A New History of Mississippi

Dennis J. Mitchell

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626741621
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Creating the first comprehensive narrative of Mississippi since the bicentennial history was published in 1976, Dennis J. Mitchell recounts the vibrant and turbulent history of a Deep South state. The author has condensed the massive scholarship produced since that time into an appealing narrative, which incorporates people missing from many previous histories including American Indians, women, African Americans, and a diversity of other minority groups. This is the story of a place and its people, history makers and ordinary citizens alike. Mississippi's rich flora and fauna are also central to the story, which follows both natural and man-made destruction and the major efforts to restore and defend rare untouched areas. Hernando De Soto, Sieur d'Iberville, Ferdinand Claiborne, Thomas Hinds, Aaron Burr, Greenwood LeFlore, Joseph Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, James D. Lynch, James K. Vardaman, Mary Grace Quackenbos, Ida B. Wells, William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, John Grisham, Jack Reed, William F. Winter, Jim Barksdale, Richard Howorth, Christopher Epps, and too many more to list—this book covers a vast and rich legacy. From the rise and fall of American Indian culture to the advent of Mississippi's world-renowned literary, artistic, and scientific contributions, Mitchell vividly brings to life the individuals and institutions that have created a fascinating and diverse state.

Chapter One

RISE AND FALL OF INDIAN CULTURE

As the warm, wet land emerged, the Paleoindians adapted. They continued to hunt deer and bear with an improved spear thrown with an atlatl, a throwing device that increased the distance and force of their weapons, but gradually they came to depend more on the fish, alligators, turtles, snakes, birds, and other small creatures in the swamps and rivers. They ate acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, pecans, persimmons, wild grapes, hackberries, goosefoot, knotweed, and seeds from honey locust. Although they did not practice agriculture, the plant and animal life in the southeastern portion of the United States grew so densely that humans could concentrate in numbers enough to build impressive mounds. On the west side of the Mississippi River at Poverty Point, these hunters and gatherers built one of the most impressive mound complexes in North America at about the same time Stonehenge went up in England. Some archaeologists believe Jaketown on the Yazoo River to be associated with this culture, along with several other sites.

Not only did some hunters and gatherers build impressive mounds, but they also carried on long-distance trade. Because the area lacked stones, they imported them from as far away as Arkansas and the Appalachian Mountains to craft stone vessels, plummets, atlatl weights, axes, and ornaments. The inhabitants constructed the largest mound at Poverty Point in the shape of a bird, indicating that they found them important and perhaps sacred. They carved stone pipes to smoke tobacco, which again may have involved religious rituals. Their accomplishments indicate a more complicated life than usually ascribed to hunters and gatherers. Even if they only occupied the mounds for portions of the year and had to forage at distances some months, the first complex civilization in Mississippi had long cultural roots that connected them to the historic Indian tribes who inhabited Mississippi.

Mississippi Prehistoric Periods

Paleo-Indian	10,000 B.C.E.–8000 B.C.E.
	Hunting with spears for large mammals
	Small nomadic groups
Archaic	8000 B.C.E.–500 B.C.E.
	Semisedentary with seasonal gathering of groups
	Gathering wild foods and fishing supplement hunting
	Atlatl used to throw spears
	Regional trade begins
	Ceramic pottery and mounds appear toward end of period
Woodland	500 B.C.E.–1000 C.E.
	Settled life in permanent villages and tribes develop
	Agriculture begins while hunting continues
	Pottery in many shapes for many uses decorated in a variety of patterns
	Burial mounds become common
	Bows and arrows and corn adopted toward end of period
Mississippian	1000 C.E.–1500 C.E.
	Agriculture based on corn, beans, and squash becomes basis for large communities
	Large temple mounds serve as center of ceremonial sites
	Chiefs head hierarchical societies
	Warfare increases
	Pottery includes crushed shells as tempering substance
	Widespread trade in rare goods controlled by chiefs

Poverty Point appeared toward the end of the long Archaic period, identified by specialists as lasting from 8000 to 1000 B.C.E. and blended into the Woodland stage, which lasted until 1000 C.E. Life changed because Indians began to gather more seed-bearing plants and to garden them, encouraging the growth of goosefoot, may grass, knotweed, and sunflowers. They settled down into widely dispersed communities, built wood houses, and began to conduct elaborate burial rituals for their dead with prized possessions made of copper, stone, and shells to comfort the dead. Bows provided them a better weapon and improved their hunts. The population probably increased because of a better food supply, and they began to settle into villages before acquiring agriculture.

