Arkansas Carves Global Niche in the Trip from Trains to Trucks.

But Its Heritage is the River

ON a twilight march to a political legacy, U.S. Sen. John L. McClellan vowed to expand his compendium of improbable feats to include one more first for the folks back in Arkansas.

At 17, the boy from Sheridan became, the nation's youngest lawyer. At 59, the veteran Democrat took the chair of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and launched an 18-year war on organized crime. At 75, the aging statesman celebrated the opening of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System and the conversion of 445 miles of Oklahoma and Arkansas sandbars into a navigable waterway.

At 80, McClellan promised to help Fort Smith trucking pioneer J. Fred Patton build a 275-mile turnpike from Texarkana through the Ouachita National Forest and over the Boston Mountains to Bentonville and Missouri beyond.

"A year later, he was dead," Patton says. "We had gone to Kansas City and St. Louis and they had agreed to meet us at the Missouri state line with a four-lane highway We'd gone to Baton Rouge, and they'd promised to build one from New Orleans to Shreveport."

At 93, Patton sees the death of the man he came to know as "Brother John" as a touchstone in Arkansas transportation history.

A former chairman of the Arkansas Trucking Association, Patton says his later bid to make the western Arkansas turnpike the state's first toll road sailed through the state Senate. But, it slammed head-on into fatal opposition from central Arkansas business leaders waiting in the hallways of the House.

What Patton and others hope will become Interstate 49 from Shreveport to Fort Smith marks time now against promises from another Arkansas native, U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, to find help in the funds appropriated to build corridors of international trade.

With its dedication last Jan. 8, Interstate 540 covers the stretch from I-40 in Alma to Fayetteville and carries the name of retired U.S. Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt, McClellan's former Republican counterpart from Harrison.

For Patton, known to his Fort Smith friends as the "grandaddy of the four-lane highway," it is one of the ironies that mark Arkansas' metamorphosis into a national transportation leader.

Consider:

* Truckers nationally rank Arkansas' highways as the poorest in the nation, but more of the nation's top 100 carriers are headquartered here than in any other state.

* Arkansas' trucking successes are tied to gaps in its earlier modes of transportation along rivers and rails.

* Some of the state's largest trucking companies weren't started by truckers. Entrepreneurs in the fledgling poultry business carved their niche from the special challenges posed by hauling live chickens.

Patton worked as a principal and superintendent of schools in Alma, taught government at Fort Smith Junior College, and ran personnel for Hunt's Department Stores before he entered the trucking business.

He was tapped to become president of England Brothers Truck Lines in 1951, following the traffic death of company co-founder Ralph England.

Robert Young Jr. was a Fort Smith lawyer who bought Arkansas Motor Freight when he couldn't find another buyer at the behest of two ailing clients. He kept out his shingle, but spent the rest of life helping build the company into Arkansas Best Corp., the nation's 11th largest carrier.

A trucker for Superior Forwarding Co. in Little Rock, J. B. Hunt Jr., built his own trucking dynasty with financial help from poultry leaders Lloyd Peterson and Gene George. He began by harvesting and trucking rice hulls for poultry beds.

Hunt, who didn't launch J. B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. until 1969, is now senior chairman of the nation's second largest carrier.

Harvey Jones, who founded Jones Truck Lines before Hunt was born, started with a single wagon and a team of mules on regular routes between Rogers, Fayetteville and his home in Springdale in 1918.

Thirteen years later, Kansas City, Mo., produce distributor and trucker John Tyson also moved his home and family to Springdale. He chose to relocate after his truck broke down, leaving Tyson with a nickel and a half a load of hay.

Tyson and Cave Springs entrepreneur Willis Shaw designed their truck trailers to feed, water and ventilate chickens for the long hot rides to the live markets of Kansas City and Chicago.

The innovations made them trucking leaders long before Tyson and his son, Don Tyson, fashioned an integrated system of poultry breeders, hatcheries, growers, feed producers and poultry plants that made Tyson Foods Inc. the world's largest poultry processor.

"They started in the poultry business," Patton says of the truckers. "There's not any one thing you can put your finger on, except they were visionaries who were entrepreneurs and saw the possibilities of the trucking industry."

When Kansas City Southern charted its railroad south from Missouri, city officials in Fort Smith demanded money for the intrusion.

"The city fathers were going to hold them up because they thought they could," says Patton. "The Indian territory said, 'We'll give you land if you'll come to Oklahoma.'"

So Kansas City Southern went through Spiro, Okla., and Fort Smith was forced to build an extension.

The collapse of Midland Valley Railroad between 1938 and 1940 removed much of the city's rail traffic and left a void that demanded to be filled for manufactures such as Dixie Cup and Gerber Baby Foods.

