When Arkansas comes to mind, most people think of the stunning rolling Ozark Mountains, trees ablaze with hues of red, orange, and yellow in autumn, and crystal-clear rivers winding through serene pastoral landscapes. It is a beautiful state.
But there’s more to Arkansas than the Ozarks. It’s might be surprising to anyone who has never visited the eastern side of Arkansas, especially anyone who has gone goose hunting in the rice fields around Houston, to find that eastern Arkansas looks a heck of a lot like southeast Texas – minus the urban sprawl.
The similarities aren’t as mysterious as you’d think, though. It turns out that the eastern part of Arkansas shares a geologic history with Texas. About 120 to 66 million years ago, North America was home to an enormous inland sea, called the Western Interior Seaway, which connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. All of Texas and Louisiana as well as the eastern portion of Arkansas were underwater for millions of years. So, eastern Arkansas is part of the same Gulf Coastal Plain that stretches into Louisiana and southeast Texas.
Paleogeographic reconstruction of the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous. https://www.cretaceousatlas.org/geology/
Although rice has been farmed for more than a century in Lousiana and Texas, it came to be cultivated much later in the flatlands of eastern Arkansas. Much of the Gulf Coastal Plain in Arkansas’ was part of the Mississippi Delta and was filled with swampy bottomland hardwoods. The area remained beyond the realm of farming for more than 120 years after the initial settlers came to Arkansas. Conquering the task of clearing these hardwood swamps on a large scale seemed nearly insurmountable with beasts of burden and rudimentary tools of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century.
A mule team pulls a hay trailer in this photo from the 1930s. https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/arkansas/ar-farming-history-1930s/
Even by the end of the 1940s, more than half of the Mississippi Delta was undeveloped. But technological advancements made during World War II ushered in a new era in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern land-moving equipment meant that the swamps could be drained and dredged, which controlled flooding. And advancements in tractor technology borne from wartime innovations made it possible for a single person to fell more trees in a day than an entire family over a lifetime could using mules or World War I-era tractors.
The aftermath of World War II saw approximately 2.5 million acres of forest cleared in Arkansas, with a substantial portion of this newfound land dedicated to rice and soybean cultivation. Presently, Arkansas holds the distinction of being the leading producer of rice in the United States, churning out over 200 million bushels annually. Notably, Riceland Foods is the world’s largest rice miller and marketer, and its rice mill in Jonesboro (15 miles from Cash) is the largest in the world.
So why did Run-N-Gun Adventures, hailing from Texas, establish Run-N-Gun Arkansas in the small locale of Cash, Arkansas?
For the same reason that once attracted ducks and geese to the coastal prairies of Texas during the height of rice production – habitat, habitat, habitat. Geese and ducks require four key elements for their winter and spring stay before embarking on their journey back to Canada for the summer: sustenance, water, grit, and security.
In the expansive four-county region surrounding Cash, rice covers more than 400,000 acres. Geese especially love rice fields. An additional 400,000 acres are dedicated to soybeans. Geese love soybean fields. And it turns out that the soil composition in eastern Arkansas includes sand which supplies the geese with lots of grit. Flooded rice fields provide ample roosting sites. Finally, Arkansas remains predominantly rural, a far cry from the urban sprawl of southeast Texas, which minimizes waterfowl hunting pressure.
Image courtesy of https://www.riceland.coop/
Interestingly, during our initial foray into Arkansas for goose hunting, we discovered that farmers extended us a warm welcome. They saw geese as a nuisance that devoured their crops. Anyone who could legally disrupt the geese’s feeding patterns were gladly given permission to hunt on their farms.
Also interesting – the goose-hunting culture that thrived in southeast Texas was not at all prevalent among Arkansas's duck-hunting outfitters. No one was hunting the geese.
Today, Run-N-Gun has securely planted its flag in the new heart of goose hunting of North America- Northeast Arkansas. Cash, Arkansas lies within the epicenter of the North American goose migration, and it is not unusual for us to see half a million geese in a single day within the four-county area. The sheer number of birds here defies belief. In fact, there are more geese here than even veterans from the goose hunting heyday in Texas have seen in their lifetime. Nick Stillwell and Patrick Connally are bringing their guiding knowledge alongside Randy Triplett to make goose and duck hunting a one of a kind adventure in Northeast Arkansas.
So, we ask you – What better place to hunt geese?