It was a rugged environment of hills and hollows and the settlers matched the mountains in which they lived. Many stories are told of bizarre happenings during this early period and one of them is about the cow trial in a paw paw thicket on Leatherwood Creek four miles north of the present location of Eureka Springs.
It was in the lusty Carpetbagger Days of the late seventies or early eighties. The Leatherwood and White River country was sparsely settled with hunters and timber workers who did a little farming to supply the table. The Arkansas-Missouri state line divided the settlement and everything went well until two men got into a dispute over the ownership of a cow. One of them was a farmer living in Missouri, the other was a doctor living across the line in Arkansas. The bovine brute in question had no respect for fences or the state line. If the grass was greener in Missouri, she pastured there, but occasionally she wandered into Arkansas to feed on the luscious provender of the hillsides and creek valleys. When in the “Show Me State” the Missouri farmer claimed ownership, but when she came to Arkansas the doctor “replevined” her and put her in his cowpen. She was a good cow and her milk flowed as freely in one state as it did in the other.
There was no Interstate Commerce Commission in those days to regulate such matters so the right of ownership in this particular case became the talk of the neighborhood. No blood was shed over the controversy, but there were fist fights from time to time when the argument went too far. At last the people of the community got tired of the uncertainty of the situation and petitioned the local justice of the peace to handle it according to law as it was written down in the book.