Next Friday there will be a Chickasaw Indian Heritage Festival in Tupelo. That event provides the perfect backdrop for an interesting ancient Chickasaw legend. It is the legend of Tibbee Lake, which is between Columbus and West Point. It is a story I wrote about last year but about which another dimension has been added. It is the 1830s story of Anny McGee who may have been a witch.
The Mississippi prairies and forest north of Tibbee Creek are the homeland of the Chickasaw Indian Nation. As with all ancient peoples and nations, their heritage includes special sacred sites and stories. What is one of the oldest of these sites to have survived is Tibbee Lake.
The story’s beginning is one I told last year. A couple of miles south of West Point on a gravel road is Tibbee Lake. Although it is near the creek, for which it is named, it appears to be an oxbow remnant of a prehistoric stream once even larger than the Tombigbee River.
The story may go back almost a thousand years. It tells of how in the distant past a Chickasaw family once camped by a fallen tree in Tibbee Swamp. In the early morning the mother and father departed to search for game or other food while leaving their young son and daughter at the camp site. Upon returning in the afternoon, the parents were horrified to find the ground around their camp site had caved in, forming a huge lake. There where the lake covered the fallen tree and the place where their children had been left were two huge serpents swimming together. In fear of the cataclysm that had apparently turned their children into serpents, the horrified parents fled and the lake was “shunned” from that day on.
The story may have been orally passed down from prehistory by the Chickasaw until finally written down in 1931. In excavations at the Moundville site near Tuscaloosa, Indian pottery vessels dating back to as early as A.D. 1200 have been found. One of the designs found on several vessels was that of a horned serpent such as the Chickasaw children were said to have been turned into.
According to Brad Lieb, tribal archaeologist with the Chickasaw Nation, “The story that has passed down to us is merely a fragment of a rich and living mythology that native peoples developed and maintained to explain their landscape, teach their cultural morals and values, and to pass along traditional spiritual knowledge.”
In southeastern U.S. Native American mythology, deep water provided a portal to the underworld. These portals were places of not only great power but also great danger, and within them would be found supernatural creatures such as large serpents. Shamans could use those portals to enter the other realm to obtain spiritual knowledge or exotic materials with medical or spiritual properties. They could then return to this world and use their knowledge and newly obtained materials to help heal and spiritually guide their people.
Prior to the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, high water would create a large whirlpool and the appearance of just such a portal at the mouth of Tibbee Creek. Tibbee Lake’s proximity to the whirlpool, its strange appearance and unusual depth for an oxbow would have played into the ancient mythology. The legend of Tibbee Lake thus may well be a surviving form of the ancient serpent tradition and the danger of its being a portal to the underworld.
Lieb recently provided the additional information on the Tibbee Lake story. Prior to the removal of the Chickasaws, in the mid 1830s, Oklahoma records indicate that a Chickasaw by the name of Anny McGee lived between Tibbee Lake and the present-day location of U.S. Highway 45 Alternate.
What makes Anny so interesting is that she was over 21, unmarried, and living alone in an isolated location near a sacred lake. That has all of the implications of Anny being a witch. Chickasaws called witches “aliktche,” and they believed witches were “shape-shifters” who could assume the form of different animals. That power was stronger at night, and the owl and bear were the animal forms usually taken.
Witches were believed to be able to cast spells from a distance using a voodoo-like ritual. These spells could make people sick and require another “doctor” to cure them. It was said that some doctors could “tell which witch had put it on a person.” By 1840, Anny had moved to the new western Indian Territory and appeared to have disappeared from recorded history.
Though Anny is long gone and Tibbee Lake is now a private hunting and fishing club, it is still a place that has a haunting air about it as you drive by. Lieb has referred to Tibbee Lake as “one of very few special places that still exist, essentially unchanged, from the deep time of pre-contact Native American oral history.”
For anyone interested in Mississippi history and especially the story of the Chickasaw People, the Chickasaw Inkana Foundation will host a Chickasaw Celebration at Fairpark at the Tupelo City Hall from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday. There will be cultural demonstrations from the Chickasaw Nation displaying traditional crafts, language, music, dancing, storytelling, cooking and stickball.
There will also be scholarly programs on Chickasaw history and culture in the Tupelo City Council Chamber. For additional information visit the Inkana Foundation website: http://www.inkana.org/
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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