"I have witnessed the demise of most of the railroads coming into Fort Smith," says Patton. "I think there's a connection between what the railroads failed to do and what trucking did."

OVER THE RIVERS

For three centuries after Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas in 1541, rivers were the state's expressways and barges were its 18-wheelers.

The steamboat Comet arrived at Arkansas Post on April 1, 1820, and pushed the shipping industry upstream into the Arkansas River. Two years later, steamboats were hauling supplies to Little Rock and across the state to Fort Smith.

River traffic gave Little Rock its name. Promoters of the establishment of multi-modal transportation systems -- those involving rail, air and water -- say they expect the river to pay a major role again.

"It played a major role in agriculture society in Arkansas, and that will not lessen in the future" says Paul Revis, executive director of the Arkansas Waterways Commission.

"For the cotton industry -- and that was the big industry of the last century -- it would not have been possible to flourish without a means of transportation to the world's markets through ports such as New Orleans," he says.

The river was the only door to civilization for Arkansas' earliest residents. At times through the state's history it proved to be a curse.

The need to harness the energy and potential threat of the Arkansas River became all too clear in 1927, when torrential rains flooded 16 million acres of land in Arkansas and seven states. The waters of the Mississippi, the Arkansas and their tributaries destroyed 160,000 homes and 41,000 businesses.

Three years later, the flood waters returned and spawned creation of the Arkansas Basin Association. Patton says he served on the board the group, which began lobbying Congress for navigation controls along the Arkansas.

In response, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers produced House Document 308, which included the Arkansas River in a list of 200 rivers deemed potential sources of shipping and electricity.

The idea was to provide a uniform channel at least 9 feet deep from the Mississippi to Catoosa, Okla., as part of an 11,000-mile inland waterway system. It called for installing 17 locks and dams, and all but five of them were in Arkansas.

In a 1995 history of the project written for the Corps, S. Charles Bolton describes the sandbars that plagued river pilots between Little Rock and Fort Smith and quotes the U.S. Army Chief of Engineers Major General E. M. Markham.

Citing "the considerable slope and the heavy movement of sand it its bed," Bolton says, Markham said the project was of "doubtful feasibility" and warned it was unwarranted by projections of future river traffic.

The Corps started work on the Dardanelle Lock and Dam, the first piece of the complex mechanism needed to raise and lower the river, in June 1957. President Richard M. Nixon dedicated the finished system at Catoosa 24 years later.

The Governor's Citizens Council on Highways and Transportation reported in October 1998 that freight carried over the state's rivers accounts for a little more than 11 percent of the total annual tonnage.

Statistics compiled in 1993 showed boats hauled 11,777,000 tons -- or 11.7 percent of 110.2 million tons shipped by truck, rail, water and air that year. Although the Arkansas River runs 300 miles from the Mississippi River to Fort Smith, Revis says Arkansas offers 1,000 miles of navigable rivers.

A single barge, according to former Congressman Hammerschmidt's citizens council, can carry the load of sixty 18-wheelers and move manufacturing components too heavy for truck or rail.

AND THROUGH THE AIR

The genesis for Arkansas' aviation commerce began outside of Little Rock even as Harvey Jones was swapping his mule team for his first truck up in Springdale.

The U.S. Army Signal Corps opened the little Rock Intermediate Air Depot on 40 acres of land three miles east of town in 1917 and expanded to include the 154th Observation Squadron of the Arkansas National Guard in 1926.

The airport became a hub for aircraft manufacturers in the 1920s and was bought by the city in 1930. American Airways began commercial passenger service in June 1931. The Fort Worth-based carrier grew to become American Airlines.

Now known as Little Rock National Airport/Adams Field, the airport picked up the last part of its name from former city councilman George Geyer Adams, a captain with the 154th squadron who died in the line of duty on Sept. 4, 1937.

The airport has grown to encompass more than 2,200 acres of land and it boarded 2.6 million passengers last year. In November 1998, Arkansas added a second large airport in Highfill, a rural Benton County hamlet that became a vortex for political debate and an investigation by the General Accounting Office, Congress' auditing arm, in the 1990s.

The airport has done far better than projected. It will board an estimated 325,656 passengers this year -- about what planners predicted for 2000. All five of the commercial passenger carriers at Fayetteville's Drake Field have moved north to XNA.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Arkansas enters 2000 facing some lingering transportation questions. Fort Smith officials still are lobbying hard to open Arkansas' western corridor.

And dialogue over the future of transportation is headed back to the water with the formation of "multi-modal" transportation authorities that would link trucks, trains, air and water.

City officials from Van Buren to Rogers are in talks with the Springdale-based Arkansas & Missouri Railroad about forming an authority that would encompass trucking companies and the airport in Highfill.

