Karen and I went to Rosenzweig arts Center Thursday night for the opening of Frances Hairston’s watercolor exhibit “Prairie Images: The Way I See It.”
It was a delightful exhibit Black Prairie paintings. I enjoyed recalling and reflecting on similar and maybe even some of the same scenes that Hairston had painted. The images she created not only recalled the flowers, fields and scenes of which I am so familiar, but also brought to mind the earliest descriptions of the old Black Prairie.
The crescent shaped Black Prairie of northeast Mississippi and west central Alabama takes its name from its rich almost black soil. Prehistoric Indians — later the Chickasaws and some Choctaws — settled on its fertile gently rolling hills and ridges. The beautiful, fruitful countryside also 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. Though he provided little description of the prairie, he had some very interesting observations. He noticed “there is a quantity of shells larger and thicker than oysters scattered in the prairies and hills.” Tonti 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.” He also found an Englishman at the Chickasaw village who Tonti had “trouble recognizing for one” as he “had on a rather dirty blue shirt; no pants, stockings, or shoes; a scarlet blanket and some discs at his neck like a savage.”
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. Over all the old fields are strawberries innumerable and that (are) good and large.”
English trader James Adair published “History of the American Indian” in 1775. He had begun trading with the Chickasaws in the 1740s. Adair described the setting of their villages in the prairie.
“There is a number of extensive and fertile Savannas, or naturally clear land, between the Mississippi and Western branches of Mobile river. The soil of this clear land generally consists of loose rich mould to a considerable depth and either a kind of chalk or marl underneath. We frequently find the grass with its seeded tops as high as our heads, when on horse-back, and very likely it would bear mowing three or four times in one season. As the Indians gather their wild hemp in some of these open fertile lands both it and our hemp would grow to admiration with moderate tillage; and so would tobacco, indigo, cotton and flax in perfection.”
Probably the best early description of the Black Prairie was written by English surveyor and naturalist Bernard Romans, who in 1771 traveled up the west side of the Tombigbee River from Mobile to the Chickasaw villages.
He wrote the savannas (prairies west of the Tombigbee) “consist of a high ground often with small gentle risings in them, some are of a vast extent, and on the west of the Mississippi, they are said to be many days journey over, the largest within my knowledge is on the road from the Choctaw to the Chickasaw nation (Highway 45 Alternate between West Point and Okolona roughly follows that old trail), and is in length near 40 miles over from north to have south, and from one end to the other, a horizon, similar to that at sea, appears; there is generally a rivulet at one or other, or at each end of the savannas, and some come to the river banks … the soil here is very fertile; in some, I (have) seen fossil shells in great numbers. It is remarkable that cattle are very fond of the grasses growing here; the Chickasaw oldfields as it is termed is a clear demonstration of this, for the cattle will come to it from any distance.”
The only high growth he found were willows by the creeks, some small oak and junipers (cedar). Romans also told of finding a crimson flower of the sunflower family and many wild strawberries.
The old Black Prairie was a beautiful and enchanting landscape, which in 1822 was described William Goodall, a missionary traveling to Mayhew, as displaying “all the innocence of Eden.”
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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