Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Kansas, 1863–1865 233
Helena, Arkansas, submerged by a flood in 1864—a hint of the mosquitoes and sanitary
problems that made it an unhealthy place
Arkansas (AD), organized at St. Louis, included many soldiers who had been born
in Arkansas. Some of them had been sent north by General Prentiss in his attempt
to clean out the Helena contraband camp late in 1862. 11
Autumn brought little change to the Helena garrison. Three companies of the
3d Arkansas (AD) scouted the country south of town during October, one company
commander recorded on the muster roll, “without any loss or [incident] worthy of
record.” The regiment’s Company D spent November and December on Island No.
63 in the Mississippi River guarding woodcutters at a wood yard that supplied fuel
for Union steamboats. The other companies furnished fatigue parties to improve
Helena’s defenses and guarded warehouses full of government supplies. The men’s
health suffered, as did that of the garrison’s white troops. At the end of October,
Company H’s commanding officer called the situation “very poor. . . . The quarters
of the men have been Shelter Tents, the ground was a steap, bareside hill. The
Tents were without floors & during the cold rains the men and the Tents were made
drenching wet.” Sickness inflicted 649 deaths—about two-thirds of a regiment’s
authorized strength—before the 3d Arkansas (AD), renumbered the 56th United
States Colored Infantry (USCI), mustered out at Helena in September 1866. One
inspector called the town “the most deadly place on the river.” 12
As autumn turned to winter, another black regiment, the 1st Iowa Colored Infantry,
arrived in Helena. Organized in Keokuk at the southeastern corner of Iowa, the
regiment had recruited largely in Missouri, but federal law allowed the state of Iowa
11 OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 1, pp. 474–75, and pt. 2, pp. 402, 432.
12 OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 3, p. 714 (“the most deadly”); NA M594, roll 211, 56th USCI (“without
any loss,” “very poor”); Dyer, Compendium, p. 1733; Rhonda M. Kohl, “‘This Godforsaken Town’: