A reader from Jefferson County asked whether Creed Taylor repaid his $8,000 debt to Amanda Trulock. I’ve never seen a ledger or a receipt, but the matter does not turn up again in her correspondence, so I am inclined to think he did.

Amanda made a quick turn from debtor to lender in the early 1850s. I don’t think she ever borrowed money; she was a debtor only in the sense that she inherited an indebted estate on the death of her husband, James Hines Trulock.

Mr. Trulock was a restless character. Amanda described him this way: “He is the most business man I know of. He is continually going, does not take time to finish any thing scarcely.”

Trulock’s ambition was for one thing only, as he explained to his father-in-law Nichols Beardsley: “I have been raised to the Culture of the Cotton and know nothing else or even take any interest in any other business.” Trulock wrote that in late September 1845, eight months after moving his household to Arkansas, where he had purchased (on credit) some 555 acres of largely uncleared land.

Beardsley, concerned for the health of his daughter and her children, must have suggested that Trulock........

© Arkansas Online