Wade County, Choctaw Nation

Transcription

On tonight's Mississippi Roads, sometimes a sunken treasure doesn't always have to involve pirates and hidden chests of gold. Plus, a century and a half ago, a nation stood divided, and one man fought to bring that nation back together as a whole. And even though there are newer options, one Mississippi man continues to find success making muskets. Plus a farm in Lumberton provides really fresh milk and ice cream. And finally a group of people keep alive a time-honored tradition of training horses for harness racing. Support for the Arts segment of Mississippi Roads comes from the Mississippi Arts Commission whose mission is to be a catalyst for the Arts and creativity in Mississippi. Information available at www.arts.ms.gov. Mississippi Roads is made possible in part by the generous support of viewers like you. Thank you! ♪ Down Mississippi Roads... ♪ ♪ Mississippi Roads ♪ Welcome back to Mississippi Roads. I'm your host, Walt Grayson. Perhaps one of the best perks about living in the south, and in Mississippi in particular, is you can go almost anywhere and put your hands on something really historic. And we really mean "put your hands on it." Which is what brings us here today to the USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum. The boat was commissioned in January of 1862 to serve in the Civil War. It only made it to December of that year before it sank to the bottom of the Yazoo river, destined to spend nearly a century in its watery grave before explorers figured out where it was buried in the river and brought it back up for us to look at and learn about today. The Mississippi River runs from the tip of the state down to where it meets Louisiana, before finally emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Its waters are swift and muddy, and that also applies to the Yazoo River that feeds it, the river in which the Cairo was buried. Its story is an interesting one, which is why so many people have worked so hard restoring the boat to the condition it's in today. One that tourists can visit and walk through and see a true piece of history up close. Touch it. Feel its size and try to imagine what life on a ship like this must have been like. To say that the Civil War changed the South is perhaps one of the biggest understatements you can make. The war changed the political and physical landscape so much so that you can still go out in plowed fields in Mississippi and find shell fragments to this very day. As a matter of fact, one of the most significant events that shaped the outcome of the war happened right here in Mississippi 150 years ago. President Lincoln had called Vicksburg the key. Whoever would emerge as the victor in the War Between the States would have to have that key in their pocket. And consequently, the fall of Vicksburg was the beginning of the end of that war. April 30th, 1863, General U.S. Grant set out from Louisiana and landed across the Mississippi River in the now extinct village of Bruinsburg, Mississippi, with the goal in mind of getting that key. Coming up behind Vicksburg and taking it from the land side. General Sherman told Grant that he was voluntarily putting himself in a vulnerable position- in enemy territory with no established supply line- that the opposing army would gladly maneuver a year to put him in. The next day, after skirmishes all along the way from the Mississippi River to it, Grant had his first major battle at Port Gibson. Many of the old buildings in the town were here when the Yankees marched through. City Hall. The Claiborne County Courthouse. Most of the churches on Church Street. The buildings have roots that go way back before the Civil War. For instance, St. Joseph's Catholic Church's diocese is named for Resin Bowie. Resin Bowie is Jim Bowie, of Bowie Knife fame's brother. Resin supplied most of the funds to build the church so his wife would quit pestering their friends, including Jewish friends, for contributions to build it. And the Presbyterian Church's iconic steeple with the hand pointing toward heaven was here. And the fact that these structures survived the war has led the town to adopt something General Grant is supposed to have said as their town slogan: "Too beautiful to burn." This may be the only Southern town to have a Union General's quote as their town slogan. But I'd like to think that he did say that because look at Port Gibson now. It's beautiful. And I would assume it was beautiful then and he probably said those words. Too beautiful to burn. Grayson: From Port Gibson, Grant's next big battle was at Raymond. After the battle, the Raymond Courthouse and St. Marks Episcopal Church were pressed into use as field hospitals. They say the marks on the tables in the courtroom upstairs at the courthouse are from Civil War amputations. And there are still dim bloodstains in the floorboards at St. Mark's Church. In the city of Jackson today, Battlefield Park is about the most conspicuous leftover of the Civil War. Man: The Battlefield Park was part of the 1863 siege of Jackson. There are earthworks there at Battlefield Park. They are very low trenches. But they're misidentified there as Confederate trenches. They're not. And there are a couple of artillery pieces located there. They are pointing in the wrong direction. And they're not Civil War guns either. They're from the