Russellville business leaders have formed an authority, and the Corps is doing preliminary studies on construction of a slack water port that would link barges along the McClellan-Kerr waterway with trailers unhitched from the trucks traveling nearby I-40 and freight from the city's airport.

Sid Brain, chairman of the Regional Intermodal Transportation Facility Authority, says it's too early in the study to tell how big the project may be.

"If everything goes on track and we secure the non-federal funding, we could possibly start construction in 2001," he says.

Truckers say the water may always be too slow for distributing manufactured goods.

Tom Garrison, who was named chief executive officer of American Freightways Corp. in Harrison in July, says the nation's sixth largest less-than-truckload carrier by revenues is going for technology and speed in the 21st century. American Freightways now is testing 50 Eaton Vorad radar-based collision avoidance systems with black boxes, similar to those that record events aboard aircraft.

Driven by E-commerce, American Freightways will focus on smaller shipments and more overnight deliveries. And he sees Arkansas' trucking future as a product of its legacy.

"You get one business that's successful in that area. You have people who used to work with the other businesses and they strike that out on their Own," he says.

THE CENTURY IN TRANSPORTATION

* FEB. 1, 1901 -- The 23-year-old St. Louis Southwestern Railway opens an independent freight agency in St. Louis, beginning a series of acquisitions that push the railroad through Arkansas, and on to Dallas. Dubbed the "Cotton Belt," the railroad becomes the prime artery for the flow of cotton between Missouri and Texas.

* 1917 -- U.S. Army Signal Corps opens the Little Rock Intermediate Air Depot on 40 acres of land east of Little Rock.

* 1918 -- With a single wagon and mule team, Harvey Jones begins hauling goods between his hometown of Springdale and the nearby towns of Rogers and Fayetteville. He replaces the wagon a year later with a truck and founds Jones Truck Lines.

* 1927 -- Torrential rains flood the Mississippi Valley, and convincing Congress to harness the lethal power of the nation's waterways.

* 1930 -- Little Rock buys the air depot and opens the municipal airport. The Sept. 4,1937, death of Capt. George Geyer Adams of the Arkansas National Guard adds the name Adams Field.

* 1931 -- John Tyson, a trucker from Kansas City, Mo., decides to relocate to the Ozarks with a nickel and a halt load of hay, after his truck breaks down in Springdale.

* 1935 -- In a response to the 1927 floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers submits House Document 308, Which explores the Arkansas River and its tributaries as one of 200 rivers from which the nation can derive navigation and electricity.

* 1938 -- Encouraged by Tyson's early successes, Cave Springs trucker Willis Shaw founds Willis Shaw Express with the mission of keeping chickens alive for markets in Kansas City and Chicago. Arkansas truckers pioneer the means of keeping chickens alive until they land frozen in the supermarkets of the 1950s.

* LATE 1930S -- The Midland Valley Railroad, a vital link to the St. Louis and San Francisco "Frisco" Railroad crossing western Arkansas, shuts down and creates the void that spawns the Fort Smith trucking industry.

* 1951 -- Unable to find another buyer for his ailing client's trucking company, Fort Smith lawyer Robert A. Young Jr. buys Arkansas Motor Freight.

* JUNE 1957 -- The Corps of Engineers starts construction on the Dardanelle Lock and Dam, the first piece of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System.

* 1965 -- Voters defeat, Gov. Orval E. Faubus $150 million state highway bond issue.

* 1969 -- J.B. and Johnelle Hunt launch J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. in Lowell, a bedroom community near Springdale.

* 1970 -- The first commercial tow to navigate the completed McClellan-Kerr Navigation System arrives at Catoosa. President Richard M. Nixon dedicates the system of locks and dams a year later.

* OCT. 25, 1982 -- Five years after buying his brother's share of the family trucking business in Harrison, F.S. Sheridan Garrison founds Arkansas Freightways and renews a dynasty.

* 1988 -- USA Truck forms in Van Buren as one of three Arkansas Best subsidiaries sold to head off a hostile takeover.

* 1996 -- Voters defeat Gov. Jim Guy Tucker's $3.5 billion highway bond package.

* NOV. 6, 1998 -- Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport officially opens in rural Benton County with a visit from President Clinton.

* JAN. 8, 1999 -- After 11 years of construction, dignitaries cut the ribbon on Interstate 540 -- a 42-mile, $420 million expressway between Alma and Fayetteville.

* JUNE 15, 1999 -- After truckers and a University of North Carolina professor independently declare Arkansas' highways among the nation's worst, voters overwhelming approve Gov. Mike Huckabee's $525 million bond package to repair 372 miles of Interstates 30 and 40.