1873 photograph of Gideon Lincecum.
From “Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist: The Life and Times of Dr. Gideon Lincecum,” with the permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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In 1905, the Mississippi Historical Society published Lincecum’s autobiography. View the larger image to read an excerpt. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Reference No. B L62L
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The State of Texas erected memorial to Gideon Lincecum in 1936. The inscription reads in part: “A veteran of the War of 1812 / internationally famous botanist / friend of Darwin.” Photo by Peggy A. Redshaw. From “Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist: The Life and Times of Dr. Gideon Lincecum,” with the permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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Gideon Lincecum (1793-1874): Mississippi Pioneer and Man of Many Talents
By Greg O'Brien
Gideon Lincecum moved to Mississippi in 1818. He brought his family,
which included his wife Sarah Bryan, two small children, his parents,
some siblings, and a few African-American slaves. They settled initially
along the Tombigbee River and helped establish the town of Columbus, Mississippi.
The Lincecums were part of the hundreds of other new settlers traveling
west from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama during the first two decades
of the 19th century. The number of Americans moving west then was so great
that historians refer to the movement as the Great Migration.
Like those other settlers, Lincecum, a Georgia native, arrived seeking
a new life and new opportunities to make a living and support his family.
He was a man of many talents. While living in Mississippi, Lincecum cut
and sold lumber, hunted, traded merchandise with Choctaw and Chickasaw
Indians, and organized a tour of Choctaw stickball players in exhibition
games. He served as chief justice of the “Quorum,” a group
of people appointed by the Mississippi Legislature to organize Monroe
County, was chairman of the school commissioners, and superintendent of
the new male and female academies in Monroe County. He dabbled in medicine
before becoming a full-time doctor in 1830.
He and his family remained in Mississippi for 30 years, for awhile living
farther north up the Tombigbee River near Cotton Gin Port. In 1848, he
moved his family to Texas in search of new borders and new opportunities.
The hunter
To Lincecum and his family, one of the main attractions of the Tombigbee
River region, located in eastern Mississippi, was the vast quantities
of wildlife. Like many Mississippians of today, Lincecum loved to hunt
for sport and to provide food and income for his family. Lincecum quickly
made friends with some neighboring Choctaw Indians and frequently hunted
with them.
He observed with wonder the countless deer, bears, turkeys, ducks, and
fish, writing about his family’s early days in Mississippi that
“we were all greatly pleased, and supplied our table with a superabundance
of fish, fowl, and venison, and occasionally a glorious fleece [meat taken
from either side of the hump] of bear meat. The quantity of game that
was found in that dark forest and the canebrakes was a subject of wonder
to everybody.”
Lincecum reported that he killed upwards of 400 deer during his early
years in Mississippi, selling their dried hams to boatmen on the Tombigbee
River. Packs of wolves also inhabited the region at that time, coming
so near to the Lincecum camp that they “could hear them snapping
their teeth.”
Enlightened thinker
Lincecum was a busy man willing to try various activities to secure an
income and support his family. In this respect he was much like the hundreds
of other new immigrants to Mississippi in the first few decades of the
1800s. But in many ways Lincecum was not a typical early American settler.
His views on education and religion reflected the Enlightenment ideals
of the American founders more than the evangelical patterns of many of
his Mississippi neighbors. Even though he was largely self-taught, having
learned to read and write and do basic math largely on his own as a youth,
Lincecum was a “frontier intellectual” who read constantly
and valued education highly.
He wanted his ten children to receive the best possible schooling, but
that was difficult in the frontier setting of early 19th-century Mississippi.
In 1831, while living in Cotton Gin Port, he enrolled six of his children
in the only available school, a “highly lauded seminary” in
Columbus. Lincecum traveled to Columbus six months after his children
started their studies in order to find out how much they had learned.
His children told him they had mastered history and geography; however,
they could not tell their father what sort of history they now knew, nor
could they name the principal rivers in the state of Mississippi or in
the United States.
Bewildered and fearing that he had wasted money, Lincecum asked his sons
and daughters to tell him what they had learned. Their answers revealed
that they had been taught only Bible stories and little else. Lincecum
was appalled: “I was overwhelmed with disappointment. I felt that
the whole world was a sham. My children, after six months’ constant
attendance in that highly praised institution, could answer no questions
of use. But they had been put on the road to salvation ... .”
