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404	Mississippi	Historical	Society.
and all roads to Andrew Jackson. The General has been credited with cutting a highway through Clarke County (Alabama) for his army, another through Choctaw County and even the “Three Chopped Way,” when in point of fact he descended the Alabama River in boats. However, worse eoonvms could be chosen^than DeSoto and. m Jacks on.1 .	/
Unfortunately for the cause of historical accuracy, the same writer, on a preceding page, and elsewhere, adds further confusion to the subject by the statement;
There were other highways in course of time, such as Jackson’s Military Road, cut southwardly from the Tennessee River, which was serviceable in subjugating the Creeks.3
In reality the Creeks were generally considered subjugated in 1813-14, while Jackson’s Military Road was not cut, named and completed until 1817-20.
Mississippi, however, is not one whit behind other Southern States in historical and traditional “Jackson roads.” She also has a “Jackson Fort,” made of cedar logs and surrounded by entrenchments. Descendants of early settlers point with traditional pride to scarred trees and gullied hillsides as marks and tracks of Jackson’s axes and artillery, while historians recount with patriotic pride the prodigious feat of Colonels Coffee and Carroll, who are said to have cut their way through the whole length of the State of Mississippi and to have arrived in the nick of time to save the day for “Old Hickory” on the plains of Chalmette. These and other stories are told by the credulous in wild-eyed amazement, despite the generally accepted historical fact that Coffee marched directly from Pensacola, via Mobile, preceded by Jackson himself, and that Carroll landed his troops from flat-boats on the Mississippi sometimes before the battle.
Although De Soto is somewhat short on mounds and fortifications, his reputed crossing-places on the upper Tombigbee are as numerous almost as the combined bridges and ferries of to-day. The most improbable one, in the light of reason and research, is thus briefly described by our most celebrated historian :
■	Peter J. Hamilton, in the Transactions of the Alabama Historical Society, II, 51.
“Ibid., 150.
General Jackson’s Military Road—Love.	405
DeSoto probably entered the present State of Mississippi at Columbus, (which is ten miles from the Alabama line and immediately on the river), and follpwed an Indian trail or buffalo path some five miles up to Lincacum’s Shoals, just above the mouth of the Tibbee and a little below the present town of Waverly. The Tombigbee here is bifurcated by an island, the first obstruction below Buttahatchie. The gravel discharged from this stream lodged against the island and rendered both channels fordable a great part of the year, and this is the only point where the Spaniards could have forded in December.*
What a spectacle! That world renowned expedition, with its indomitable leader ever in the van, “seized with a desire to rival Cortez in glory and Pizarro in wealth,” equipped for any and every emergency; able, after great depletion of force and destruction of property, to cross the mighty Mississippi, following a buffalo path through the cane-brake of Buttahatchie Swamp in search of a bifurcation to ford its pigs—and that, too, in December! A careful examintion of the records of the expedition left by its several chroniclers will render futile any attempt to prove that De Soto crossed the Tombigbee within the borders of Lowndes County, and his precautionary policy of keeping on the march successive chiefs or head-men captives until the next town or village was reached insured competent guides over the best and most frequented trails. He was, therefore, never lost, in the sense of not being able to find the right way to well-known crossing-places.
The preposterous idea that early settlers could easily follow the blazes of De Soto would be dispelled by a little study of woodscraft in connection with a simple mathematical calculation —1816—1540=276—and the story of Spanish cannon and horses left in and along the river should also be relegated to the realm of fiction.
Another writer, coming well within the historic period in “Choctaw crossing-places on the Tombigbee,” says of “Ten-mile shoals crossing,” that the “present name is derived from the fact that the shoals are ten miles from Columbus, Mississippi.” 5 A personal examination or casual inquiry would have
‘Claiborne’s Mississippi, 5.
1 H. S. Halbert in the Transactions of the Alabama Historical Society,
I 431-