Around 700 C.E. the Cole’s Creek Culture emerged between the Gulf Coast and the Yazoo Basin with distinctive flat-topped, pyramidal mounds usually arranged around an open plaza. Few lived on site, but obviously it provided a civic and ceremonial center. They built the mounds in stages and constructed buildings atop the mounds, which may have been temples, charnel houses, or homes for elite families. Cole’s Creek peoples experimented with maize or corn, but the plant served only a supplementary role in their food supply.

In the Mississippian period, from 1000 to 1500 C.E., maize became the main source of food along with squash and beans. In the Mississippian era, corn provided more nutrients than its distant cousin grown today, and Indians made two crops each year. Abundant crops and continued hunting provided food surpluses previously unequaled. Perhaps to protect those surpluses and to store them safely, populations across the Southeast formed chiefdoms. Large populations gathered into villages, and dominant political families emerged. The chiefs lived in houses on top of impressive mounds. The chiefs had access to more meat than the ordinary inhabitants, and claimed burial in or near the “public” buildings with elaborate artifacts, copper jewelry, and ceremonial weapons. “Commoners” buried their dead either in community cemeteries or near their homes with a shell ornament, a tool, or a ceramic vessel.

Evidence indicates that commoners gave food offerings to their ruler, creating a chief of considerable power. The chiefs distributed food to commoners in times of scarcity and controlled rare goods obtained by long-distance trade. Not all peoples formed chiefdoms, and for unknown reasons, in the 1400s chiefdoms suddenly declined, and many Indians scattered into smaller communities again. They continued to farm and hunt, reverting to gathering when crops failed.

In 1539 Hernando de Soto and his expedition stumbled into this world seeking the precious metals that the conquistadores had looted so successfully from the Aztecs and Incas. By the time the Spaniards crossed the Tombigbee in 1540 near what is now Columbus, they had plundered and raped their way across much of the Southeast and had learned about the Mississippian culture without understanding it. The Spaniards lived more in the medieval than the modern European world and never doubted their superiority over the peoples they encountered.

Unfortunately, they provide the only historical record of Mississippian peoples. Mississippian, meaning the culture of corn-growing, mound-building, chief-ruled societies found throughout the Southeast, lived in hierarchal societies and carried their rulers on their shoulders in litters. They spoke a variety of languages as different as Arabic and German, and lived in villages of 300 to 500 people, who might be the only humans they would ever know. They felt surrounded by enemies, who intruded into their hunting grounds. If they lived in a chiefdom with a ruling family, the chiefdom would contain no more than 5,000 inhabitants and extend no more than a day’s walk. The family and clan provided the center of their lives and their protection. Injuries to blood relatives required revenge, as clans never forgave and accepted the obligation to kill the killer or, failing that, the killer’s relatives. Wearing only a breechcloth, Mississippians fought with war clubs carved from hickory, ironwood, or black locust, unless using a bow from a distance.

If they died in battle, they believed in an afterlife and invested some effort to understand the actions and motives of spiritual beings, whom they knew inhabited the beyond. Omens loomed large to them, and the wrong bird singing could abort a war mission. All societies understood themselves to be at the center of the world; had a special reverence for the four directions, making symbols to illustrate them; and smoked tobacco on special occasions. Their mothers determined their inheritance, and their mother’s eldest brother educated and guided their sisters’ children through life.

Having fought in what is today Alabama, de Soto continued north. After resting his men for a week and stealing food, he kidnapped a chief from a town on the Black Warrior River, forcing the chief to guide the expedition into the Chicaza (Tombigbee) River valley. December rains and fording swamps, creeks, and rivers made the Spaniards miserable. When they reached the Tombigbee, a large war party assembled on the opposite bank to threaten them if they tried to cross. De Soto sent an Indian to explain he came in peace, but the party seized and executed his emissary as a further warning.

