This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain

Notes

Notes This book is a significantly revised version of my doctoral dissertation in North American Studies for the University of Helsinki, Evolution of a Place. Small portions of the text have been previously published in my articles “Down by the Riverside” and “‘Home in the Big Forest.’ ” Chapter 1. Environmental History and the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain 1. Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 3–4. For an overview of the gargantuan change in the American landscape after the European colonization, see Zelinsky, “Landscapes,” 1289–95. 2. Among the many basins making up the Lower Mississippi Valley is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, which is actually more oval than deltoid in shape. The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is usually called “the Mississippi Delta” or simply “the Delta” by the region’s inhabitants. It must be noted, however, that the term “Mis257 258 Notes to Chapter One sissippi Delta” in physical geography refers to the true delta of the Mississippi River at its mouth in Louisiana. In this study, the term “Delta” is used interchangeably with “Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.” The channel of the Mississippi River, from Memphis to Vicksburg, forms the western boundary of the Yazoo-Mississippi floodplain. The eastern boundary is defined by a series of bluffs that begin just below Memphis and run south to Greenwood and thence southwesterly along the Yazoo River, which meets the Mississippi just above Vicksburg. The area is approximately two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, encompassing some seven thousand square miles of alluvial floodplain. For more information on the regional geography, see chapter 2. 3. Eldredge, Preliminary Report on the Forest Survey of the Bottom-Land Hardwood Unit in Mississippi, 2–5. 4. Cowdrey, This Land, This South, remains the only general work on the subject . Excellent smaller-scale studies include Silver, New Face on the Countryside; Kirby, Poquosin; Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”; Davis, Where There Are Mountains. 5. Brandfon, Cotton Kingdom of the New South; Cobb, Most Southern Place on Earth; Woods, Development Arrested; Willis, Forgotten Time; Otto, Final Frontiers. Brandfon’s and Willis’s books are based upon their doctoral dissertations . See Brandfon, “Planters of the New South”; Willis, “On the New South Frontier.” A highly recommendable, if somewhat dated, introduction to the Delta history is Frank E. Smith, Yazoo River. 6. While Fickle’s Mississippi Forests and Forestry is indispensable for the study of exploitation of the pine forests of southern and central Mississippi, it is rather cursory with its treatment of the state’s hardwood forests. Vileisis’s Discovering the Unknown Landscape provides an excellent overview on the subject on a national scale but obviously must omit many important locations. Harrison’s Levee Districts and Levee Building in Mississippi and Alluvial Empire remain the definitive monographs on their subject. See also his Flood Control in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and “Clearing Land in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.” For a summary of his argument regarding the Delta, consult Harrison and Mooney, Flood Control and Water Management in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. 7. The following discussion on methodology and historiography of environmental history is based upon Myllyntaus and Saikku, “Environmental History” 1–20; Myllyntaus, “Environment in Explaining History,” 141–59. See also Crosby , “Past and Present of Environmental History,” 1177–89; Hughes, “Whither Environmental History,” 1–3; John R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Notes to Chapter One 259 Culture of Environmental History,” 5–43; Richard White, “American Environmental History,” 297–335. 8. Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” 290–91. See also Haila, Vihreään aikaan, 7–17; Haila and Levins, Humanity and Nature, 182–83. 9. The roundtable panel in Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087–1147, remains probably the best introduction to the field. Articles include Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1087–1106; and “Seeing Beyond Culture ,” 1142–47; Crosby, “An Enthusiastic Second,” 1107–10; Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” 1111–16; Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History,” 1117–21; Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production ,” 1122–31; Pyne, “Firestick History,” 1132–41. See also Bailes, “Critical Issues in Environmental History,” 1–21. 10. Myllyntaus, “Environment in Explaining History,” 145–51. 11. Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” 289–307; Massa, “Ympäristöhistoria tutkimuskohteena,” 294–301; Myllyntaus, “Environment in Explaining History,” 152–55. See also Worster, “History as Natural History,” 1–19. 12. Christensen, “Landscape History and Ecological Change,” 116–24. On the use of historical sources in...