West Memphis is the largest city in Crittenden County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 26,245 at the 2010 census, ranking it as the state’s 18th largest city, behind Bella Vista. It is part of the Memphis metropolitan area, and is located directly across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee.

Native Americans lived in the Mississippi River Valley for at least 10,000 years, although much of the evidence of their presence has been buried or destroyed. The people of the Mississippian Period were the last indigenous inhabitants of the West Memphis area. Mound City Road, located within the eastern allowance of the West Memphis city limits, has a marker indicating that the villages of Aquixo (Aquijo) or Pacaha were in the area. Several mounds are yet visible.

Explorers from both Spain and France visited the Place near West Memphis. Among those explorers were Hernando de Soto and his men from Spain and Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet from France. By the grow old French hunters and explorers entered the region, the Mississippian towns and supplementary settlements had been abandoned. The native site of West Memphis came from Spanish estate grants issued during the 1790s. Grants were unconditional to Benjamin Fooy, John Henry Fooy, and Isaac Fooy in the Hopefield (Crittenden County) area and to William McKenney in the Bridgeport-West Memphis area.

In the summer of 1541, Spanish voyager Hernando De Soto crossed the Mississippi River into what is now Crittenden County subsequently an army of greater than 300 conquistadors and regarding as many captured Native American slaves. The Spanish found the house to be the most densely populated that they had seen back starting their journey on the Florida coast, two years earlier. The Spanish expedition departed Arkansas two years later, leaving at the back numerous Old World diseases. It was 130 years since Europeans visited this region again. The French expedition of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 found none of the towns or people that the Spanish had documented; all that remained were the many mounds that still dot the landscape along the rivers and creeks. The indigenous inhabitants, like the future settlers, were drawn to this region because of its fertile river bottom soil, abundant game, and thick forest.