A natural river crossing at Columbia was used by Native Americans who traveled the Ouachita River valley before the time of Christ, and Indian mounds at Watson Brake upriver date to 3500 B.C. The Ouachita tribe of the Caddo nation was prominent by 400 A.D., while mound builders along the Ouachita maintained a thriving civilization. In 1543 Hernandez DeSoto passed through this region and traveled down the Ouachita, and in 1682 LaSalle claimed for France the lands drained by the Mississippi River, including the Ouachita valley. French explorers Bienville and St. Denis reportedly camped on the Ouachita during their Natchitoches expedition in 1700, and by 1720 a large plantation settlement upriver across from twin bluffs was apparently abandoned because of Native American aggression. In 1788 Don Juan Filhiol, a French military commander from Pargoud, France, was authorized by the Spanish crown to protect and settle the lands along the Ouachita, and some of his descendants still own property upriver. After the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase territory from France in 1803, Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Dunbar and Hunter Expedition of the Ouachita River in 1904, and its map marked this crossing. When Louisiana became a state in 1812 and was divided into parishes, this land lay in Catahoula Parish. In the 1820s Daniel Humphries, a bear hunter, became Columbia's first settler, Columbia was officially established in 1827, many settlers came from the Columbia, South Carolina, area, and in 1828 a post office eleven miles upriver known as Caldwell's post office operated under postmaster J.C. Caldwell. Caldwell Parish was created from Catahoula and Ouachita parishes in 1838 with Columbia as parish seat, and Columbia developed into a steamboat town and major port that shipped oak staves for barrels and thousands of bales of cotton. In 1861 the site became a hub where Confederate soldiers from Caldwell and nearby parishes mustered out and departed by steamboat, and later in the war a Yankee boat sank a steamboat here to deter river traffic. After the war Bob Blanks and his brothers Fred, Jack, and Henry built the largest steamboat operation on the Ouachita, making regular trips to New Orleans and returning with merchantable goods. John Schepis arrived from Sicily in 1906, saying he stepped off a steamboat carrying a boatload of bananas with only pennies in his pocket, and he became the primary builder of the one hundred block on Main Street. Although the steamboat era lasted into the early 1900s, transportation was gradually overtaken by construction of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad beginning in 1888. Before locks and dams were completed in 1925, the Ouachita could shrink to the size of a creek, the river was crossed by a low-water bridge, and when the water was high this site served as a ferry landing. A first steel bridge was built at Main Street in 1907, the Great Flood of 1927 inundated the area from this location to Natchez, Mississippi, levees were completed in 1937, and a New Bridge built here in 1931 under Governor and Senator Huey P. Long and Governor O.K. Allen lasted until 2007.