Peter’s Post. Biked: 21 miles
The sweet spot in daily biking distance is 40-50 miles given our current conditioning and loaded bikes. We can knock that off in 5-6 hours including stops and that keeps it fun. However, when riding on “the Trace” as they call it, lodging is not evenly spaced and we’ve had to plan accordingly. The 63 miles Jackson to Kosciusko yesterday was a little more than we wished in miles and it would have been another 73 to Houston today so we opted to split it into a 21 mile day today and a 52 mile ride tomorrow. We were both pretty whipped yesterday so it was a bit of a relief to get a late start, big breakfast and have a short day today. This is not a race or an endurance contest. It was enough to get the legs turning but not enough to get really tired. The riding on the Trace is so lovely with very little traffic and great scenery.
We’re staying in a little B&B cottage called the Southern Grace Cottage which is lovely and fits the bill.
There is a lot of civil rights history is not in the immediate vicinity but it’s all around. Bryant’s Grocery (Where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955) is 60 miles to the east and Philadelphia (where Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were killed in 1964, is 40 to the West. Laura, our ace researcher found this map showing some of the most famous (notorious) sites of the civil rights movement if you are not that familiar with the geography of the state. Laura and I keep bringing up these tragic events and heroic struggles from the past to remind ourselves why it’s important not to forget them. As Medgar Evers said: “Freedom has never been free.” Perhaps it’s particularly important at this time in our history to not be complacent.
The history that is in the immediate area is the history of the 5 “Civilized Tribes” Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole and particularly the Choctaw who lived here. They were called “civilized” because they had agreed to adopt western ways, became Christian, literate, farmed and some even owned slaves. Of course, this was not enough to protect them or their land. The bargain at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (see monument) in 1830 involved the Choctaw trading their land in Mississippi for new land out west (Oklahoma) in return for a right of sovereignty as a tribe. Like a lot of treaties between the Native Americans and the U.S. Government, things didn’t turn out as advertised. The removal of the Native Americans paved the way for the introduction of many more African slaves to work the land. The rapid expansion of slavery came late in Mississippi relative to southern states to the east because it required the removal of tribes from the land on the trail of tears. My pithy descriptions of events belie the suffering inherent in all these events (the brutal evacuation of the Native Americans and cruel importation of enslaved Africans) that has been borne by generations of descendants of those affected. A stone monument blithely honors an act of genocide.
Thanks for your encouragement and for traveling with us.
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