Last week I was asked about the landscape around Columbus when the town was first settled 204 years ago.  There are several good descriptions of this area in early records. These are among my favorites.

One of the first Anglo-American to settle at the site of Columbus was Gideon Lincecum, who in 1818 moved his family from Tuscaloosa and built a log house on the banks of the Tombigbee in the area of the present day Stennis Lock and Dam public boat ramp. In 1819 he moved three miles downriver and built a frame house and store on the north side of what is now the Elks Club/Gilmer block downtown.

Lincecum’s account of that move is found in the fascinating book, “Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist” and is the earliest description of Columbus at its founding. Lincecum paints a vivid image of a wild and beautiful forest teeming with game. His last two campsites before arriving at the Tombigbee were at creeks the Choctaws called “Lua Copesa” (which means Cold Fire) and “Lookse-ok-pullia” (which means “a terrapin floating on the water”). His next camp was on the banks of the Tombigbee three miles north of present day downtown.

Lincecum’s description of the present day Columbus landscape in 1818:

“At our camp near Cold Fire creek (Just south of Columbus on Highway 69 it is now incorrectly called Coal Fire), there certainly must have been half a dozen packs of (wolves) around the camp and they came so near we could hear them snapping their teeth.” At the Luxapalila camp: “It was full of blue-winged teal, swarming like wild pigeons. … We heard the panthers scream; the raccoons complained; the owls came near and hooted awfully; and the wolves howled all night.” On the journey which had taken 12 days, hundreds of “fat turkeys” had been seen.

At what is now the intersection of Catfish Alley and Main Street in downtown, Lincecum killed a “big buck with a chair frame (antlers) on his head.” The deer fell at the base of a large pine tree. The Eagle Hotel was built in that location and it later became the site of the Gilmer Hotel.

Lincecum expressed delight at the beauty of his campsite. It was situated in a bend of the river near a canebrake that came almost to the water’s edge. It was on a low bluff where a spring flowed from the roots of a large sycamore tree splashing onto a rock extending out from the base of the bluff. On the first night he camped there, at least 40 turkeys lit in nearby trees. The next morning, he shot one that dressed out at 29-1/2 pounds. He explored the river around his camp and found “plenty of bear and deer signs.” Fishing in the river was excellent and several catfish over 80 pounds were caught. Lincecum said Choctaws were living only two miles across the river as was John Pitchlynn who turned out to be a cousin.

Swamps and slues along the Tombigbee
Two hundred years ago what is now the Island across from Columbus was a favorite hunting ground of Choctaw Indians who called it “Shonk Colohenocoby” or “Crooked Cypress”. Lincecum called the area “White Slue” and described it as a string of ponds and lakes.” He wrote that in “the canebrakes and all around the cypress swamp could be found “more turkeys and deer, some bear, coons, foxes, panthers and catamounts than at any place I ever lived.” Trees in several of the slues near Columbus have “Grandpa’s Beard” a lichen that resembles Spanish Moss, hanging from their limbs.

The Black Prairie
The crescent shaped Black Prairie of northeast Mississippi and west central Alabama takes its name from its rich almost black soil. The beautiful, fruitful countryside caught the attention of early European explorers, who in the 1700s described the region in their letters, journals and books. In 1702, Henri de Tonti, an associate of the French explorer La Salle, traveled up the west side of the Tombigbee, from Mobile to a Chickasaw village south of present day Tupelo. He observed that “there is a quantity of shells larger and thicker than oysters scattered in the prairies and hills” and he asked the Chickasaws where the shells came from. The Chickasaw answered him, “It was from the time when the great chief was angry and he flooded all the land.”

In the spring of 1708, British Capt. Thomas Nairne ventured from Charleston, South Carolina, to the Chickasaw Nation, which was then centered around present day Tupelo. As he approached the Chickasaw villages from the east, he wrote of being greeted by a country “being pleasant open forests of oak chestnuts and (hickory) so intermixed with savannas as if it were a made landscape. It’s now that season of the year, when nature adorns the earth with a livery of verdant green, and there is some pleasure in an evening to ride up and down the savannas. When among a tuft of oaks on a rising knoll, in the midst of a large grassy plain, I revole a thousand things about the primitive life of men.” Nairne also said, “I see no other (fruits) the Chickasaws have except peaches; and plums, red, (blue), and yellow. Overall in the old fields are strawberries innumerable and that (are) good and large.”

In the 1820s Peter Pitchlynn, who in the 1860s became governor or chief of the Choctaw Nation, lived on the edge of a prairie near Red Bud Creek south of present day Artesia. The prairie was bordered on the west by Catalpa bottom and extended to the present location of the Golden Triangle Regional Airport. The prairie became known as Peter Pitchlynn’s Prairie.

In April 1822, William Goodell was traveling from Columbus to the Choctaw Indian mission at Mayhew. His route followed what is now known as the Old West Point Road and crossed a large prairie. Mayhew was at that time on a ridge overlooking Tibbee Creek between present day West Point and Starkville. Goodell described the scene along the road: “Flowers of red, purple, yellow and indeed of every hue, are scattered, by a bountiful God, in rich profusion, and in all the beauty and innocence of Eden, on each side of the path; and their fragrance is as if the very incense of heaven were there offered. You can stand in almost any place, and count flowers of ten or twelve different hues.”

Before Columbus became a town in 1819 the landscape here had all the beauty and innocence of Eden.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Slimantics: Redistricting by another name is no less offensive

  By Slim Smith • 2 days ago

• 

  Our View: We don’t want to hear, ‘there’s nothing to do’

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 2 days ago

• 

  Our View: At 250, America’s improbable birth still inspires

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 14 hours ago