He immediately pulled his children out of the school and took them back
to Cotton Gin Port. Apparently Lincecum relied on home schooling for his
children from that point onward. Throughout his life Lincecum remained
a committed free thinker and critic of organized religion.
The doctor
Lincecum had studied medicine on his own since 1811, and had periodically
provided medical services for his neighbors and other customers. As with
education, Lincecum’s views on medicine reflected a willingness
to question the established truths of his day and to seek out more practical
methods for healing people. In 1830, Lincecum became a full-time doctor
near Cotton Gin Port in order to make an income without doing strenuous
work, for he had become very sick after physically over-exerting himself.
Lincecum practiced allopathic medicine which relied heavily upon bleeding
the patient and administering strong drugs, such as mercury.
People in early 19th-century Mississippi often caught illnesses. Lincecum
wrote that “one or more of the family was sick all the time.”
When Lincecum and other Mississippi doctors lost hundreds of patients
during a cholera outbreak around 1833, Lincecum became convinced that
the medical books of his day did more harm than good, especially the practice
of “bleeding” patients to release impurities. “I felt
tired of killing people,” he exclaimed, “and concluded to
quit the man killing practice.” Lincecum complained that all American
medical journals at the time were written by people in the northern states
who did not understand southern diseases or the southern environment.
He sought out an expert on southern illnesses who knew herbal remedies
for most ailments. That expert was a Choctaw Indian doctor called Alikchi
Chito (“Great Doctor”) who lived in the Six Towns Division
of the Choctaw Nation (the Six Towns, located in the southern region,
was one of three ethnic and political divisions among the Choctaws, the
other two were called by the Americans the Western and Eastern divisions).
Over a period of six weeks, Alikchi Chito taught Lincecum the uses of
various plants to cure most types of sickness. From that point onward,
Lincecum rejected the so-called remedies published in medical books in
favor of herbal medications to treat his patients and called himself a
“botanic doctor.”
His new medicines worked beyond his expectations and he enjoyed a reputation
as a very good doctor the remainder of his time in Mississippi. Herbal
remedies are popular today and have always been used in so-called “folk
medicine” by various Mississippians. The notable aspect of Lincecum’s
medical training is that he learned the most effective medicines from
Choctaw Indians and then passed on that knowledge to his patients and
other doctors, thus preserving a key aspect of the cultural practices
of the original inhabitants of Mississippi.
Friend of Indians
Lincecum interacted with Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians frequently before
most of the Indians were forcibly removed in the early 1830s by the Mississippi
and United States governments. He traded with them, hunted with them,
ate meals with them, sought out their knowledge about medicine, learned
how to speak and write their language, organized and led a tour of Choctaw
stickball players throughout the South in 1829-30, and familiarized himself
with much of their history and traditions.
Lincecum visited an elderly Choctaw man called Chahta Immataha several
times between 1823 and 1825 in order to record the traditional history
of the Choctaws. In 1904, the Mississippi Historical Society published
parts of that long story, but Lincecum’s entire written history
of the Choctaw people, based on what Chahta Immataha told him, exists
in the University of Texas Archives.
Lincecum knew Choctaw Chief Pushmataha personally and wrote the most
valuable description of his life that exists. Unlike many of his early
19th-century Mississippi neighbors, Lincecum viewed Indians as people
worthy of respect who were every bit equal, and often superior, to Euro-Americans.
Where Indians had problems, such as with alcohol abuse, Lincecum tended
to blame the bad influence of non-Indians for the situation.
Though overly romantic, Lincecum felt that Indians were the most honest
and decent people he had ever met. He even suggested that “if there
could be born an honest, liberty-loving leader who would take things in
hand, concentrate the Indian forces, capture all the praying white races
and their allies, the mixed-blood cut throats, and chop off their ...
heads, there would remain the most innocent law-abiding people on earth
— the pure Indian.”
