A visit to the littler rock

Finding the lost history of Arkansas's capital city

Over the years, when I’ve passed through Little Rock, its placeness never resolved clearly. For me it was a waypoint—a civilized layover between my home in Mississippi’s lowlands and the mountains I was always seeking to the west. Its terrain was between, neither highland nor lowland. Just land.

A few weeks ago, I was back in town, and hoping to be defensively stylishly late to the party where I knew I’d know no one, I spent a few minutes wandering the banks of the Arkansas River. Eventually, I stumbled across an artifact I had not known existed: a small remnant of what the French had once called le Petit Rocher. The Little Rock.

Suddenly, this city became legible.

The western edge of the Arkansas Delta is not clearly defined, in part because rivers like the Arkansas flow east here, adding their own floodplains to the big Mississippi’s.¹ One good way to def…