Hidden History of the Mississippi Sound

By Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett

Inside are thirteen little-known tales from the Gulf Coast from Lake Borgne to Mobile.

Sail into the Mississippi Sound with Bienville, the Frenchman covered in serpentine tattoos. Meet the heroes of the Sound: fearless Father LeDuc, who faced down Yankee pillagers; the wild woman of Horn Island, who could shoot as well as any man; and Ray Nosaka, who fed his body to the dogs of war, all in service of his country. Glimpse a school of the Sound's own patron fish, the striped mullet, Biloxi's bacon. But don't get too comfortable on the beach - a hurricane is always on the horizon. Join authors Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett on this journey into the hidden history of the Mississippi Sound.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439667217

Josh Foreman

Ryan Starrett was birthed and reared in Jackson, Mississippi. After receiving degrees from the University of Dallas, Adams State University and Spring Hill College, as well as spending a ten-year hiatus in Texas, he returned home to continue his teaching career. He lives in Madison with his wife, Jackie, and two children, Joseph Padraic and Penelope Rose. Josh Foreman was born and raised in the Jackson Metro Area. He is a sixth-generation Mississippian and an eleventh-generation southerner. He lived, taught and wrote in South Korea from 2005 to 2014. He holds degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with his wife, Melissa, and his two children, Keeland and Genevieve.

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CONTACT CRISIS

Europe Comes to the Mississippians

It was an angel of deliverance or a grim specter: a canoe trailing the Narváez party as it entered the Mississippi Sound in the fall of 1528. The canoe wouldn’t come close enough for the men aboard the five rafts to see who was in it. It just waited, watched, then left.

The 240-odd men were close to death, having survived half a year of exploring a Florida that seemed to fight them like a body fighting an infection. Fifty or so of their party hadn’t made it. They’d had enough of Florida. For the past month, they’d been floating on crude rafts in the Gulf of Mexico, hoping to make their way west to the Rio Grande. They had run out of food and water, and they expected to die.¹

Soon after the ghostly canoe shadowed the men, they made landfall at a small island, perhaps Petit Bois or Horn, two barrier islands surrounding the sound. They searched for fresh water but found none. A storm hit, and the men hunkered down for six days. They grew so thirsty that some drank seawater. Men began to die.

They thought of the canoe. With nothing to lose, they set out in the direction they’d last seen it traveling, not knowing whether they’d find land or their deaths. They sailed for about ten miles. Then they spotted it—an Indian village on the shore. They realized God had rescued them in the hour of greatest distress.² Would this be a quick and violent end to their suffering, or salvation? The Indians saw them and met them at sea with canoes. The Indians guided them back to their village, where the men saw something more precious than gold: jars of fresh water and plenty of cooked fish.

The men—mostly Spaniards with some other Europeans and Africans mixed in—had made landfall on the Gulf Coast somewhere between Pascagoula and Mobile. The Indians who greeted them there were most likely members of the Pensacola people, a subgroup of the Mississippian Culture that had spread across the South and Midwest at the time of first European contact. Their meeting represents the first recorded time Indians had met Europeans along the shores of the Mississippi Sound.³

Among the Spanish that day was a man named Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. It is because of him that we know such vivid details of the expedition’s experiences on the Gulf Coast. Cabeza de Vaca had been the treasurer for the voyage, which had become more a fight for survival than an expedition. As more and more of his Spanish compatriots died off in the New World, he survived—for eight years. After living in the New World among natives for those years and crossing the North American continent on foot, he finally made it back to Spanish-controlled Mexico and wrote down his tale.

Remains of the Party of Narvaez, by John William Orr, 1858. Library of Congress.

The Spanish expedition was being led that day at the sound by a man named Pánfilo de Narváez, tall and blonde-bearded with a reputation for rashness, ego and indifference to the suffering of others. Those who knew him described a man who would sit on a horse, statuesque, and watch a group of Indians being massacred, who sought to keep all spoils of conquest for himself, and who kept a violent rivalry with fellow conquistador Hernán Cortés. It was Narváez who had first decided to leave the safety of his ships and head inland into Florida near Tampa Bay.⁴

On shore with the Indians, Cabeza de Vaca and his compatriots partook of the fresh water and fish that the Pensacolas provided. The Pensacolas were tall and well built⁵ and didn’t carry bows or arrows—a relief to Narváez and his men for sure. They’d been harried by native archers as they made their way through Florida. Some of the Spaniards who were particularly ill lay on the beach. Others, including Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca, walked with the chief of the local Pensacolas to his hut.