As the Mississippi and U.S. governments forced Indian removal west of
the Mississippi River in the early 1830s, Lincecum sympathized with the
anti- removal position of most Choctaws and Chickasaws. He singled out
the various Christian missionaries living and working among the Indians
for particular condemnation, believing they did little to stop Indian
Removal. Lincecum eloquently described his feelings towards his Indian
neighbors when remembering a Choctaw family that passed his home on their
way to banishment in Indian Territory in November 1831:
“I remember now, though the time has long passed, with feelings
of unfeigned gratitude the many kindnesses bestowed on me and my little
family in 1818 and 1819 when we were in their neighborhood, before the
country began to fill up with other white people ... . We met often,
hunted together, fished together, swam together, and they were positively
and I have no hesitation in declaring it here, the most truthful, most
reliable and best people I have ever dealt with. While we resided in
their country my wife had a very severe spell of fever that confined
her to bed for several weeks ... kind hearted Chahta women would come
often, bringing with them their nicely prepared tampulo water
for her to drink, and remaining by the sick bed for hours at a time
... . The time is long gone, and I may never have the pleasure of meeting
with any of that most excellent race of people again. But so long as
the life pendulum swings in this old time-shattered bosom, I shall remember
their many kindnesses to me and mine, with sentiments of kindest affection
and deepest gratitude.”
Legacy
Gideon Lincecum’s legacy to Mississippi is extensive though it
has been under-appreciated. He and his family lived in Mississippi for
thirty years and prospered under trying circumstances. Lincecum wrote
a detailed autobiography that exposes what life was like in the early
years of Mississippi statehood as few other sources can. Some of the most
valuable information we have about the Choctaw Indians comes from Lincecum’s
writings.
Many historians have noticed the significance of Lincecum’s writing,
but Lincecum has not yet been recognized as a key figure in Mississippi
history despite the fact that three key Lincecum works were published
by the Mississippi Historical Society in the early 20th century.
One reason for this neglect is that Lincecum and his family moved to
Texas. In Texas, Lincecum became renown as a naturalist. He collected
plant and animal specimens, corresponded with notable naturalists such
as Charles Darwin (sending him forty-eight samples of Texas ants with
detailed commentaries), dabbled in geology, recorded weather observations,
and tracked drought cycles.
All of Lincecum’s work published in his lifetime occurred after
he moved to Texas. He contributed plant and animal collections to the
Philadelphia Academy of Science and the Smithsonian Institution. He wrote
articles for the American Naturalist, the American Sportsman,
the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Journal
of the Linnaean Society, the Texas Almanac, and newspapers.
Lincecum has left a rich record of Mississippi life during a time of
massive change and transformation when Mississippi transitioned from Indian
to Euro-American control and when frontier lifestyles became increasingly
dominated by plantations, large-scale agriculture, and overwhelming dependence
on African- American slavery.
Mississippi is fortunate that a person of Lincecum’s high intellect
chose to call Mississippi home and to write about all that he saw and
did.
Greg O'Brien, Ph.D., is associate professor of history at the University
of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830 (University
of Nebraska Press, 2002) and co-editor of George Washington's South
(University Press of Florida, 2004).
Posted September 2004
References:
Burkhalter, Lois Wood. Gideon Lincecum, 1793-1874: A Biography.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.
Davis, William C. A Way Through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace
and the Civilization of the Southern Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1995.
Geiser, Samuel Wood. Naturalists of the Frontier. Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1937.
Lincecum, Gideon. Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist: The life and
Times of Dr. Gideon Lincecum. Edited by Jerry Bryan Lincecum and
Edward Hake Phillips. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University
Press, 1994. (http://www.tamu.edu/upress or 800-826-8911)
Lincecum, Gideon. “Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum.”
Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. 8 (1905), 443-519.
Lincecum, Gideon. “Choctaw Traditions about Their Settlement in
Mississippi and the Origin of Their Mounds.”Publications of
the Mississippi Historical Society. 8 (1904), 521-542.
Lincecum, Gideon. “Life of Apushimataha.” Publications
of the Mississippi Historical Society. 9 (1906), 415-485.
Lincecum, Gideon. Pushmataha: A Choctaw Leader and His People.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Lincecum, Gideon. Science on the Texas Frontier: Observations of
Dr. Gideon Lincecum. Edited by Jerry Bryan Lincecum, Edward Hake
Phillips, and Peggy A. Redshaw. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M
University Press, 1997.
Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, pp. 55-57.
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