Trail Blazers.

Kosciusko-French Camp-Starkville-West Point

One makes best-sellers, one creates best sellers. One defied the bigotry and violent hatred of a region to pave the way for education and opportunity for all. Others hacked a trail through the woods, founded a school for women, then created not just a chance to learn but a life’s path for at-risk children. Some are saving the world’s oceans, others are creating new worlds of artificial intelligence. And one transformed the bitter fruit of an impossibly sad and lonely childhood into an intoxicating brand of blues.

These trail blazers saw a path where others saw only impenetrable wilderness and insurmountable odds. They embraced the challenge of opening the road, accepted the cost, overcame the hardships.  And at the end of it, when others might have stopped, rested and said, “I have arrived,” these pioneers simply “lit out” in new directions, their energy undiminished.

Dreamers, doers, with paths old and new that are calling. What made them? What drove them? Let’s hit the road—their roads—to find out.

The Choctaws were the first in this area, growing so much corn in these fertile hills that they were able to sell it to neighboring tribes. Eventually whites began to travel the Natchez Trace, and with these migrations came a French Canadian named Louis Lefleur who established a trading post on the bluff above the Pearl River. In what became known as Lefleur’s Bluff, the enterprising trader married a half-Indian woman and together they had 11 children; by his second wife, he would have more children, including his fourth son, named Greenwood.

When Greenwood was 12, the family moved north from Lefleur’s Bluff to another spot on the Natchez Trace where they established a tavern that became known as “Frenchman’s Camp” and eventually “French Camp.” Andrew Jackson stopped there with his men on the way to the Battle of New Orleans in 1812.

In that same conflict, Louis Lefleur served under Pushmataha, then the Choctaw chief. However, by the time the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed in 1830, Greenwood Lefleur—now known as Greenwood Leflore—had become the chief of the entire Choctaw tribe. The shrewd son of a shrewd trader, Leflore believed his mission was not to oppose the treaty, which called for the removal of Indian tribes to Oklahoma.   Rather, he believed his duty was to negotiate for the best possible Oklahoma lands for the tribe. This he did, but while most of the rest of the Choctaws were forced on to the long march of the infamous Trail of Tears, Leflore stayed behind in Mississippi on the 1,000 acres he had negotiated for himself. He built a grand plantation home on the land and turned his political skills toward white society, rising to become a state legislator and a personal friend of Jefferson Davis.

In the meantime, new settlers flooded the area made available by the treaty, many of them Scotch-Irish from Georgia and the Carolinas. These people were not so trusting as those who had lost the land, but they were not without ideas of community. And they were industrious. Towns and schools were established, and a certain characteristics began grafting to one another in the rich soil: hardiness, self-sufficiency and an impressive capacity for productivity. Gumption, as it was called in the Hills.

This regional character is exemplified in Kosciusko’s most famous son and daughter, civil rights leader James Meredith and tv phenomenon Oprah Winfrey, whose ancestry showed resilience and strength, not to mention loads of gumption.