Because I had just finished drafting a chapter on John James Audubon’s 1820-21 Mississippi River Journal, I wanted to retrace parts of his itinerary. He floated down the great river on a flatboat, shooting game for the crew and collecting and drawing birds on a three-month float from Cincinnati to New Orleans. We were driving an air-conditioned van, with fast food handy to keep us going for the day and a half we meandered from Hernando to Baton Rouge. We went by land, criss-crossing the river from site to site. Not quite the same as Audubon’s journey almost 200 hundred years earlier. After leaving the Delta Blues Museum, our next stop took us over to Arkansas, the Arkansas Post where Audubon got off the river for a night to stay at the tavern, sharing a room with five other men, his backside peeking out from the rude covers of his bed. The Post, situated at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers was first established as a trading post by the French in 1686, ceded to the Spanish in 1763, reclaimed by the French and then sold to the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. An important location in the river travel, trade routes, and fur trade, it was a gateway to the West via the Arkansas River and to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi. When Audubon visited in 1820, it was already in shambles even though it became for a short time the capital of the new state of Arkansas. During the Civil War it was so heavily bombarded by the Union forces that it never recovered. Today nothing of the town or fort remains; concrete sidewalks mark the streets of the town. The course of the river has also changed, burying the shoreline that Audubon would have seen, but making for a pleasant spot for a stroll and a picnic. To get here we had to go north from Clarksdale to Helena to cross over the Mississippi and then south in Arkansas to the Post, an out-of-the way location today when once it had had such a prominent location. Today, you have to want to go there. The park ranger was so glad to see us that she chatted with us about the Post, its history, and the local alligator. She asked where we were from—Texas—and she told us she was from Temple, Texas, making some kind of connection there at that small post.
Next stop, Winterville Indian Mounds in Mississippi. That meant another crossing of the river, this time at Greenville on a new cable-stayed bridge. The mounds were not part of Audubon’s trip, though he did meet various groups of Indians on and along the Mississippi, trading for food with them. The mounds, among the largest in Mississippi, were used for sacred ceremonials from AD 1000 to 1450. Today, visitors can view several grassed humps of land and speculate about the lives of the Natives who populated the area and then disappeared. We looked at the small museum, the displays of arrowheads, tools, and pottery, and then walked about the grounds a bit before getting back in the car. What happened to these and the other mound builders who lived along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys is a mystery, but at one time they dominated the region, leaving behind traces of their past civilization.
The GPS system routed us through Arkansas to go to Natchez, Mississippi, where we would spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express, so another crossing of the Mississippi River. Traveling south through Arkansas, we noticed a sign for a Japanese Internment Museum, so we stopped there. There is only a small museum, housed in a part of the old train depot. There are no remains of the two camps in southeast Arkansas which held 5,000 and 8,000 Japanese Americans, just the museum and an informational video. The woman working at the museum, an older woman with crevasses of wrinkles, red lipstick, what must be a blond wig styled to flip up at shoulder length, wearing camo-colored pants with a red and white rhinestone flower appliquéd at the pocket, greeted us and chatted so much that she forgot to take our admissions fee. She told how when she was a child she had no idea, nor apparently did her friends, that there was an internment camp in the region. She also made the point that the camps had guards with guns, not to keep the Japanese safe but to protect against the Japanese residents of the camp. It seems that a theme for today’s outings has a racial tone, Japanese, Native American, Black Americans, as part of the South and the treatment of them that has not been very positive, to say the least. Though we don’t know what happened to the mound builders, we do know about the Native Americans who were forced off their lands in the Trail of Tears, some 200 drowning near Arkansas Post. From the park ranger at Arkansas Post, we also learned about the massacre of about 300 African American Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee on April 12, 1864 directed or condoned by General Bedford Forrest, perhaps in retaliation for Confederate losses at the Post. Sad stories in our nation’s history.
