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Hickman
- University of Washington Press
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HICKMAN "Life must be a seeking for there is nothing to be found" -Anon. THE MIS SIS SIP P I R I V E R, a willful thing of nature, comes down about 25 miles from its junction with the Ohio below Cairo at Byrd's Point before it ignores the forgotten towns of Columbus and Hickman, Kentucky, on its passage to the Gulf of Mexico. The river made those places on the bluffs of southwestern Kentucky, a few miles north of the Tennessee line, just as the railroads, and later highways, broke them and left them nearly abandoned relics of steamboat America. Columbus, "the Gibraltar of the Confederacy" in 1861, is recognized from the rolling Kentucky landscape by a few houses built close together, a tertiary highway junction, and a nondescript convenience store with a Sinclair gas pump. Hickman, about nine miles south, still stands as constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, except that it is mostly vacant, easy to visualize as the victim of a late twentieth-century invention, the neutron bomb. "A pretty town perched on a handsome hill," the riverboat pilot Mark Twain wrote of Hickman in his memoir Life on the Mississippi . A frequent visitor, Twain stayed at the LaClede Hotel, whose entrance was framed like a horseshoe-good luck for guests? These included, as the Chamber of Commerce boasts, celebrities: President William Howard Taft, Charles Lindbergh, and George "Machine Gun" Kelly. Lindbergh's airplane was stuck in a nearby HICKMAN /191 Mississippi mud flat. Kelly, a gangster on the fly, was a pal of the local police chief, no stickler for law enforcement propriety. All of this I learned recently when, to borrow from the Prophet Isaiah, I decided to report neither war nor politics any more, but instead go back and look at where I had come from and review my heritage, aiming to sort fact from myth, and to reflect on my profession . This was nearly half a century after I left. Unlike Columbus, there remain in Hickman alongside the bluffs above its two main streets, handsome old houses-near mansions -some of these occupied by descendants of the settlers of the 1840S and well kept. Rich from the produce of the adjacent land, tobacco being the most lucrative crop in the town's early days, and from commerce on the docks, cotton, corn, and molasses from West Tennessee and Kentucky, the settlers built well and high to avoid the infrequent but devastating intrusions of the Mississippi into the town's commercial district, even to the lobby of the LaClede. An early memory from the great flood of 1937 was the sight of the refugees from the river bottoms, young ones shoeless and unwashed , housed in National Guard army tents, probably a step up in comfort from their riverside shanties. Will Alexander Percy, the poet-writer from Greenville, Mississippi, downriver, described such river folk as Anglo-Saxon white trash, lazy, dull-witted, and of a lower class than the black serfs on his plantation. I only saw them as people with the same faces of fright and despair as I would come to see in refugees in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. A local newspaper ran a picture of a fellow rowing his small boat through the horseshoe into the lobby of the LaClede. Some luck. The river had reached over Hickman's seawall, a willful beast. It gave and it took. For a long while, almost from the purchase of the fertile territory ofwestern Kentucky and Tennessee in 18I 8 from the Chickasaw Indians, the river was a most generous giver-to the whole nation as well as Columbus and Hickman. The national government paid $300,000 for this black earth, I'd argue the richest land west of the Volga and north of the Mississippi Delta. The sale was negotiated by Tennessee's Andrew Jackson, hero of the Creek War and the War [3.235.139.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:35 GMT) I92 / HICKMAN of I8I2, and Kentucky's Isaac Shelby, whose victory and the subsequent massacre of British loyalists at Kings Mountain in I780 sent Cornwallis running for Yorktown and surrender. Considering the military skills of Jackson and Shelby, "the Purchase" as it came to be called, was surely driven as much by the threat of arms as by the federal treasury. It's now forgotten, even by those whose ancestors came to inhabit and farm. Settlers rushed into this new American frontier, most of...