ARKANSAS, FLAG OF

U.S. state flag consisting of a red field (background) bearing a blue-and-white design. In the centre is a white diamond with four blue stars and the name of the state also in blue; surrounding the diamond is a blue band with 25 white stars. In 1911 the Arkansas legislature failed to approve a flag proposal made by the Federation of Women's Clubs, but two years later the Arkansas secretary of state set up a committee to select an appropriate state flag. Among the 65 submissions to the committee, a flag designed by Willie Hocker, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was approved. The legislature voted in 1913 to accept the flag, a copy of which was presented to the battleship USS Arkansas. The three stars originally appearing in the centre recalled that Arkansas was the third state created from the Louisiana Territory and that it had been ruled by three different countries (France, Spain, and the United States). The flag was modified in 1923 by the addition of a fourth star to stand for the Confederate States of America, and the final form was approved on April 10, 1924. The basic design and colours suggest the Battle Flag of the Confederacy. The diamond shape of the central emblem symbolizes the state's diamond production, and the 25 stars on the diamond border indicate that Arkansas was the 25th state to join the Union. Whitney Smith History Exploration and settlement Arkansas's early inhabitants included bluff-dwelling Indians, whose farming and hunting culture flourished about AD 500. Later mound-building cultures left sepulchral mounds and other remains along the Mississippi. Spanish and French explorers traveled the trans-Mississippi regions in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Frenchman Henri de Tonty founded the Arkansas Post on the lower Arkansas River in 1686. The first permanent white settlement in what is now Arkansas, it served as a fur-trading centre and a way station for travelers between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. Following the Louisiana Purchase by the United States in 1803, Arkansas lay within the territories of Louisiana until 1812 and of Missouri until 1819, when it became a separate territory. Its northern boundary, latitude 3630 N, was the line of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 that later separated the slave and free states in the West. Statehood and Civil War By the time of statehood in 1836, all land titles of the Quapaw, Osage, Caddo, Cherokee, and Choctaw Indians had been withdrawn by the U.S. Congress, and the tribes were forced westward into the Indian Territory, the future Oklahoma. Violence broke out intermittently along the state's western border until the late 19th century, when the frontier atmosphere disappeared with the white settlement of the Indian Territory. Although a slave state, Arkansas did not secede from the Union until May 1861five months after South Carolina did so. Arkansas took this action only after the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers. Union sentiment was strong in northern Arkansas; about 6,000 Arkansans joined the Federal forces. About 58,000, however, fought for the Confederacy. Little Rock fell to Federal troops in 1863, and for a decade the state was a legislative battleground between secessionist supporters and the imposed Republican government. Arkansas was readmitted to the Union in 1868, but internal strife approached open warfare. In 1874 the state returned to the fold of the Democratic Party, and remained there until Winthrop Rockefeller, a Republican, was elected governor in 1966. The Civil War's chief long-range effects on Arkansas, as on most of the other former Confederate States, were a crop-lien sharecropping system, a race problem of new and formidable dimensions, a one-party (Democratic) political system, and widespread poverty. Economic development in Arkansas was severely handicapped by the collapse of state credit following repudiation in 1885 of bonded indebtedness, including interest of nearly $14,000,000.