Inside the hut, the Spaniards feasted on fish. They gave a bit of the maize they’d saved to the chief, who wore a fine robe of marten-ermine skin that gave off a strong odor of amber and musk.⁶ Everything seemed to be going OK—and then the sun set.

Shortly after sunset, the Pensacolas attacked Narváez and his men, storming into the hut where the chief and the Spanish leaders sat. The Spanish tried to hold the chief as a shield against attack, but he slipped away, leaving them gripping his fine robe. Narváez was seriously wounded by a stone to the face. The Spanish rushed back to their rafts, leaving behind a defense force of fifty men to fight against the Pensacolas through the night. Cabeza de Vaca was thankful they didn’t have many bows and arrows—otherwise the attack might have been much deadlier.

The Spanish who had stayed behind succeeded in driving the attackers away. The party spent the next day burning some thirty Indian canoes as a means to stay warm as a cold storm blew through. Then they left, sailing for three days, once again desperately in need of fresh water.

The episode along the shores of the sound was described in brief detail by Cabeza de Vaca, and over the years, much more attention has been paid by scholars to the Narváez expedition’s experiences in Florida and Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences in Texas. But the Narváez expedition’s contact with the Pensacolas and other southern Mississippian tribes marked an apocalyptic milestone in those tribes’ stories. Cabeza de Vaca described the people living there in 1528; another European account of them did not appear for 158 years, when a Spanish friar named Juan Mercado, living in a mission on the Chattahoochee River, described the political states of some Gulf Coast Indian tribes.⁷

In those intervening 158 years, the societies that lived along the Gulf Coast changed dramatically.

People had been living along the Mississippi Sound for some 11,500 years before Europeans showed up. Over the millennia, societies developed from small groups. People made complex pottery, built circular houses and ate a diet of edible plants, whitetail deer, fish and shellfish. They used tools made of bone, stone, wood, rope and shell—harpoons, hooks, nets and awls.⁸

The varied societies that lived along the Gulf Coast (and in much of the South and Midwest) in the centuries prior to European contact are collectively referred to by anthropologists as the Mississippian Culture. The Mississippian Culture was distinguished by certain advancements in technology: the use of the bow and arrow, the cultivation of maize as a staple food and new techniques for making ceramics.⁹

Another distinguishing characteristic of the Mississippian Culture was its tendency to build mounds, the greatest of which were constructed at the Cahokia Mounds site near St. Louis, Missouri. At Cahokia Mounds, one flat-topped mound rises ten stories and contains twenty-two million cubic feet of soil.¹⁰ The second-largest Mississippian mound site is at Moundville, near present-day Tuscaloosa, Alabama, about 190 miles from the Mississippi Sound.¹¹

Mississippian society was hierarchical and has often been described as a series of chiefdoms by anthropologists, with the largest sites wielding the most influence in the region. The mounds characteristic of Mississippian societies served different functions—sometimes they were built for ritual purposes or to inter the dead—but the giant, flat-topped mounds such as those found at Cahokia and Moundville served as governing seats for the powerful. Chiefs ruled from the elite space of the tops of the mounds, and their subjects lived clustered (at suitably lower elevation) around the bases of the mounds in towns protected, in some cases, by palisades and moats.¹²

High-status people in the Mississippian world enjoyed not only the best real estate but also more food and nicer clothes than everyone else. Elites might have worn bearskin robes or feather cloaks (or marten-ermine-skin cloaks, as in the case of the chief encountered by the Narváez expedition). They received food from their lessers—stores of maize, fish and the best cuts of deer. Feasting was another feature of the culture. Elites collected surpluses from subordinates but hosted feasts from time to time, sharing the surpluses back.¹³

Status was central to Mississippian society, and status was reflected in the way people were buried. Many Mississippian sites feature cemeteries where high-status men and women are buried with exotic objects such as copper axes (found at Moundville). Burials suggest that women could wield similar levels of status as men.¹⁴