Spanish-American War. Other than that everything is completely correct at Battlefield Park. Grayson: One battle in particular that was most decisive in determining the outcome of the Vicksburg Campaign, perhaps the pivotal battle, was fought along Bakers Creek between Bolton and Edwards in Hinds County: The Battle of Champion Hill. There were over 7,000 casualties, a little less than 3,000 for the north and a little more than 4,000 for the South. (violin music playing) The next day after Champion Hill at the Battle of the Big Black River, the South made a valiant, but hopeless last stand. Completely routed by the North, fully half of the defenders left behind at the Big Black River never made it back to Vicksburg, Many were taken captive or killed. A bunch of them drowned while trying to swim to safety across the Big Black. ♪♪ The next day Grant tried to storm Vicksburg. And he tried once more after that. And the Confederate lines held as all had predicted from Jefferson Davis on down, making them think Vicksburg could never be taken. And by battle, it couldn't. But on the other hand, by siege, or as Grant said it by our-camping the enemy, sitting and waiting and lobbing shells into the town from the river and from the land side, 24-7. (cannon and gun fire) After the Confederate Soldiers retreated from the Battle of the Big Black River into Vicksburg, the town became a city whose conditions were poor to start with and deteriorated rapidly for 47 days. To escape the constant shelling from the Union lines on the land side and the Union Fleet on the Mississippi River, Vicksburg went underground, with its population digging caves in the hillsides and living in them until the end of the siege. Although General Pemberton, a northerner by birth, feared public condemnation if he surrendered the city, he had no choice but to hand over Vicksburg to the Union Army. The irony of it was that Vicksburg at the beginning of the war was a Union town. Very pro Union. I tell people we were pro Union until they shot at us. That will change your mind a lot of times and it did. Grayson: The loss of Vicksburg, coupled with the loss of Port Hudson five days later, and the horrific loss by the Confederates at Gettysburg all in the same period of time, took away any hopes of the South of ever winning the war, although the war went on for two more years. It was just a strange coincidence of history that Vicksburg and Gettysburg came to a conclusion at exactly the same time. As Ed Barras and Parker Hills said in their book, Receding Tide, they tied those two battles together and basically framed it as the high point of the Confederacy, if you will. And then of course the war lasted two full years after that, but... Grayson: There are 17,000 Union Soldiers buried in the National Cemetery at Vicksburg, more than any other cemetery in the nation. Fully 13,000 of them are unknown, over 7,000 of them are Black Union Troops. Confederate dead from the siege are buried in the Soldier's Rest section of Vicksburg's Cedar Hills Cemetery. About 5,000 soldiers are buried here. All of these dead, and so many more across half the country made history, of course. And with the surrender of the South at the end of the war, several things happened that still affect us today. First of all, we undisputedly became the UNITED States, indivisible. And then, with the Emancipation Proclamation, and the subsequent passage of the 13th Amendment, slavery was abolished in the United States. The home of the brave became the land of the really free. And the beginning of the end of the Civil War is preserved right here in Vicksburg. The Cairo Museum is on the west end of the Vicksburg National Military Park. It's just right down the road from Fort Hill, over here. Fort Hill is one of those high bluffs. Visitors can get on top of that thing and see for miles over across the River into Louisiana. Plus you can get a good idea of where the old Mississippi River bed used to run. And it was those high bluffs that gave Vicksburg the nickname of "The Gibraltar of the Confederacy." So when cities along the Mississippi River like Vicksburg and Natchez became important towns for the Union to capture, they commissioned "city class" gunboats like the Cairo to help them take control of key points along the River. And the boats were impressive indeed. The North hoped to use them to split the Confederacy into two parts, so they were heavily armored and carried 13 canons each. The Cairo was commissioned in 1862, and saw only limited action before two torpedoes ripped holes in her hull, sinking her in the Yazoo River, though no one on board was killed. We'll get back to how the Cairo was resurrected in a few minutes. But first of all, think about the soldier on the ground during the Civil War and in particular the weapons that he carried. And although there were vast refinements in weaponry and pistols and in rifles during the Civil War, back before that, we pretty much had muskets. You may think of muskets as antique and old fashioned, but we found a man who still makes them, and says there's a pretty good market for them. (band saw whirring) My name's Matt Avance. I own Tennessee Valley Muzzle Loading. We build, basically, custom muzzle loading rifles. They're all based on historical original guns. Most of these guns are made out of what we refer to as curly maple, sugar maple. It's a type of