“The lumber salvaged from the town was not wasted. Many car-loads of used lumber were shipped to western Kansas to build houses and barns for the pioneer families of that region. Many a woman, I have been told, stood at the door of her sod-shanty and wept tears of joy when she saw the ‘old man’ coming with a big wagon load of second-hand pine lumber from Eureka Springs. “Why a lad of six or seven years should remember these things I will never understand but, nevertheless, they are true. “I have always thought that the building of the street car system was a civic blunder, but I may be wrong. And I am even more positive in my opinion that the coming of the automobile age was a great calamity to Eureka Springs.... Now, wait a minute before you call me crazy! “In 1879 the ‘Healing Spring Country’ was a vast uninhabited wilderness where timber wolves prowled and howled and froze the blood in the veins of their waiting victims, and foxes had their dens in the caves and crevices along the hillside. Many a ‘big bad wolf’ slacked his thirst at Basin Spring and perhaps cured himself of his mangy ills. (Some ‘wolves’ do that now, I am told.) In just two years the wild animals had to take to the bushes to make room for five thousand people who had poured in to make their homes at the springs. “There was a reason for the spectacular growth of Eureka Springs, probably several reasons. The people believed in the water as a cure for their ailments. Practically every family had some member who had been brought back from the brink of the grave to health again through (so they thought) the ‘magic power’ of the healing springs. “I feel that I owe my life to Eureka Springs! My parents took me there in 1882, my body ravaged and my spine twisted with infantile paralysis. I had lost my sense of balance to the extent that I would fall headlong if my dragging feet so much as touched a rough spot on the floor. I fell perhaps thousands of times while I was learning to walk a second time. My parents moved into a cabin in a lonely hollow not far from Basin Spring. Each day fresh water was brought from this spring for my dishpan bath. It wasn’t long until I began dragging my feet along as I tried to follow my brother when he would go to the spring for water. I even began to try to climb the hillsides by holding to bushes growing there. Each day I would go a little farther up the hillside. Then a great day came! “I heard a church bell ringing sweet and clear on the hilltop high above our home. An intense longing entered my childish heart to answer that pleading call in person. With wishful face I asked my father, ‘Daddy, may I go up there?’ A moment’s thoughtful pause and then his answer. ‘Why yes, Jesse, you may go. I think you can make it and no harm to try anyway.’ So I got out all alone to climb that rugged hill. So steep the way, so painful the going that I often had to touch the ground with both my hands as though I were climbing a ladder.