High water

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I get inspiration for my “Viewpoint” columns from all sorts of place. Well, I’ve been on a little bit of a run where something in the “Today in History” page has struck my fancy, and today is one of those days.

Here’s a blast from the past that has at least some local flavor… On this day in 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto and his men observed the first recorded flood of the Mississippi River. It might have even been somewhere close to wherever it is you’re reading this.

A little math tells us that was 483 years ago. That’s a long, long time ago. Now, I can assure you that the Mississippi River was flooding this area long before de Soto and his crew came alooking, bringing the first horses and pigs to the area, in case you didn’t know. But I guess the Quapaw and Choctaw that

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lived here before it was “discovered” didn’t write it down for posterity.

Of course, eventually, the cypress swamps were drained and levees were built (and then rebuilt and again rebuilt — we seem to have gotten a pretty good handle on it now) to keep the Mississippi River at bay. And that’s how we got what eventually became Crittenden County (and a few other communities along the Mighty Mississippi).

Arkansas actually went through quite a few owners over the last half-a-millennia, going from the Spanish (who established the first land grants, some of which can be traced all the way to today).

Of course, the French had it for a while before selling it to the fledgling United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in the early 1800s.

Luckily, we were eventually able to control the flooding. It hasn’t always been easy. If you were around at the time, we had a lot — and I do mean a lot — of water on the levee back in 2011. They were calling it a “Hundred Year Flood” — as in it only gets that bad every century or so. And indeed it got really bad about a hundred years before that, in the early 1900s when all of Marion flooded and you could ride a boat to the Marion Hotel from Memphis.

We don’t know how bad the flood de Soto and his crew saw but I’d be willing to bet it was something to behold.