maple that really doesn't grow here in the deep South where we're at. Most of this wood comes from Ohio Pennsylvania and New York, places like that. I have some patterns, profile pattern that we'll lay out on it, cut it out with my band saw and we literally just start taking everything off of that big piece of wood that's not a gun stock. And there's a couple of steps after that to get the barrel in and then I'll do some more drawing on it. Cut away, and then repeat that process until I get it to a point where it's ready to accept all the other parts that go with it. You want to maximize the curl that's going to be seen on the finished product. You do want to look and make sure that grain is not going to run out of the wrist and make it a weak place in the stock because whenever you get it finished, it's going to be much smaller than it is in that big piece of wood. Sometimes you have to work around imperfections in the wood. Maybe where a bug got in it. We basically do twelve what we refer to as long guns, rifles and smooth boards. There are literally hundreds of different what they call schools of muzzleloaders. This rifle here, we built for my wife and there's a couple of things about it that I remember particularly. One of them is this gold band that's right here on the top of the barrel. That was my wedding band. I had an accident building this gun and cut this hand pretty bad. They had to cut my ring off of me. So it was one of those things that-- scary moment, scary day doing something for your wife. And after it's all done and over with and everything's going to work out and be fine, it's just a reminder not that we did this just for her. That was the biggest reason. But don't do what you did that day! Every time I look at this gun. (band saw whirring) The guns particularly back in that day, they were a tool as much as they might have been a piece of art. It was something that everyone had and had to have. Particularly if you were a frontiersman, what they called a long hunter, went on the long walks. You were out hunting, foraging for food to feed your family and you had to have one of these things for literal self protection. (band saw whirring) One of the things that I've prided myself on in doing this is I've always been able to take that piece of wood and see what it was going to look like in my mind's eye when I got done with it. Have an idea of where I'm going to end up. Whenever we get through with a piece and it's totally finished and we pass it on to a customer, nothing like seeing the big smile. I've even seen people cry before. It's really pleasurable. (band saw whirring) I'm not ready to retire by any stretch of the imagination. Days are longer than they were at almost 60 than they were at 40. My hands are not as steady as they were 20 years ago. Some things it takes me a little longer to do than it used to. I really don't see me not doing this anywhere in the really near future. But I do see me stepping back a little bit and letting someone else take the lead, so to speak. I'm no where near ready to retire, but I would like to fish more than I do. After the two torpedoes destroyed the Cairo's hull, it sank to the bottom of the Yazoo River. And then the natural progression of time hid the wreck and it really became more difficult to find after the survivors began to die. But in 1956, a historian at the Vicksburg National Military Park used documents and maps to pinpoint where he believed the Cairo to be buried. Three years later, divers brought up parts of the ship that proved that the historian had been correct. The Yazoo mud had actually helped preserve parts of the ship, and interest in its recovery began to grow in the 1960s as different pieces of the ship were recovered. In 1964, efforts finally got underway to restore the ship from the century it had spent being covered by silt and mud and sand. But it wasn't easy. The first try ended up damaging the wreckage when the three-inch cables that were being used to lift it out of the river cut into its hull. Engineers made the decision then to cut the Cairo into three pieces and lift them onto barges, which were eventually sent to Ingalls Shipyard on the Coast for careful restoration. In 1977, the Cairo finally made its way back to Vicksburg, where it's been open to the public pretty much ever since then. And along with the ability to tour the boat itself, there's a museum inside where the public can see some other artifacts from the war and from the boat itself, as well as stories on how the boat was raised and restored. Wherever a soldier finds himself or herself, they have to eat somehow. On the Cairo had a fairly large area for food storage, and the food that they carried, by its very nature, had to be something that would last a long time. Now in contrast to that, we found a farm in Lumberton that prides itself on its freshness. >> Today we have Dairy Fest, last year the first Saturday in October we held our first Dairy Fest., and it went well so we wanted to hold a second annual Dairy Fest here on our farm. And really what we like to do is have people on our farm, show them what we do, what dairy farmers do, what we provide for them. Because our dairy farm is different from other dairy farms in that we process our own milk. We have Jerseys anywhere from babies to aged cows, a little over 200. Now we're milking about 86, and they are higher