Woman recalls flight from Arkansas

 Edited and paraphrased by Jim Fish 

At 102 years old, Mrs. Clarintha Draper still vividly remembered the desperate 600-mile journey she made on horseback to flee war-torn Arkansas during the Civil War, clutching her two small children as she sought refuge in Texas.

Born in 1837, Mrs. Draper shared her memories in an interview first published in the San Antonio Express in 1939. Her account offered a stark portrait of hardship and survival in a nation divided by war.

The Drapers originally moved from Texas to Arkansas before the war, hoping to claim a slave girl willed to George Washington Draper by his grandfather. The legal battle drained the family’s resources, and when the Civil War erupted, George enlisted in the Confederate army. After falling ill on furlough, he was captured by Union forces, leaving his wife and children alone.

Union troops burned their home, leaving Mrs. Draper with only a single horse—spared because it had been loaned to a neighbor. “I saddled my horse, put my little boy behind me and my little girl in front of me, and started for Texas,” she recalled.

The journey was perilous. Near Walden, Arkansas, she hid with her children as cannon fire raged around them. “The cannonballs were falling thick as hail,” she said. Her four-year-old son, Dawson, burned his hand on a still-hot projectile he mistook for a trinket.

Crossing the Arkansas River posed another deadly challenge. Barred from the ferry by suspicious guards, she forced her horse into the swollen waters. “The water was so deep my little boy would wash away from me,” she remembered. Soldiers on the far bank helped her build a fire to warm her children, whose clothes had frozen stiff.

Later, Northern soldiers seized her good horse, leaving her with a broken-down mount. She fought back fiercely, even kicking one soldier in the face, but was forced to give up the animal. She walked much of the rest of the way, leading the frail horse that carried her children. Eventually she was able to trade for a better one.

Exhausted and nearly destitute, she reached a home where she initially was refused shelter but was eventually allowed to stay after the men of the household saw her plight. She remained for six weeks, weaving cloth to repay their kindness. Crossing the Red River into Texas proved easier, and she finally found friends—and her starving mother, whose property had been confiscated—in Fannin County.

For nearly a year, Mrs. Draper believed her husband dead. After his release from a Union prison, he returned to Arkansas, learned his family had fled, and borrowed a mule to make his own slow journey to Texas, where they were reunited.

At the time of the 1939 interview, Mrs. Draper’s son Dawson lived near Brady in McCulloch County and confirmed details of the story from his own childhood memories.

Mrs. Draper’s tale remains a testament to courage, determination, and survival against all odds—a living link to one of the most turbulent chapters in American history.

SOURCE October 15, 1939, issue of the San Antonio Express