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"Death Comes
For Napoleon"
In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain tells us that he was
already "in a pretty sour humor," before he ascended to the hurricane
deck and told Captain McCord, "I have come to say good-bye, captain, I
wish to go ashore at Napoleon." The captain glanced up at the
pilothouse and said, "He wants to get off at Napoleon! Why, hang
it, don't you know? There isn't any Napoleon any more. Hasn't been
for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it, tore it
all to rags and emptied it into the Mississippi!"
Twain reports being flabberghasted. "Carried the
whole town away? - banks, churches, jails, newspaper
offices, courthouse theater, fire department, livery stable -
everything?"
"Everything" came the reply, "Didn't leave hide nor
hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one
brick chimney. This boat is paddling along right now where the
dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney - all
that's left of Napoleon. . ."
What Twain then squinted at was the debris of a long
history that included la Salle's participation in America's first
Catholic mass; an aristocratic French officer in self-imposed exile from
Napoleon Bonaparte's stillborn empire; the wanderings of naturalist
Thomas Nuttall; the Trail of Tears; the flames of Sherman's army; and
the irreversible decay of the riverbank precipitated by the Civil War.
(From "Death Comes For Napoleon" by Mitch Gould; DCHS
journal, "River Towns, River Boats, River People" Spring,1977)
Napoleon, Arkansas, was a flourishing town
before the Civil War. It had served as a landing for the Arkansas
River trade, and was a busy, bustling place where flatboatmen,
steamboatmen, professional gamblers, and ordinary citizens mingled.
First named the "Mouth of Arkansas", a postoffice was established in
April 1832. After Desha County was created in 1838 and after two
temporary county seats, Napoleon became the permanent county seat in
January 1843 and the second largest town in Arkansas. Napoleon was incorporated in January 1851. Not
long after a large block of land was deeded to the United States of
America in 1844 for a three story military hospital, the town of
Napoleon was inundated by flood waters. Despite arguments that
Napoleon's low river banks were too unstable, the hospital was
completed and opened in 1853.
Personal accounts paint polar opposite pictures of
culture and corruption in
this growing river port. Some travelers found it to be a shanty
town of "a few slightly built, wood houses and the best hotel in the
place is an old, dismantled steamboat. Clouds of mosquitos and
buffalo gnats assault on going out of doors" Others wrote,
"Napoleon was a wealthy town supported by a planter aristocracy" that
traveled the river to New Orleans and Memphis for grand parties and
shopping.
Napoleon's demise began in the winter of 1862-63 when Union
forces occupied the port. Many of the wood structures were stripped for
firewood and left to the elements. Lieutenant Commodore Selfridge,
along with Union troops,
dug a canal a few hundred yards long from the Mississippi river to the
Arkansas river (see insert). The 25 mile long narrow Beulah Bend
in the Mississippi had been guarded well by a confederate canon on the
Mississippi side that could easily fire on Union gunboats traveling on
the river from the north and south. The canal not only directed
river traffic away from the bend but in time directed the flow of the
Mississippi towards
Napoleon.
With the river slowly eating away at the foundation of
Napoleon, the federal government abandoned the military hospital as bare
structures crumbled into the ever flowing Mississippi. While flood
waters covered the small remaining area of town in 1874, a steamer
patrolled the floodplain, picking up the last family to live in
Napoleon. All that remains of Napoleon today is the cast-iron bell of
Napoleon's Catholic church (housed in McGehee's Catholic church) and two
grave markers from Napoleon's cemetery.
Only a few times has the Mississippi been low enough
for a chimney to be seen in the river sand that now covers the town
site. Nature and the river have truly reclaimed what belonged to
them!
For further reading order: DCHS Publications for 1977, 1980, 1985, 1986
on the publications page
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