With the holidays and the approaching new year, many friends have had to decide between watching ball games or going hunting. The Golden Triangle area has a grand and centuries-old heritage of both.
While the hunting heritage is well-known, few people realize that almost 200 years ago one of America’s first professional ball teams was organized just across the Tombigbee River from Columbus.
Since before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Native Americans have been playing the game of stick ball. Though the game was played by tribes from present day Canada to the Gulf, it was the Choctaws from whom most early descriptions of the game have survived. To call it simply a game, though, is a misnomer, for its playing was not only a social and cultural event, but often a means of settling disputes between villages and even neighboring tribes.
In 1856, a Canadian who had witnessed stick ball games there reconfigured the game and named it lacrosse.
In 1829, Columbus resident Gideon Lincecum hit on a money-making scheme. He decided to raise two teams of Choctaw ball players and take them on a tour of the eastern United States, putting on exhibitions of ball games and traditional dances. Word was sent out across the Choctaw Nation, then still in its Mississippi homeland, that any ball players who wished to join the traveling teams should be at Okshush Spring (Oak Slush Creek about two miles west of downtown Columbus) by noon on Nov. 29. More than 400 ball players showed up. Lincecum only wanted 40 players and rigged a drawing so as to only get the 40 players that he wanted to travel with him. The two teams departed Columbus traveling up the Military Road, passing by what is now the site of Columbus’ new soccer complex.
The only exhibition game I have seen a reference to was possibly one in Huntsville, Alabama. It is not clear how far the travailing Choctaw teams made it. However, there was a reference by Lincecum to seeing Pushmataha’s grave, and as he is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., they may well have made it that far. The Choctaws were to be compensated for playing ball, so by today’s standards they were professional ball players — among the first, if not the first, professional ball players in America.
Two hundred years ago hunting in the Columbus area was also different than today. It often was more a matter of survival than a sport, and wild game was more plentiful and much more varied than now.
Two early residents who told of their hunting exploits were Peter Pitchlynn, who was born on the banks of the Noxubee River in 1806 and later became governor of the Choctaw Nation, and Gideon Lincecum, who in 1818 moved from Tuscaloosa to the Tombigbee at the present site of the Stennis Lock and Dam.
Lincecum recalled that in 1818 at what is now the intersection of Catfish Alley and Main Street in downtown Columbus, he killed a “big buck with a chair frame (antlers) on his head.” The deer fell at the base of a large pine tree, and after cutting the deer’s throat, Lincecum cleaned his knife by cutting into the tree with it. The Eagle Hotel was built at that location around 1821 and its sign post stood where the large pine had been. That later became the site of the Gilmer Hotel.
Two hundred years ago White Slough, on what is now The Island, was a favorite hunting ground of Choctaw Indians who called it “Shonk Colohenocoby” or “Crooked Cypress.” Its long association with Native American hunting was shown by the finding there, during the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, of a 2,000-year-old small spear point embedded in a buried cypress knee.
White Slough was also Lincecum’s favorite hunting grounds. He recalled that: “In the canebrake and all around the cypress swamp could be found more turkeys and deer, and some bear, coons, foxes, panthers and catamounts than at any place I ever lived.” He also found that during the winter the slough filled up with ducks and geese. Lincecum hunted both to provide food for his family and to obtain venison to smoke for shipment to markets in Mobile, Alabama.
During the 1820s, Peter Pitchlynn lived in a log house on the south end of a prairie that ran from west of the present-day Golden Triangle Regional Airport to a couple of miles south of Artesia. That prairie, by the early 1830s, was named Peter Pitchlynn’s Prairie.
In an 1870 interview in the Atlantic Monthly he recounted how he enjoyed bear hunting. That would have been in Catalpa Creek bottom which bordered the prairie on the west.
Gideon Lincecum also enjoyed bear hunting and described the unusual way they were hunted and killed. Lincecum said many people would hunt bears armed only with a knife. In the early 1800s, the forest around Columbus were home to many packs of wolves, the natural enemy of the bear. Hunters, led by a pack of dogs, would pursue a bear. The bear would ignore the human hunters to attack the dogs, associating them with wolves, their natural enemy. That enabled the hunters to jump on the bear and kill it with a knife. The bear would associate the knife wounds with dog bites becoming even more preoccupied with the dogs.
Lincecum told how the most dangerous aspect of the hunt was not the bear. It was a hunter armed with a gun who might get excited and accidentally shoot another hunter who was on a bear with a knife.
He mentioned that he always hunted with packs of American dogs which he described as being “many-colored, crop-eared, bob-tailed” dogs. He also described an interesting “…little red-mouthed native dog, with yellow eyes and bushy tail — a distinct race of indigenous dogs.”
We have a grand heritage of both hunting and ball games, though both are quite different today than they were 200 years ago.
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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