Life and commercial death near the Mississippi
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
In
June 2008, Tom and Huck (Saul and his friend Marin) return as two
senior citizens not on a raft but in a rented car, driving from New
Jersey south and then west through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West
Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and into Illinois where we see the
Mississippi River near Murphysboro.
We
had driven through the territory on which Daniel Boone had hunted
bear, that Lewis and Clark had traversed two centuries before
four-lane with fast food and expensive gasoline rest stops cut
through it. We headed for the land where Louis Joliet and Pere
Jacques Marquette, in 1673, took their river journey with an Indian
guide.
A
decade later, in 1682, Ferdinand La Salle and Tonty (Frenchmen)
canoed down the river and met and entertained some Indians.
Deciphering the gibberish most of us learned in grade school, here’s
what happened. After playing some fiddle music, the priest who
accompanied the “explorers” performed some mysterious ceremony
with a cross. The Indians applauded the performance and the land
scammers interpreted this as formal approval to deliver the
Mississippi River Valley to King Louis XIV.
In the 1763 Treaty of Paris — end of the French and Indian Wars —
France ceded that ill-gotten
territory
to England. Much of the vast area that French priest and land
grabbers conned from Indian nations “belonged” to England.
The
American Revolution rectified that. According to the 1783 Treaty of
Paris, the Mississippi “shall forever remain free and open to the
subjects of Great Britain and the citizens of the United States.”
In
1803, Thomas Jefferson bought the land the French stole from Indian
nations. He paid Napoleon practically nothing for the immense amount
of real estate, but he could have just taken it from him. Nappy was
caught up in imperial wars in Europe at the time.
Jump
ahead two centuries to modern Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio meets
the Mississippi. Most downtown businesses have closed. Vacant houses
abound amidst ramshackle dwellings. The 2000 Census estimated some
61% of Cairo school children lived in poverty, the 15th highest in
the
United States. The Cairo streets look like a movie set for a dying
town, replete with houses with broken windows, boards over store
fronts and poor people hanging out.
Even
its Fort Defiance State Park, which overlooks the joining of the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers,
has
gone to seed. From the cracked cement of the observation tower we
watched the barges moving slowly down river. From the place where the
rivers join, we looked into Kentucky on one side and Missouri on the
other. The Cairo City and Canal Company founded Cairo in 1837. The
Illinois Central Railroad ran through it by the late 1850s and it
became a major steamboat port with its own Customs House, now a
museum with few visitors. On the shore, the plastic and glass bottle
debris from trysts and informal drinking parties remain for future
archeologists to decipher the meaning of modern cultural life on the
Mississippi in 2008.
Tragedy
or just evolution? Not a question you would put to a descendent of
the Cherokees in the nearby Trail of Tears State Park. The
middle-aged woman who asks us if we need help in the visitor center
got laid off from her last job in an old age home and now works as a
guide for visitors. She’s part Cherokee, she tells us. Her
grandfather told her as a child what his father told him about how in
1830 President Jackson pushed through Congress The Indian Removal Act
so he could negotiate treaties with Indian nations. If they would
leave their lands, Jackson promised, they could settle on new and
good land in the west. Over the next seven years Jackson removed some
50,000 Indians. They had no choice but to give up twenty five million
acres of forests and farms for arid dirt on reservations west of the
Mississippi. The Creeks and Seminoles refused. Jackson ordered the
army to force them out at gun point or drag them away in chains.
Jackson’s
motive? White “settlers” — speculators? — had their greedy eyes
on Cherokee land. The Cherokees took their case to the Supreme Court
in 1831 claiming sovereignty. In 1832, the Court ruled the Cherokees
did have the right to the land, but Jackson sneered at the ruling.
“Justice Marshall has made his ruling, and now he may enforce it.”
So much for separation of power and checks and balances!
