Early History of Phillips County

The Land, the Legends and the Lore

by Patty Smith

Published 2020

The Rivers and the Ridge

Old Man River! Men have lauded her, cursed her, and tolerated her. Songs have been written about her, stories told about her, and dreams built around her. She is as infamous as any American hero, and yet the ridge that she parallels and nestles against is “terra incognito”. Man can tell you about our Mississippi River, but few men know of the rich history of Crowley’s Ridge and the St Francis River. Boats and festival fans come and go, and our young people seek their fortune in other places, but most leave missing chapters of the saga.

The first European to set foot in our land was Hernando Desoto in 1541. Most historians now believe he landed at Sunflower Landing in Mississippi, traveled up the Mississippi to Council Bend (Memphis) by flatboat and then began his exploration of the territory. In his journal, he noted the hundreds of cooking fires that dotted the top of the bluffs. It is said that he met with the Pacaha Indians at Helena who took him and his crew to the tallest bluff in the territory at the time. This bluff, which was sacred ground to the Pacaha, was located between Perry and Porter Streets, and Franklin and Columbia, where First Baptist Church of Helena now stands. Tradition has it that this was the locale where he raised his large cross and held the first Christian service west of the Mississippi.

One hundred and thirty years later, Marquette and Joliet traveled the Mississippi, making camp at the mouth of the St. Francis River during their exploration for the French of the lands between the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Marquette noted in his journal that the fires of the ridge were much less prolific than those De Soto had seen, with thousands of Indians having lost their lives to warfare, and the diseases of smallpox, plague, and influenza brought by Europeans in 1541. In 1681, Marquette’s journal was published in Paris and included the first map known to depict the entire Mississippi River and the lands surrounding her. It was this map that gave historians insight into various locations along Mississippi River where Marquette and Joliet stopped during their journey.

Just ten years after Marquette and Joliet, Chevalier de La Salle visited with the Indians at the mouth of the St. Francis. It was during this voyage that La Salle claimed all the land for France and called it the Territory of Louisiana, after French king, Louis XIV. It was not only an amazing feat, but also probably had as much, if not more, influence in shaping the American story than any other chapter in our history. If there were others who visited our village, and circumstances dictate that there most likely were, their accounts were lost over time.

By 1738, the French were defending their new territory under the guidance of Jean-Baptiste Bienville.. Bienville was appointed four times as the governor of the new territory of Louisiana. He and his troops built Fort St. Francis at the mouth of the St. Francis River, guarding both the St. Francis River and Mississippi River from the English and the Chickasaw, who had allied with the English against the French. The fort was a large structure with officer’s quarter, barracks, a hospital, a powder magazine, bake houses, and warehouses. In 1739, the French destroyed the fort to keep England and their allies from gaining access.

By 1797, the first settlers had come, but there were others who would visit our homes and villages along the Mississippi. In 1820 and 1822, James Audubon, frontier naturalist and painter, visited what was now known as the Arkansas Territory. He spent a month studying the birds of our area in 1822, and discovered the Willow Flycatcher. It was also in our fair village where he gathered the materials from a Mallard Duck he had killed to create a lifelike model for his sketch of the Mallard. His book, “Birds of America” was a favorite throughout Europe and America.

In 1828, and again in 1831, Abraham Lincoln traversed the Mississippi River from the Ohio River to New Orleans. He had been hired to assist Allen Gentry, whose father was sending supplies to New Orleans by flatboat. According to “Lincoln in New Orleans”, by James Klotter, the young men often docked their flatboat at night and during storms to avoid the dangerous snags in the river. They preferred to stop at locations where villages and towns were located, often visiting with the town folks and taking advantage of the local establishments. Lincoln was quite young at the time and was thus an unknown, and while no records were kept of either journey, it is highly probable since flatboats only averaged traveling sixty-six miles per day that he and his partner stopped at least once in our small town of Helena, or the nearby village of Utica in the St. Francis National Forest.

There were others, whose names have scattered like the sands of time, but Helena, our ridge and our rivers are rife with nostalgic history, and it won’t be long before the chapters of this book are lost, written only in historical quarterlies and newspapers, both long ago placed among discarded items in a dusty attic. It is a history worth telling, a history worth repeating to every generation, and a history worth commerating.

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Primary sources for these articles include the Phillips County Historical Quarterlies, Shinn's Pioneers and Makers of Arkansas; Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Eastern Arkansas; Down the Great River by Glazier; Arkansas Historical Documents and Land Grants; The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture; Courts and Lawyers on the Arkansas Frontier; Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi; USGenWeb; Ancestry.com; FamilySearch.org; Phillips DNA Project.