A flanking party of Spaniards swam their horses at a lower, shallow site, and the war party disappeared, allowing de Soto to cross. The Spanish had entered the Black Prairie, where the largest town, Chicaza, contained only twenty homes. When the Spaniards arrived, the chief and all his people had abandoned the town. Yet de Soto decided to winter there. The Chicaza lived in homes scattered about the surrounding countryside, which the Spanish raided for food, even tearing down houses to drag the materials back to construct more lodging for themselves. The Chicaza attacked in small groups at night until the Spanish captured a few men and used them to persuade the chief to visit. He came on a litter bearing gifts and brought his tributary chiefs with him. Eventually, although relations did not improve, de Soto invited the leaders to dine on pork from the pig herd accompanying the expedition. As a result, the Chicaza began to attack the unknown animals, killing and stealing as many as possible.

The chief tried to use the strangers against his enemies, but when the Spanish prepared to leave in March, the Chicaza struck in force by creeping into their occupied town with fire concealed in small pots. They fired flaming arrows onto the roofs of houses containing the sleeping Spaniards. As the Spanish charged out half-dressed, the Indians clubbed them as archers targeted their horses. The Chicaza killed twelve men, fifty-seven horses, and 400 pigs, which burned. They lost one warrior. As the Spanish worked to clothe themselves and refit their armor, de Soto dispatched horsemen in every direction to murder anyone they could find within a circle of fifteen miles. Despite the attempt at cleansing the neighborhood, the Chicaza attacked again, but denied the element of surprise and fighting on open land against horsemen armed with iron weapons, they lost several men and did not return again. De Soto left Mississippi through a wilderness north of Chicaza to wander around what is today Tennessee and Arkansas. When he turned south again, he died, and his men “buried” him in the Mississippi River, hoping the hostile Indians would not learn of his death.

The survivors of the first Spanish incursion did not encourage other Europeans to follow them into the Southeast. Europeans would not appear in the area again until French explorers descended the Mississippi River in the 1680s. Europeans left diseases behind, devastating the Indian populations. Some scholars guess the losses to be as high as 80 percent of the population, but others respond with lower estimates because, they argue, the Indians did not live in densely populated towns. Archaeologists refer to the period between the initial European incursion and sustained contact as protohistoric because written records again vanished, leaving only the physical remains to tell the story. During this era, the historic tribes formed and moved into the territories that we recognize as the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez nations. The Natchez preserved the chiefdom-type culture encountered by de Soto, while the Choctaw and Chickasaw represented the new confederations of peoples who migrated into the poorer soil areas that had been wilderness in the 1500s.

The Choctaw and Chickasaw understood themselves to be brothers who had chosen to separate. They shared with other southeastern peoples the old memory of traveling from the west following a leaning pole to a new land, sometimes carrying the bones of their ancestors. At some point, the Choctaw abandoned this memory for the story of the earth giving birth to them at Nanih Waiyah mound built by earlier peoples during the Middle Woodland period. In their later creation story, they crawled from the earth at the mound and lay on the grass to be dried by the sun, which became their chief god.

Archaeologists believe the Choctaw shared a prairie culture with the Chakchiuma and Chickasaw, but chose to join with people from the east who traced their ancestry to the devolved Moundville chiefdom in what is today Alabama, and with people from the Southwest related to the Natchez, who may have had a chiefdom in the lower Pearl River valley. The latter group, sometimes referred to as Plaquemine, became the Choctaw of the Six-Towns and the Chickasawhay living on the upper portion of the Pascagoula, speaking with an accent and maintaining distinctive dress and hairstyles. The eastern Choctaw lived on tributaries of the Tombigbee in what is today Kemper County, while the western Choctaw inhabited the upper Pearl. Their confederation evolved as they dealt with the shock and chaos resulting from the spread of disease and death after the European incursion.

