Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 - Driving the Natchez Trail to Tishomingo State Park.

After breakfast but before we continued our drive north, we hiked up the Little Mountain Trail from our campground to the top of a nearby hill. It was only 603 feet high, but even at that it was a couple of hundred feet taller than the surrounding terrain and offered a nice view out over the woods. Although some parts of the parkway have cultivated fields on both sides of the road, this was one of the areas that had broad stretches of forests all around, which made for a pleasant view. The walk was only about 3/4 of a mile long, but it had a decent climb up to the overlook plus the plaques for a nature trail along the way, so it took us an hour more or less to finish it and start our drive for the day.

We once again dawdled along and stopped at many of the points of interest along the parkway. We walked yet another section of the old Natchez Trace trail and stopped to see mounds at two different areas that represented earlier stages of the mound builder Indian culture. The Bynum Mounds were two small cone shaped hills at the edge of a clearing in the forest. Those mounds had been built about 1800 years back just outside the village and served as a kind of cemetery. Those Indians lived in a village, raised corn, and supplemented that diet with hunting and gathering, so they were on the transitional edge from a pure hunter-gatherer life style to the later mound builders who had lived in permanent villages and constructed the huge Emerald mound.

The complex of 8 mounds at the Pharr Mounds site was constructed somewhere between 100 BC and 300 AD Some of the mounds served as places of cremation and burial, which was similar to the Bynum mounds, but excavations of others yielded somewhat different types of contents. The description of the lifestyle was also more of a pure hunter-gatherer culture with the local villages periodically inhabited as the seasonal food supplies waxed and waned. Contents such as sea shells indicated that the mound builders had trade networks that extended as far as the Atlantic Coast on the East and the Gulf Coast on the South, so it was quite a civilization for the time.

The Chickasaw Village Site, on the other hand, represented the last flowering of Indian culture in that area prior to Andrew Jackson's ethnic cleansing campaign that involved forcible relocation of all Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi. The Chickasaw were a feisty tribe, apparently, who had fought off Hernando Desoto when he demanded slaves from them while wintering there in the 1540s. Given the typical ethics and conduct of Spanish Conquistadors like Desoto, I think they would have been justified in wiping out that expedition, but they didn't and he lived to tell the tale and claim all the land for Spain, worse luck.

A couple of centuries later in 1736, the Chickasaw also wiped out a two-pronged French military expedition designed to exterminate them. They first defeated the force coming south from Illinois and killed its commander, then they badly defeated the second force of French military and Choctaws coming up from the south. It seemed to me that the French were attempting genocide and that they deserved everything they got. I would have liked to know a little more about the Chickasaw commander(s) and how they planned their defense against those attacks, but the roadside plaques were silent on those details. The plaques at the village did describe how the circular winter houses of the Chickasaw were designed with a curving entrance around the house's perimeter, in part for more effective defense when attacked, so it was clear that tribe really did prepare for fighting even in the smallest details.

A path starting at the perimeter of the village had plaques that explored different aspects of the Chickasaw culture. In particular the plaques explained about different plants and their uses in the lives of the Chickasaw.

Continuing on from the Chickasaw village site, we stopped for lunch a few miles down the road in Tupelo. Driving off the parkway after several days of relaxed, 50 miles per hour cruising along with almost no traffic and no stop signs or stoplights for hundreds of miles was quite a jolt to the sensibilities, at least for me. As soon as we were off the parkway I was immediately enmeshed in a whirl of trucks and car traffic all trying to go 70 miles per hour around me, plus a confusing mélange of signs, stoplights, and complicated interchanges. I was more than bewitched, bothered, and bewildered; I felt hassled, harried, and hounded until I could finally get the rig parked in the back 40 acres of a Kroger store's parking lot where I found 6 empty spaces in a row. I calmed down during lunch at a Chick-Filet, after which we visited the Kroger to purchase some groceries. To celebrate Valentine's Day (better late than never!), I bought Monika a miniature rose plant and some chocolate. Fortunately when we departed I could take a side road straight back to the parkway without having to once again run the gauntlet of traffic.

We returned to the parkway near the main Visitor Center, which had a lot of very nicely done exhibits plus short video clips about themes such as the Natchez Trace parkway's construction, history, Indian tribes, scenic vistas, economic heyday, and so forth. I also found a couple of CDs of 19th Century frontier music plus the associated songbooks that contained the sheet music and lyrics. For someone like me who wants to sing and play the songs, finding the CDs and corresponding songbooks is a real bonanza, so despite the expense I bought them all. Now if I had only been able to find something similar to that in west Texas and down in Cajun country!

Our final walk for the day was at Donivan Slough, a short nature trail right beside the parkway. This trail was quite different from the cypress swamp that we had visited further south because the slough was already mostly filled in and only had standing water for a brief part of the year. A few cypress trees were still hanging on, of course, but the succession to trees that liked low lying moist areas (but not complete swamp) was well underway. Seeing the slough in the process of changing into a normal deciduous forest kind of completed our earlier view of the cypress and tupelo swamp; those ecological changes take place over centuries, so seeing the different stages at least helps us short lived humans get a grasp on those gradual processes.

The campground we chose for the evening, Tishomingo State Park, was just another half an hour up the parkway. I was glad to back the trailer into a lakeside site and then hook it up to water and electric service. We immediately plugged in things that needed to be charged, of course, but as soon as that was done we both took off for the hot showers right across the road from our campsite. Having the 120 volt AC also let us use the computers as much as we wanted to that evening without worrying about running out of battery charge, which was a relief. After sunset I was tired enough to hit the sack, but Monika still had enough energy to go outside and watch the moon rise over the lake.