After spending his early life migrating back and forth between Scotland, Canada, and Scandinavia, Arthur moved to Boston in 1879, and accepted a position as the general manager of the Scottish-Carolina Timber and Land Company's American operations. In the early 1880s, Arthur identified a rich stand of timber in the upper Blue Ridge Mountains along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, and devised a boom system to extract the timber from the difficult mountain terrain. Later in the same decade, Arthur identified the abundant iron ore deposits in the Cumberland Gap region, and established a multimillion-dollar iron production operation in hopes of making Middlesboro the Pittsburgh of the South.