The major cultural center closest to the Mississippi Sound was probably the Bottle Creek mound complex, north of Mobile Bay on the Tensaw River. The Mississippian societies in the Mississippi Sound region did not build such grand mounds as those at Cahokia or Bottle Creek, though they did build some. A more common feature of the Mississippian Culture on the coast was the many oyster- and clam-shell middens (heaps of discarded shell) they left behind, some of which have persisted to the present day. The largest Mississippian settlement along the Mississippi Sound was at Deer Island, just south of Biloxi. To give an idea of the number of people living there in the centuries before European contact and the amount of oysters they ate, the shell middens on Deer Island are around three feet thick.¹⁵

The sound region was not a heavily populated one prior to European contact. The two settlement areas where most people lived along the sound were the Pascagoula River area in the east and the Pearl River area in the west. Scientists have speculated that the threat of hurricanes and flooding in the plains between the Pearl and Pascagoula Rivers prevented large groups from settling on those plains.¹⁶

Instead, the marshes and plains on the north side of the sound were foraging grounds. Some evidence suggests that Choctaws from farther north journeyed to the coast at certain times of year to gather seafood. The Choctaws were an agricultural people and scheduled their ranging around the planting and harvesting of crops. Spring, summer and fall provided time to go afield and gather food. Spring, in particular, was the season of oysters and marsh clams, and visitors to the sound would avoid hurricanes and the oppressive heat at that time as well.

Bay St. Louis was particularly rich in marsh clams, and several shell middens lie near the bay where the Jourdan and Wolf Rivers empty. Those middens suggest that the meat of the clams was being smoked for preservation.¹⁷ In addition to consuming large amounts of oysters and marsh clams, Mississippians also heavily preyed upon alligators, turtles and large fish like gar and drums.¹⁸

People living near the sound also found their niche in local trade networks using resources from the sea. They strengthened their pottery by adding crushed shell to clay before firing. They made salt using broad, flat salt pans, and they fashioned beads from marine shells.¹⁹ They used their trade goods to obtain goods from societies farther north; the stone hoe, fashioned from chert in Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee, was the most commonly traded item at the time.²⁰

Although 170 years had passed since the Narváez expedition, the Mississippi Sound was still an unknown region to Europeans in 1698, when Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, bane of the English and the First Great Canadian, was tasked with exploring the area for France. Robert de La Salle, another French explorer, had died in Texas more than a decade before while searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River. D’Iberville, who had known La Salle personally, was tasked with finding the mouth of the river, charting the depth of the northern Gulf and selecting a site for a French colony.²¹

D’Iberville traveled along the Gulf Coast in 1699, passing a fresh but ragged Spanish settlement at Pensacola and moving on to Dauphin Island, where he found a mass of bones he thought might be the remains of the Narváez expedition (they weren’t), and on to the shores of the Mississippi Sound.²²

When d’Iberville got there, he found a welcome sight: game animals, and plenty of them. He found not only the whitetail deer that were noted centuries later by anthropologists studying the diets of the precontact Indians but also an animal that wasn’t mentioned as a traditional food in those anthropologists’ reports: boeufs sauvages, or bison.²³

All along the northern Gulf Coast, d’Iberville saw and hunted bison. And the Indians he encountered there were making use of the animals, too. In south Louisiana, d’Iberville saw groups of bison grazing in fields and standing on the banks of the Mississippi River. He found Indians using bison bones as plows and stockpiling bundles of bison furs. At Biloxi, he noted they were abundant. At Pascagoula, Indians ate bison meat and used bison-horn spoons. Bison were so plentiful around Lake Ponchartrain that in 1712 a hunting party killed fifteen one day and eight the next. Reports from other explorers in the area in the late 1600s and early 1700s note, again and again, that bison abounded.

But, when Cabeza de Vaca had tramped through Florida 170 years before, he never mentioned any bison (until he reached west Texas, that is). De Soto, who traveled overland through the Southeast for four years in the 1530s and 1540s, similarly made no mention of any bison. What de Soto did find when he traveled through the lands of the Mississippians were lots and lots of people. But by the time La Salle explored some of