Among the important towns in Arkansas before the Civil War was a village named Napoleon. Located at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, Napoleon was a robust frontier town, an important river landing where land speculators abounded, criminals found a haven, and floods were as much a part of life as mosquitoes.
A French immigrant businessman named Frederick Notrebe of Arkansas Post named the Desha County settlement after his beloved emperor. Notrebe, like his friend and fellow French immigrant Antoine Barraque, never lost his loyalty to the exiled Bonaparte. The exact date of Napoleon's founding is unknown, but it was probably in the early 1830s. A post office was established in 1832 under the name Mouth of Arkansas, and was changed to Napoleon in 1837.
Among the earliest settlers was an army officer named Stephan van Rennsalaer Ryan, who came to the area while escorting the last Cherokees from their ancestral homes in Georgia to what is today Oklahoma. By 1835, the Arkansas Gazette was running advertisements for Ryan's warehouse and hotel at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers.
Ryan also invested in real estate and sold lots to a number of settlers. Ultimately, after a severe flood inundated the whole town, Ryan lost his investment and reportedly fled to South America.
Still, Napoleon was strategically located, and the town grew to include several hundred people. The 1860 census recorded occupations as diverse as steamboat pilots, store clerks, and barkeepers. About 30 Napoleon residents in 1860 were professionals, including 10 attorneys and seven physicians. One man, a native of Cambridgeshire, England, made his living as a marble dealer. Like most Delta towns, Napoleon attracted a number of Jewish settlers. Frederick Heinz, a baker and immigrant from Darmstadt, Germany, was successful enough to own three slaves.
Like most towns of any size, Napoleon had a newspaper. The Weekly Planter, a Democratic paper, was published in Napoleon from 1857 until the town was occupied by federal troops in 1862.
The newspaper kept a close tab on water levels on the nearby rivers, for floods devastated Napoleon with numbing regularity. The municipal government built a levee system, but it was inadequate for a town situated at the confluence of two massive rivers. A visiting cleric in 1843 described the town as being "built up on the brink of the river, the banks of which were so low that it required but a moderate swell of its volume to send navigable currents around and also through the center of the town."
The same visiting minister commented on another great scourge facing the residents of Napoleon--the great numbers of mosquitoes. The lowlands "generated musketoes by the million--not the diminutive and insignificant species known farther north, but genuine gallinippers of vigorous and huge proportions. By waging a ceaseless warfare against them we succeeded in preserving life, but were alarmingly reduced by our daily loss of blood."
The main feature that gave life and hope to Napoleon was the U.S. Marine Hospital, a three-story brick building that provided medical services for boatmen working on the rivers. The hospital was built by a U.S. Army officer by the name of Stephen Harriman Long, who later gained fame for his exploration of the Rocky Mountains and for whom Long's Peak in Colorado was named.
Long was commissioned to build the hospital in early 1849, but voiced opposition to the site after taking a look at a study done of Napoleon. He noted Napoleon's frequent flooding and urged the relocation of the hospital to the high ground upriver at Helena. Long specifically wrote of his fear that the two rivers might form a new confluence and leave Napoleon stranded. Long was rebuffed when headstrong U.S. Senator Solon Borland of Arkansas got involved in the debate and insisted that the hospital be built at Napoleon. It was not finished until 1854, and the first patient did not arrive there until 1855--only 13 years before the hospital was claimed by the Mississippi River.
Napoleon continued its precarious existence. The town was occupied by federal forces in September 1862, and on January 17, 1863, while a blizzard raged, a large federal flotilla tied up at Napoleon. Late that night, undisciplined troops set the town aflame, and ashes rose into the sky to meet the snowflakes. Gen. William T. Sherman, who would later wage total war in Georgia and South Carolina, was ordered to find and punish the "worthless men" who set the fires.
The Civil War destroyed Napoleon in more ways than one. The fire of 1863 was the first blow, but action taken by a federal naval commander sealed the fate of the town. In a bid to reduce Confederate guerrilla attacks, Lt. Commander Thomas O. Selfridge, commander of the gunboat Conestoga, decided to dig a canal through the narrow neck of land that separated the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers just upriver from Napoleon. Suddenly, the river ran faster, but flooding worsened. The strategy worked well for the federal fleet, but it set about an inexorable force of destruction that left Napoleon to wash into the brown waters of the Mississippi.
By March 1868, the Marine Hospital in Napoleon was only 52 feet from the shore. Within three weeks a corner of the hospital collapsed into the swirling brown waters. Over the next several months the town crumbled into the river.
In his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain mourned the loss of Napoleon: "Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town 20 years ago ... town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights--an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley ... a town no more--swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney."
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com. An earlier version of this column was published Nov. 19, 2006.
Editorial on 11/11/2018