The Choctaw lived along streams and farmed corn, squash, sunflowers, and beans on natural levees in soil that could be easily worked with a digging stick or the shoulder blade of a buffalo serving as a hoe. The chiefdoms east and west of them had cultivated floodplains with more extensive fields, but the Choctaw continued to rely more on hunting and gathering to supplement agriculture. Men helped with the heavy work of clearing land and then left food production to women. Corn provided the Choctaw most of their calories, and usually they produced an abundance. They preferred deer meat but consumed a wide variety of small game, including birds and fish. Aside from deer, the Choctaw valued bear the most because bear fat became the most important cooking oil.

A bow made of hickory or black locust with a pull of around fifty pounds served as their main hunting weapon. Arrows armed with stone heads or sometimes with a bird talon or deer antler points provided the ammunition for the hunt. The Choctaw knew how to mix a nonlethal but stunning poison to bring fish to the surface. Boys practiced hunting turkeys and small game with blowpipes fashioned from cane. Mothers also assigned their children to chase away birds from the fields. The women packed their crops close, allowing bean vines to climb the corn stalks and interspersing sunflowers and tobacco among the squash and beans. Using lye, they transformed the dried corn into hominy, and in the process released niacin, which was important to a healthy diet.

In times of drought, the Choctaw reverted to gathering in the river bottoms and extended their deer-hunting season to provide meat. Generally the Choctaw left their towns to hunt when the leaves began to fall. Less foliage made hunting easier, and they practiced game management, allowing the spring-born deer to grow over the summer. During hungry times, women harvested tender young smilax vines as an asparagus-like vegetable and tubers of the vine to pound into flour for bread. Morning glory vine roots provided a sort of wild potato. Nuts and berries remained an important source of food every year, with the Choctaw extracting oil from hickory nuts for a multitude of uses. With more meat from the extended hunting season and the vegetables found in the borderlands, the Choctaw weathered droughts to return to their gardens the next spring.

Animal hides made up most of their clothing and bed covers, but women also wove cloth from fibers obtained from tree trunks. From bird feathers, they manufactured blankets, shawls, and ceremonial garments. European observers compared the process to wig making, as the women attached feathers to a net of strings with feathers on both sides of the “fabric.” Some of the bird feather material became a sort of towel used to wipe hands after a meal. Feathers also provided important ornamentation, with eagles’ feathers seeming to be the most prestigious.

The Choctaw built their homes of wood and wattle, painting the interior white and thatching the roofs with grasses. Their homes spread along natural levees for considerable distances rather than bunching around a central plaza as some earlier Indian towns had done. Visitors reported winding their way through paths and gardens, giving the impression of rural more than town living even in large population centers. Ball fields brought the entire population together for contests dubbed the “little brother to war.” Played with sticks and deer-hide balls, the game created enormous excitement enhanced by the tradition of betting heavily on the outcome. In addition to their private plots, the Choctaw farmed a common field of crops for the town as a whole.

Red and white chiefs led the towns as representatives of the moieties designated by those colors. The white chiefs dominated and controlled the rare trade items such as shell and copper jewelry, which they distributed to members of the tribe to increase and solidify their position and to enhance their ability to negotiate important decisions. The red chiefs led warriors into battle against external enemies. The moieties determined each person’s role in life because one could not marry within one’s moiety, and certain lifelong obligations stemmed from birth into the red or white group. For example, the Choctaw burial custom required the dead to be exposed on a platform until most of the flesh decayed, and then a bone-picker from the opposite moiety picked off the remaining flesh and placed the bones in a basket for internment in the town’s charnel house. A child’s moiety depended on his or her mother because the Choctaw’s inheritance came from the maternal side. The mother’s brother fulfilled the male role for discipline and education. The child’s father behaved as a fond, indulgent uncle might in a paternal society.

Women played a more important role in Choctaw life than females did in Western societies at the time. When the Choctaw first met to negotiate with Europeans, the delegation included women. Inheritance depended upon the mother’s status, not the father’s. Women, as the primary farmers, produced the bulk of the family’s food, and the Choctaw had no exclusive male priesthood to inhibit females. The mother mound gave birth to the C...