Pine Bluff’s first elected mayor and Jefferson County’s first resident to be elected governor were dangerously close to becoming registered fatalities of the political violence that marred their era.
In 1847 – 165 years ago – Mayor James De Baun Jr. and Gov. John S. Roane survived shootings, but the mayor’s father, James De Baun Sr., wasn’t as fortunate.
Elected mayor in Pine Bluff’s first elections just over six months earlier, the younger De Baun and his father were walking on June 24 to the elder’s business, a store near the Arkansas River. As they approached White’s Tavern, a riverside saloon and eatery, two assailants at the door of the establishment’s dining room opened fire with shotguns.
The senior De Baun died instantly. The mayor, despite five severe buckshot wounds, would survive.
The gunmen escaped in boats.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The Arkansas Gazette reported only that a “Dr. Embree” was the lone identified shooter. The late James W. Leslie, who wrote three books on Jefferson County and Southeast Arkansas history, researched the matter and determined that Israel Embree and Jordan N. Embree were major land owners in nearby Rob Roy, but neither was known as a physician.
Leslie also found records showing Israel Embree had been charged with murder in 1830, but was not convicted.
There is no record of a trial in the murder of James De Baun Sr., but an 1848 circuit court docket discloses that felony assault charges filed against Mayor De Baun were dropped because an unnamed witness failed to appear.
Perhaps the mayor had sought revenge against “Dr. Embree” in the death of the elder De Baun, but that suspicion has never been confirmed.
Just over a month after the De Baun slaying, former state Rep. John Seldon Roane of Pine Bluff – elected governor in 1850 – and nationally-known Masonic leader and frontiersman Albert Pike engaged in a duel on an Arkansas River sandbar in the Cherokee Nation of the Oklahoma Territory.
Roane asked for the showdown after Pike publicly criticized Roane’s performance as a commander in the Mexican War of 1846.
Dueling was illegal in Arkansas and carried a death sentence, so Pike and Roane traveled to Fort Smith and then boated with their seconds to the sandbar, where they aligned back-to-back, took an agreed-upon number of steps and turned to face and fire their pistols at each other.
Though they were both marksmen, neither struck their target.
If one was scared, the other was glad, because they shook hands, hastily settled their differences and returned to Fort Smith to dine together.
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Sources for this article include Bayou Country.