in vitamins A, B, C as well as protein. They have higher milk solids. So it's a tastier product and a healthier product. Both: Country Girl's Creamery. Butch: We don't give our cows any hormones or medications. We don't give any them any genetically modified feeds that will make them milk more or grow faster to give more milk. Now you'll notice our cows, you can see their hip bones, their ribs, their shoulder bones. They're not a fleshy animal; they eat to make milk. We pasteurize and bottle our own milk, make cheese. About two years ago we added beef. We have cream, butter, yogurt; and we have ice cream as well. This March will be our fourth year in operation and we continue to grow. We do lots of things that we didn't know we'd do when we started the creamery, such as tourism. We do a lot of school groups, church groups, senior citizen groups. We wholesale our products and we retail them. So we get to do a little bit of everything. We've been very fortunate. We found a niche market and we push out a natural product, and feed and raise our animals in a natural manner. Cow: Moo... Back during the Civil War, gunboats like the Cairo here were just one way that troops were transported from place to place. Most of them walked. Some of the officers may have had horses, which brings us to our next story and that's a story about horse racing. Horse races have been popular since ancient Roman days and maybe even before that. But it turns out that Mississippi is the perfect place in which to train horses how to race. They call Mississippi the "bush tracks." In rural, somewhat secluded areas of the state, acres of land lend itself to some of the best training grounds for national title-holding harness racehorses. We've been racing in the state of Mississippi, officially since 1976. Announcer: Make that swing around that turn for the first time on their way down to the half, these fillies aren't playing. They're hustling all the way down the track. On the inside, "Look Good On You" on the outside, it's "Dragon Baby." At the half in 1:03. In the northern states people go to the track because they go to bet. Here in Mississippi they go to the track to watch the horses race because it's great family fun. They bring out their coolers and everything in there. Their grills and they can barbeque while watching the horses race. Woman: We have people from all over Mississippi that come watch. People having fun, children playing and everybody just gathered around having a good time. Wade: Harness racing is a particular type racing where the horse wears a harness and with the pacing races they wear hobbles on their legs to help them to hold their gates at high rates of speed, and they pull the sulky verses quarter horses, thoroughbred racing where they use the saddle where they ride on their backs. Grayson: Mississippians have trained and sold some very expensive first-class harness racing horses. Harness racers and owners from throughout the United States are always eager to have a Mississippi-trained horse. There's a horse that was trained here, that left the state of Mississippi, "Public Enemy." He went on to win over 2 million dollars. What I feel that makes it work here is the passion that we put into it. We are very persistent in our training and with the climate that we have here in Mississippi, we have the opportunity to train more versus the guys in the northern states. And these are the things that give us that winning edge. We do have a racing association here in Mississippi where we have races on an average of once a month. They are official races that we officiate. Today we're racing at Grants Down in Jackson, Mississippi. We have about 214 members who oversee all the rules and regulations of Harness Racing all over the United States. Announcer: And we're off. Wade: When I start the races, the staring gate is running 35 miles per hour, and those horses are pushing that truck. Announcer: And they're off and pacing... WADE: I would estimate them pacing anywhere 55 plus at top speeds going around the track. And that's a great feeling, going that fast, sitting inside that sulky. Grayson: A prime contender that has the crowd cheering these days is a new comer: Announcer: "Silk Swinging Star" and Derrick Anderson he's sweeping on around that turn... Wade: His registered name on his papers is "Silk Swinging Star." I call him "Silk Side Swinger." I have some big hopes for him. He's a horse that I'm training to send to Chicago to Bellmore Track to hopefully set a track record with. Announcer: Here he is at the wire "Silk Swinging Star!" Wade: He's a prime candidate. He has one of the best gaits that I've seen in harness horses. For a horse to come from a little Mississippi barn, a little Mississippi track and go to these big major tracks and outshine, I mean, that's a great accomplishment. Grayson: The Mississippi Trotting Association hosts races once a month and they're open to the public. So bring your family, friends, lawn chair and a cooler and have some great Mississippi harness horse racing fun. Regrettably, that's all the time we have for this episode. If you've got a question about anything you've seen on tonight's show, contact us: Until next time, I'm Walt Grayson. I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads. Mississippi Roads is made possible in part by the generous support of viewers like you. Thank you!