Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas

The Mississippi River, a dynamic waterway that often cuts new channels and thus either forms islands or causes former islands to merge with the eastern or western banks, cut a path through a section of Tennessee land known as Devil’s Elbow; subsequently, the channel that previously went around the land partially dried up, leaving the land, for all practical purposes, a part of Arkansas. Decades of boundary disputes between the two states followed with regard to Devil’s Elbow, designated Island 37 by the U.S. government. Because competing claims of jurisdiction left it in something of a legal void, Island 37 became an outpost for bootleggers and other criminals in the early twentieth century.