Lately there have been a lot of news reports of increasing bear sightings in Mississippi and occasionally someone still mentions black panthers too. Old newspaper articles and fur trade records provide a detailed account of the wildlife that once called northeast Mississippi and west Alabama home. The range of the wildlife that once roamed our virgin forest and open prairies is amazing.

One of the most interesting accounts of area wildlife is provided in the notebook of George Rapalji, which can be found at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Rapalji was a trapper and fur trader along the Big Black River (which flows from Webster County to the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg). Between 1786 and 1797, he recorded the following skins being traded; deer, otter, bear, raccoon, fox, beaver, cat, wildcat and a “tyger.” Over the course of his nine years of trapping and trading along the Big Black, Rapalji only reported one tyger skin as having been taken. That skin was taken in 1794. The three different types of cat skins taken in Mississippi during the 1790s by Rapalji may well represent bobcat, Florida panther and jaguar.

In an 1870 interview, Peter Pitchlynn, who served as chief of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma during the 1860s, recalled bear hunting when he resided on Redbud Creek near the Robinson Road (southeast of Starkville) during the 1820s.

Gideon Lincecum moved in 1818 to the banks of the Tombigbee at the present site of the Lock and Dam West Bank boat ramp. He wrote about his favorite hunting ground, which was White Slough on the Island north of the site where the Lowndes County Port is located. He said that the Choctaws called the Slough Shonk Colocherocoby or “Crooked Cypress.” Lincecum recalled that, “In the canebrake and all around the cypress swamp could be found more turkeys and deer, and some bear, coons, foxes, panthers and catamounts than at any place I ever lived.” He also told of bear hunting with a pack of dogs and a hunting knife.

White Slough was a favorite hunting ground for both the Choctaws and the first Anglo-American settlers who began arriving at the site of Columbus in 1818. Besides all the wild game found there, during the winter the slough filled up with ducks and geese. The early Anglo settlers hunted both to provide food for their families and to obtain meat to smoke for shipment down river to markets in Mobile, Alabama.

Wolfe Road (originally named Wolf Road) in northeast Lowndes County received its name because of the large number of wolves in the area when it was first settled. It is one of the oldest roads in the area and was in use by 1820. In an 1872 newspaper account W.E. Gibbs told the story behind its name: “That part of our county … was then (around 1820) ‘veritably a howling wilderness,’ being made so by innumerable bands of predatory wolves, so numerous that the rearing of stock was an impossibility. The Wolf Road took its name from this fact.”

There are several accounts of jaguar being seen east of the Mississippi River. Peter Matthiessen in “Wildlife in America,” quotes a 1711 account from coastal Carolina as saying, “tygers are more to the westward.” Additionally, he refers to a 1737 sighting of a tyger in Carolina. Florida panthers were referred to as panthers or catamounts. Until the late 1700s (according to most natural histories), the range of the jaguar, which was then known as the tyger, el tigre, or spotted tyger, extended to the Red River in eastern Texas and Louisiana.

However, in the spring of 1836 a jaguar was trapped at Cypress Bluff on the Tombigbee River in Alabama. Newspapers across the country picked up the story. The report in April 24, 1836, Connecticut Observer was typical. “An animal supposed to be a lynx, which has been prowling in the neighborhood of Cypress Bluff, on the Tombigbee river, has recently been taken in a snare, and carried to Mobile for exhibition. … The animal resembles somewhat the peculiar kind of leopard, which is found in the Lebanon mountains, near Jerusalem, in Asia – He is fed principally upon swallows and martins.” The Arabian Leopard which roamed the Lavant but is now endangered, and jaguar resembled each other. The jaguar is the only big cat in North America that would resemble an Arabian Leopard.

For many years people have reported seeing panthers in Mississippi. The previously mentioned records are full of reports of panthers here. They would be the Florida panther. Naturalists all agree that Mississippi is within the traditional range of the Florida panther. What is questioned, though, are the reports of people seeing black panthers here.

As to the black panther, I have my own idea. While deer hunting near Artesia around 1980, I watched as a pair of panthers crossed along the other side of a small field from where my deer blind was situated. It was late afternoon, and the light was fading, but I could not resist staying and watching the big cats. One was tawny-colored, and the other was brownish. As I watched them, the light started to fade and the brown one began to appear to be black. I later asked the person who was farming the place if he had ever seen them. He responded, “a couple of times over the last few months.” I never saw them again.

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