Page 146 - South Mississippi Living - December, 2017

Mississippi
story by Kelsey Sunderman-Foster
HISTORY
THIS YEAR, THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI CELEBRATES200years OF STATEHOOD BY REFLECTING ON ITS HISTORY AND CULTURE. ON DECEMBER 10, 1817, MISSISSIPPI WAS
GRANTED STATEHOOD, MAKING IT THE 20TH STATE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Hernando de Soto Pierre Le Moyne d-Iberville
“No state has more stories to tell, and here, many voices rise together to tell them.”
However, the state’s recorded history goes back to centuries prior, when Native American tribes, including the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Natchez, Yazoo and Biloxi, inhabited the area. It wasn’t until 1540 that the first European explorer, Hernando de Soto, led an exhibition into what would later become the Mississippi Territory. Years after
in 1699, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville established the first European settlement in Old Biloxi.
1716 brought forth the state’s first major town and trading post, which was known as Fort Rosalie. The area, later renamed Natchez, was under the control of many countries over the years, from Spain to Great Britain and France. Spain was the last European power to control the region and did so up until the Treaty of San Lorenzo was signed in 1795. The treaty, also known as Pickney’s Treaty, recognized the 31st parallel as the boundary between Spanish Florida and the United States.
On April 7, 1798, Congress created the Mississippi Territory. “The territory’s original boundaries consisted of the region bounded by the Mississippi and Chattahoochee rivers in the west and east, the 31st parallel in the south, and the point where the Yazoo River emptied into the Mississippi
River in the north,” wrote J. Michael Bunn and Clay Williams in their Mississippi History Now article, “Mississippi’s Territorial Years: A Momentous and Contentious Affair.”
According to Bunn and Williams, the territory expanded twice over the next two decades. “In 1804, the northern boundary was extended to the Tennessee state line, and in 1812, President James Madison annexed additional land along the Gulf of Mexico Coast. By 1813, the Mississippi Territory encompassed the boundaries of present-day Alabama and Mississippi.”
As a result of its former foreign control, the Mississippi Territory’s residents were a conglomerate of previously British, Spanish and French citizens as well as immigrants from other states who sought land and opportunity in the new territory. These influences produced the diverse culture that Mississippi is recognized for today.
“No state has more stories to tell, and here, many voices rise together to tell them.” — excerpt from the Mississippi Bicentennial Celebration historical narrative.
Sources: Mississippi History Now, an online publication of the Mississippi Historical Society; MS200.org; TheUS50. com; Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Mississippi circa 1823, provided by the Mississippi Department of Archives and Histor y