OF ARKANSAS. 307 



said to be four feet thick. It is thu3 probable that the same coal will be 

 found of workable thickuess all around the country, when the com- 

 bustible mineral shall become valuable enough to encourage exploration 

 by borings. Clarksville, the county seat of Johnson, is built on an 

 eminence, just at the top of the black shales overlying the Spadra coal. 

 These shales may attain a thickness of fifty to sixty feet; but, as near the 

 town the bank of shales is cut by the creek to the depth of thirty to forty 

 feet, the coal, if it is formed there, would probably be found ten to twenty 

 feet below the level of the creek. 



The coal-bank of Dwight mission, in the same county, is the only one 

 that was still in the way of our route, and the last which I was directed to 

 examine. At our passage there it was covered by high water and could 

 not be seen. But the great bank of shales exposed near the river, of a 

 thickness of about sixty feet, shows, in its composition, the same materials 

 which have been seen before. The shales have apparently the same com- 

 position, and contain in extraordinary quantity pebbles of carbonate of 

 iron. 



As a conclusion to this examination of some of the coal-banks of 

 Arkansas it may be remarked : 



That the value of the coal-beds of a country is necessarily relative, and 

 cannot be estimated by comparison with the price or the value of the coal 

 at another place. A bed of anthracite three feet thick is profitably worked, 

 even by a shaft fifty to one hundred feet deep, in the basins of Pennsyl- 

 vania, where numerous strata of the same combustible mineral are found 

 and worked from six to nine feet thick, or more, and where millions of 

 tons are every year mined and brought to market. A bed of bituminous 

 coal four feet thick is remunerative when worked all along the Ohio 

 river from Pittsburg to Careyville, although, from an excessive compe- 

 tition, the coal is sometimes delivered to the boats at five cents per bushel, 

 or even lower. In Arkansas, where the coal is semi-bituminous, or half 

 anthracite, and consequently of higher value as a heating agent than the 

 bituminous coal of the East; where also this combustible material, though 

 still uncalled for by manufacturers, and used only for a few forges, is paid 

 at the bank from ten to twenty-five cents per bushel, the coal has a much 

 higher value. From data collected in statistical tables it results that a coal- 

 bank like the Spadra's, three and a half feet thick, producing about three 

 feet of clean coal, will hereafter, and when the demand for coal becomes 

 more pressing, give to the owners more profitable results than a bank of 

 nine feet of anthracite would give in the central part of the basin of Penn- 

 sylvania. 



It is true that in Arkansas the working of the coal will never excite 

 such speculation and employ such a capital as is necessary in or near the 

 centre of the coal-basin. But from what is known already about the dis- 



