Pin Drop: Louisiana Purchase State Park
A forgotten Arkansas swamp where "the settlement of the American West began"
I’m back to the grindstone on my Mississippi River book, so—with your forgiveness—the content at Southlands may be more river-centric over the next few weeks. For this week’s “pin drop,” I’ve adapted a brief section from early in the book, a look at a curious little state park.
On October 27, 1815, Prospect Robbins—an U.S. Army veteran who had just a few months earlier been fighting the British—arrived by flatboat at the junction of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. He set a post to mark the beginning of his journey, and then, with a party of three other men, began a trek west into a wild floodplain unknown to the U.S. empire.
The team slept in tents. They lugged drinking water in pails. Most were veterans of the War of 1812; several had helped the Boone family open the salt trade in Missouri. They knew how to hunt in these forests, they knew what gear to carry and how to create quick shelter. This was not easy work. The team left so late in the year to avoid the “Inundations, the undergrowth, weeds, & Flies of various descriptions,” as one of their superiors put it. “No mortal man could take the woods before October,” he added.
On the same day that Robbins began his journey, a second surveyor, Joseph Brown, embarked from the mouth of the St. Francis River, to the north, and walked west. These men were official emissaries of the U.S. government, come to take the measure of this place.
Thomas Jefferson, when he purchased the vast domain then known as Louisiana—which stretched as far west as the Rocky Mountains, as far north as Canada—had a vision. He wanted to build an “empire for liberty,” as he later called it, an unfurling quilt of private property. Self-reliant farmers would work small homesteads, becoming the independent men best positioned to serve democracy. So the government developed a system by which surveyors could split the nation into Jefferson’s dreamscape, a perfect grid of townships, each covering six square miles. These could be broken into 640-acre sections, then split into 160-acre quarter sections, which could be sold at auctions in various land offices across the territories.
An army of surveyors began crawling across the young United States in 1785, abstracting the physical facts of the territory into claims on private property. Thirty years later, Prospect Robbins and Joseph Brown finally brought the project across the Mississippi River, into the nation’s new domain.
These men had been instructed to establish an “initial point” around which all subsequent grids of surveys across the western territories could be arranged. Think of the origin on the coordinate plane in a graph in an algebra book: a zero-point, a center place—arbitrary but precise.
At the end of each mile, the men selected some stout trunk, where they carved a mark to indicate their passage. “Witness trees,” they called these. On November 10, after two weeks in the forests—during which his team averaged a slow four miles per day—Robbins must have spied some mark of Brown’s. He slashed two trees to indicate the point where the two teams’ lines crossed. The initial point was set.
Robbins had traveled 55 miles, or 60 chain lengths plus another 50 links. Both teams continued onward—after two more months, Robbins reached the Missouri River, while Brown traveled on to the Arkansas—but in twelve of the thirteen states included in the Louisiana Purchase, as far away as Minnesota and the Dakotas, parcels would be oriented around these two trees.
There’s an irony to the fact that so fundamental a point in the U.S. grid lays where it does. The surveyors’ job was to record the landscape, jotting notes into their field books about what they saw. But the grid itself did not care about topography or ecology: the straight lines plunge through waterways, over mountains, as if there is no physical terrain.
Of course the facts on the ground did matter. They always do. Robbins and Brown knew this. Several years earlier, plans to create a federal land office alongside the southern Mississippi River were postponed due to too much flooding. Even after these men established the initial point, the swampy land along the river proved troublesome to surveyors. In general, teams were expected to travel eleven miles per day, which meant each range would be completed in two weeks. Even decades later, as the surveying project near its completion, one team in northern Arkansas became so mired in the swamps that they required 48 days to survey a single range.
The land around the initial point had little to recommend. Prospect Robbins described the terrain as “low,” featuring “cypress and briers and thickets in abundance.” He was unimpressed, repeatedly describing this floodplain territory as second-rate land.
More than a hundred years later, in the 1920s—as much of the region was being cleared for agriculture—a new group of surveyors was attempting to clarify the local county boundaries. As they stumbled through the still-swampy landscape, they noticed Robbins’s slashed trees. The initial point was rediscovered. The state set a monument on the site, and several decades later the state turned the place into a park.
This is not a park you come to soak in the awesome power of the natural world. The ancient forests here were at some point cut down, I presume, given that the trees today are clearly second growth. You’re not going to camp out in this wetland; you’re not even supposed to deviate from the boardwalk that’s been built atop the mucky soil. Still, the fact that tupelo and cypress and buttonbush all grow here is, I think, significant.
The boardwalk takes you to the place where, according to an official placard, “the settlement of the American West began.” Another sign along the route calls on visitors to imagine “the strengths of those people” who helped explore and survey and settle the vast territory beyond the Mississippi River. They were indeed strong people, though at this point I think we should acknowledge that their settlement required dispossession and destruction, too.
One thing you can’t help but notice at Lousiana Purchase State Park is that the initial point itself, the zero place, was never tamed. At its center, Jefferson’s dreamscape holds a bit of wild. So this scrubby forest gives us reason to reflect not just on the might of the settlers, but on the power of the land and water below their feet.
If you go
The Louisiana Purchase State Park lies a few miles off Highway 49, northwest of Helena, Arkansas. While Robbins’ starting point, at the mouth of the Arkansas River, remains too wild to access by car, you can drive to the mouth of the St. Francis River, where Joseph Brown began his westward walk. (You won’t be in the precisely same place, though; the location of the river’s mouth has shifted slightly of the centuries.) The surrounding St. Francis National Forest is another demonstration of the persistence of the wild.
The mouth of the St. Francis also serves as a good launch point for a short trip down the Mississippi—a chance to see another unconquered place. Camp, or at least picnic, on Buck Island, an island that’s been preserved as a paddler’s refuge, before ending in Helena Harob. (Don’t own a boat? You can book a trip with my friends at the Quapaw Canoe Company.)
If you’re a determined landlubber, there’s still more for you here: head from the park to Marianna, Arkansas, to the famous Jones Bar-B-Q Diner. Plan to be there early: the restaurant opens at 7 a.m. and can sell out within hours.
I really enjoyed this story, especially having been on a survey crew doing straight lines in the Calcasieu and Atchafalya River Basins years ago. But I was surprised to read the paragraphs about the breaking of the land into sections and townships without any mention of the peoples whose land was taken away. I’m hoping the full book will offer that context.