Caruthersville, the capital of historic Pemiscot County and the center of a cotton, grain, timber, and industrial area, was laid out in 1857 by George W. Bushey and J. Hardeman Walker on the Walker plantation. The Bootheel counties of Pemiscot, Dunklin, and part of New Madrid are said to be part of Missouri through Walker’s efforts, and his grave is in Eastwood Methodist Churchyard. The first settlement in this vicinity was the French village of Little Prairie, founded as a trading post near an Indian village in 1794 by Francois Le Sieur while Missouri was Spanish Upper Louisiana. During the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12, Little Prairie, at the center of the disturbance, was destroyed; rebuilt, it later became known as Lost Village and finally was lost to floodwaters and the caving riverbank. Pemiscot County, named for its main bayou from an Indian derivative meaning liquid mud, was organized in 1851, and its first county seat, Gayoso, named for the Spanish governor of Louisiana, stood a few miles north before the Mississippi River claimed the site. Caruthersville became the county seat in 1898. In Missouri’s Southeast Lowland Region, it serves one of the state’s most productive agricultural counties. Southern pioneers were drawn to the area by game, timber, and soil, but growth was halted during the Civil War when troops and guerrilla bands ranged through the county, and from 1864 to 1866 Pemiscot County was completely disorganized and placed under the jurisdiction of the adjacent New Madrid County Court. Caruthersville grew as a shipping center after Louis Houck’s St. Louis, Kennett, and Southern Railroad arrived in 1894, while lumber companies harvesting the county’s forests spurred railroad development. Land reclaimed by the St. Francis River drainage district in 1893 and the Little River drainage district in 1905, along with levees, increased growth, and the county population rose from 12,115 in 1900 to 45,624 in 1950. Pemiscot County lies in territory ceded by Osage tribes in 1808 and used by bands of Delaware, Shawnee, and Cherokee Indians, and some of Missouri’s largest Indian mounds are in the county, including one near Cottonwood Point that measured 400 feet by 250 before land use reduced its size.