Historically, it was hard to get to Arkansas.
Hernando de Soto discovered this in 1541.
His troops had to build flatboats to get across the Mississippi River under the cover of darkness in an effort to avoid hostile Native Americans who patrolled the river during the day in war canoes, according to History.com.
Crossing the river isn't quite so perilous today.
Bridges over the river have made things considerably easier, but since May 11, de Soto's namesake bridge on Interstate 40 has been closed because of a cracked beam, so motorists are being funneled across the only other bridge in the Memphis area that's open -- the four-lane Memphis-Arkansas Memorial Bridge on Interstate 55.
The traffic delays may be an inconvenience, but it's nothing like the olden days.
Memphis was a gateway to the West.
Arkansas became a territory in 1819, and its territorial leaders saw the Memphis to Little Rock road as a "'channel' for the immigration that was sorely needed for Arkansas' development," wrote S. Charles Bolton in the winter 2019 issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.
But the Mississippi River was a formidable obstacle.
By August 1830, the Arkansas Gazette reported that 1,500 people had entered the Arkansas Territory at Memphis in the previous year, and during a prolonged drought that just ended, the ferry that transported them across the Mississippi River was sometimes backed up for several days, wrote Bolton.
Of course, many of those people were passing through Arkansas on their way somewhere else.
In 1836, Arkansas became a state.
Keelboats and steamboats ferried people across the river from Memphis to Hopefield or Mound City, once bustling towns on the Arkansas side of the river.
John Fogleman of Marion, a retired circuit judge, said his great-grandfather and his great-grandfather's brother were both ferryboat captains.
Their ferries were steamboats but smaller, said Fogleman.
"There was no levee to speak of and there were landings up and down the river," he said. "There was Fogleman's landing, which was simply a place for them to get firewood for the boats."
When the water was high, people from Memphis would take the ferry all the way to Marion, just sightseeing, said Fogleman.
"One described a beautiful courthouse, wonderful saloon and a gallows," he said.
Steamboats on the Mississippi River could travel at about 10 miles per hour downstream and 5 miles per hour upstream. Railroads, however, could hurtle across the landscape at 60 to 70 miles per hour, as long as there wasn't a river in the way. Even then, some ferries were capable of transporting rail cars and locomotives.
"When railroads came to eastern Arkansas, rail ferries carried loaded boxcars across the river, but there were difficulties on both sides," wrote Perre Magness in a 1998 article for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. "On the eastern side, the cars had to be pulled up steep switchbacks, and on the western side there were swamps and floods to contend with."
Charles W. Crawford, a history professor at the University of Memphis, said the Mississippi River was hard to cross south of St. Louis.
Crawford, who grew up in Arkansas, said he introduced a resolution on behalf of the Tennessee Historical Commission to name the newest bridge at Memphis for de Soto, and legislatures on both sides of the river went along with it. The "new" bridge opened in 1973.
Crawford said a railroad bridge was completed in 1892 at Memphis.
A crowd gathered to watch the first train come across the bridge.
"Local people were very much afraid it would fall down," said Crawford.
It didn't. Today, almost 130 years later, the one-lane Frisco Bridge is still serving rail traffic over the Mississippi River.
Crawford said the Harahan Bridge was constructed next. It was completed in 1916, providing two rail lines.
But that wasn't all.
"Due to increasing numbers of automobiles on both sides of the river, carriageways were hung off both sides of the Harahan in 1917," Crawford wrote in an article about the Memphis-Arkansas Memorial Bridge for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "These provided a single lane for traffic on either side of the bridge.
"Although Arkansas cars could cross the Mississippi River at Memphis beginning in 1917 rather than having to drive to the nearest bridge in St. Louis, the need for a span dedicated to automobile traffic and carrying multiple lanes in each direction quickly became apparent," wrote Crawford.
The need for a new bridge became even more apparent in 1928 when the partially wooden Harahan Bridge caught fire.
"The blaze at the bridge's center proved especially difficult to extinguish," wrote Crawford. "The Memphis Fire Department was forced to load pumping trucks on available boats to reach over the water to the fire. Despite this effort, over 700 feet of roadway on the Harahan were damaged. The region's only bridge for automobile traffic remained closed for a year and a half while repairs were under way."
That bridge is today known as Big River Crossing. It's still used by trains, and the former "carriageways" are now trails for pedestrians and cyclists.
After the fire and subsequent repair, automobile traffic on the Harahan bridge increased substantially.
Motorists who made it to the Arkansas side of the river in 1938 were greeted by a billboard that read "Welcome to the Southwest."
By the time the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge finally opened in 1949, the daily volume of automobiles using the Harahan's two lanes had increased to 11,000, wrote Crawford.
"Stalled vehicles and slow farm implements frequently caused substantial delays," according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas article. "As the Harahan had only one lane on either side of the railroad tracks, passing was impossible."
The Memphis-Arkansas Bridge provided two lanes of traffic in each direction.
The increased vehicular traffic offered by the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge helped West Memphis grow as a national trucking center, wrote Crawford.
Just how long the six-lane Hernando de Soto Bridge will be closed for repairs hasn't been determined.
Other bridges over the Mississippi River have been built at Helena-West Helena and Lake Village.
Some historians believe de Soto died at the site of what is now Lake Village in 1542 and was buried in the Mississippi River.
That, too, was done under the cover of darkness. The Spanish conquistadors didn't want the Indians to see it and realize that de Soto wasn't an immortal "Son of the Sun" as they had been told.