The
Georgia legislature offered Cherokee homelands to whites despite the
fact the Indians still inhabited it. Cherokee Chief John Ross refused
to sign a treaty with Jackson swapping good land for unknown
“reservation land.” Jackson found an ersatz Indian chief to sign
in 1833. He presented this fraudulent document to Congress, which
ratified The Treaty of New Echota in 1835.
“Colonel
Jackson was a no good double crosser,” the visitor center woman
declared. “The Cherokees fought for him in the 1812 War and this is
how he paid them back. Took their land cause it was valuable and his
political pals wanted it.”
The
white farmers and developers adored Jackson. The Cherokees left a
Trail of Tears, as they were forced to march from their eastern farms
across rugged terrain in winter to Oklahoma. Thousands died;
meaningful nationhood lost without their land.
Kids
in grade school still learn about the glorious settling of the west,
which Indians had already settled. As we drove down the highways
paralleling the banks of the Mississippi we saw the rich agriculture.
But the small farmers who benefited from Jackson’s perfidy have
long given way to agribusiness. Cheap labor tends to vast acres of
soy beans, cotton, corn, wheat, sorghum and rice. Crop dusters blast
them with chemicals.
In
his prize winning book on Jackson, the recently deceased and much
celebrated historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote: “White
resentment of the Cherokees had been building and reached a pinnacle
after gold was discovered in Georgia, and immediately following the
passage of the Cherokee Nation constitution, and establishment of a
Cherokee Supreme Court. Possessed with ‘gold fever,’ and a thirst
for expansion, the white communities turned on their Cherokee
neighbors.” Schlesinger acknowledged that Jackson’s “command
and life was saved due to 500 Cherokee allies at the Battle of
Horseshoe Bend in 1814.” He characterized Jackson’s removal of
his former saviors as “unbelievable.” Yet, he continued, “The
U.S. government decided it was time for the Cherokees to leave behind
their farms, their land and their homes.”
“Time’s
up for the Indians. Tough luck! Move on.” That’s how millions
learn history. I wonder if Israeli grade school teachers use language
similar to Schlesinger’s. “The Israeli government decided it was
time for the Palestinians to leave their homes.”
The
post civil war small town white and even black populations have not
suffered that level of atrocities, but they have seen their way of
life become downright “Wal-Marty.”
In
Jonesboro, Illinois, where Lincoln debated Douglass, Fred, a Korean
War vet, observed that “Wal-Mart promised everything at lower
prices and now they’ve put the small stores out of business, well
you get what you get there, a bunch of bad Chinese toys and such.”
In
the nearby Bardwell, Kentucky, “business district” the once
ubiquitous stores of typical small town America were closed. Fred,
who volunteers at the visitor center in Jonesboro, shook his head.
“The people are leaving. No jobs. Why would anyone want to come
here with big money to invest?” He smiled. “Different times,”
he said, “and you can’t blame it all on Bush. The factories
started shutting down quite a while before he put his backside in the
Oval Office.” He chuckled wryly. “He sure has wasted a lot of our
money though in that war in Eye-Rack. But business wouldn’t come
here anyway. Hardly any of the companies I remember as a kid are here
any more.”
He
didn’t mention the New Page Corporation, which emits an acrid
stench from its sulfur plant in nearby Wickliffe, Kentucky,
(population 749). The nose-searing redolence almost drove us back to
the interstate highway. At a time of rotting factories and empty
warehouses, which means almost everyone loses his job, “you get
used to the smell,” said a local man.
Hickman
and Dyersburg, the Kentucky towns on the road to Memphis, parallel to
the Mississippi, have similarly depressing main streets. Some antique
stores have replaced furniture, shoes, jewelry or dry goods stores.
Their commercial death stands in dramatic comparison to the full
parking lots at Wal-Mart at the edge of town — the metaphor for
early 21st
Century small town America. A depressing eye opener for old Tom and
Huck.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose films have won
awards. (Available through roundworldproductions@gmail.com).
