Christmas 1540 in what is now the Starkville-West Point-Columbus area was the first Christmas celebrated in Mississippi.
It was a cold, windy, snowy day, described as being like a blizzard and as cold or colder than the northern plateau of Spain. That description has survived in the journals of members of Hernando de Soto’s 1539-1542 expedition across the Southeast.
It is between Starkville and West Point that many artifacts have been found, which appear to be associated with the Hernando de Soto entrada’s 1540-1541 winter camp. Current archaeological findings would most likely place that camp in the prairie west of Columbus, south of West Point and centered in the Starkville area. The site of the Christmas camp tracks a full day’s march west from de Soto’s Tombigbee River crossing.
De Soto crossed the Tombigbee on rafts on Dec. 16, 1540, and arrived at the village of Chicaca that night. The river crossing point would have to have been within a day’s march of Chicaca. Here, the history of the Military Road emerges. In 1817, U.S. Army surveyor Capt. Hugh Young reported he had been told by John Pitchlynn, U.S. Interpreter for the Choctaw Nation, that near the mouth of Moore’s Creek was the Choctaw’s favored high water crossing of the Tombigbee during the 1700s and early 1800s. That was the reason for the Military Road ferry having been placed where Columbus would later be settled. In December 1540, when de Soto reached the Tombigbee River, it was high and out of its banks.
About five miles south of Columbus near Buzzard’s Island, there is evidence of a prehistoric Indian trail crossing the Tombigbee. There, in addition to evidence of a trail, an Indian dugout canoe was found buried in the mud. Canoes were often sunk to conceal them at river crossings.
The strongest evidence is that the Tombigbee crossing would be within a day’s march of the present-day Starkville area. Though a long day’s march, much of it would have been across an open grass-covered prairie. Depending on the exact location of Chicaca, the Tombigbee crossing point might have been as high as Barton’s Ferry or as low as Ten Mile Shoals. Given Pitchlynn’s statement, current archaeology and river conditions in 1540, the Tombigbee at present day downtown Columbus or near Buzzard’s Island five miles South of Columbus are the most likely places for the de Soto expedition to have crossed the river in 1540.
At the Tombigbee, the Spanish built a barge or a piragua to cross the high water. On Dec. 16, Chickasaws gathered on the west bank to contest the crossing. DeSoto then sent Baltasar de Gallagos with 30 horsemen upstream to cross over. The Chickasaws – realizing they were about to be out flanked – ceased their opposition and departed.
After crossing the Tombigbee on rafts, de Soto’s force marched to an abandoned Chickasaw village of about 20 houses which was called Chicaca, arriving that night. There, the Spanish established their winter camp of 1540-1541. The Chickasaws brought food and blankets to the Spanish and the approximately 500 Europeans probably greatly depleted the Indians’ winter food supply. As a supplemental food source, the Spanish had been driving a herd of hundreds of hogs across the south.
At some point in December 1540, possibly on the Feast of St. Lucy or the Feast of St. Nicolas – but most likely at Christmas – de Soto would have ordered the slaughter and cooking of some of the hogs as a special or celebratory meal. This was a form of roasting meat over an open fire that was called a barbacoa. It was from that word and form of cooking that barbecue took its name.
That Spanish meal would have been the first pork barbecue ever held in Mississippi and makes this month the 483rd anniversary of the first Mississippi barbecue. It would also make barbecue the first Christmas meal in Mississippi.
And that first European Christmas in what is now Mississippi was a cold one. Rodrigo Rangel, personal secretary to Hernando de Soto, wrote in his journal which was translated by John Worth for The De Soto Chronicles, edited by Clayton, Knight and Moore, University of Alabama Press, 1993. “They were there in Chicaca that Christmas, and it snowed with as much wind as if they were in Burgos (located on north central plateau of Spain), and with as much or more cold.” How interesting that the first Christmas celebration in what is now Mississippi was a pork barbecue held on a very cold, windy and snowy Christmas day 483 years ago.
Rufus Ward is a local historian.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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