Toothpick State

An unhappy propensity to duelling, the origin in Arkansas of the bowie-knife,—from an alleged use of which Arkansas received the nickname, which it has always retained, of the “toothpick state,”—and other backwoods associations gave the state a reputation which to some extent has survived in spite of many years of sober history.

It was still rather a wild place where men wore long two-edged knives called after a wild rascal, Captain James Bowie, and they were so apt to use them on the slightest occasions that the state was nicknamed the Toothpick State.