Mile 715.5 — Cow Island Bend
The Mississippi River makes a hairpin turn around Cow Island No. 48, running into the Cow Island Bend due west and turned around to exit below Cow Island in a southeasterly direction. Blue Holes form around the dikes top end at low water levels, and an ocean-sized inlet forms during low water at bottom end. Possible camping around LBD 715 during low water levels below 15 Memphis Gauge, but wide open and exposed. Bring your own firewood as it will be hit or miss whether any good wood has been strewn across its beaches or not from the last rise.
Goodbye Tennessee, Hullo Mississippi:
The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and the Blues
As you come around the bottom end of Cow Island you will leave the state Tennessee left bank descending and enter the State of Mississippi, through which the river flows 440 miles until succumbing to Louisiana near Angola. Even though geographically you have already been paddling in the fertile Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (once you flowed under the Lower Bridges of Memphis and past the end of the South Bluff), you are now officially and geopolitically within the same. Pull out your Mississippi Saxophone (harmonica) and play a blues in celebration! Find the nearest crossroads and fall down on your knees for a midnight full moon encounter! Best yet, see below for some live blues and fresh corn whiskey.
Said to begin in the lobby of Memphis’ Peabody Hotel and end at Catfish Row in Vicksburg (Cohen: Lanterns on the Levee), the eye-shaped “Upper” Delta is the largest self-contained floodplain flatland along the entire Lower Mississippi River, 250 miles north to south, and 60 miles at its widest. It’s also the most famous floodplain, and the most feared. It’s the birthplace of the blues, and also of the share-cropping system. Mississippi Delta cotton kingdom plantations ushered in the meteoric rise of some world-class musicians alongside the international textile industry. Some did so benevolently, leading to great advances in agriculture and industry, and arguably the birth of the blues and some great literature along the way. Still others harbored the evils of subjection, and successfully avoided the Civil Rights Era into present day as highlighted by the infamous Parchman Penitentiary.
A thriving jungle wilderness through the Civil War, the Delta was considered a frontier into the early 1900s for its deep forests full of giant cypresses, oaks, sweetgums, and a fantastically active wildlife including panthers (cougars) and black bear. Teddy Roosevelt hunted bear in the south Delta and declared he’d found the biggest trees in North America outside of the West Coast. Unfortunately, no one thought to save any of these sacred forests, and 90% of them have been cleared away for farmland. Second growth forests can be seen, however, in some special places that we’ll point out further downstream, including Big Island and Delta National Forest. Another location is St. Francis National Forest, which you’ll soon pass on your way into Helena. If you are so inclined, make a side trip from Helena into the lofty forests of St. Francis National Forest for the feeling of what the used to the big woods Faulkner wrote about and Teddy Roosevelt boasted about. In the cycle of life, the demise of one thing leads to the birth of others. The best outcome of destroying the greatest bottomland hardwood forests in North America was not cotton t-shirts and jeans. It was the world-changing art form known as the Delta blues, created by the black men and women who sustained great physical and emotional duress under the sharecropper system, and found an eloquent musical expression to fill their lives and aid in their survival. As sure as the “Blues Had a Baby and they called her Rock and Roll,” slavery begat sharecropping, begat civil rights, begat poverty, and thus begat gang-banging and black-on-black crime. The Civil War is still being fought and blues never died. Such is the contradictory nature of the Delta. Rising like a Phoenix from her own ashes, the Delta is finding resurrection in tourism, sustainable agriculture, and education. Incredible advances are being made in education as highlighted by the KIPP public school system of Helena, Arkansas, whose students are embracing the river as their landscape in part through learning to paddle canoes and kayaks, water quality testing, and an annual expedition around Big Island.
Check for blues festivals which abound along the cities and towns downstream during the warmer months of the year. Notables include Juke Joint Festival (first Saturday after Easter), Sunflower Blues & Gospel Festival (2nd weekend of August), Delta Blues Festival (3rd Saturday in September) and the King Biscuit Festival (2nd weekend of October). There are many others in between as well. Go to www.cathead.biz for complete listings and a well-maintained calendar of juke joint performances and other not-to-miss occasions. If you can tie in a weekend of blues with your Mississippi River Expedition you will think you have washed into the shores of a paddler’s heaven!
The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is defined by the Yazoo and the Mississippi Rivers. The Yazoo “River of Death” is born of several Mississippi Hill Country rivers and streams, including the Coldwater, Yocona, Yalobusha and Tallahatchie Rivers, the same Tallahatchie that Bobby Gentry sang about concerning Choctaw Ridge, a Bridge, and Billy Joe McAllister. The 450-mile long Yazoo drainage parallels the Mississippi but does not meet it until Vicksburg. What takes the Yazoo 450 miles is 300 miles on the Mississippi (downstream of Memphis). A close inspection of the Rivergator Mississippi Delta Map will illustrate the geography of these various rivers, and will also illuminate other famous rivers contained within, such as the illustrious Sunflower River, which drains the heart of the Mississippi Delta including its tributaries the Hushpuckena, the Quiver River and Deer Creek. As we journey further southward the Rivergator will touch upon these alternate waterways where appropriate and attempt to provide some context to the sometimes bewildering nature of the Mississippi Delta.