Two years ago today we spent the day driving through Mississippi with my bicycle on top of our car. We started on the Natchez Trace, but decided it was boring whether by car or bicycle. What I really wanted to do was visit some of the places where the Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, had gone in 1811 in an attempt to recruit Choctaw people to his pan-Indian movement of resistance and revival. His most famous destination was Tuckabatchee, in what is now Alabama. That also happens to be near where Nate Shaw lived. Tecumseh had some success there, among the Creeks. But he had first made some stops in modern Mississippi, where his mission was not so well accepted.

I had ridden my bike from Vincennes, Indiana to just across the border in Alabama. It became apparent that there would not be enough time to ride to Tuckabatchee and have much time to spend riding there, so we decided to visit some of rural Mississippi by car. We spent a day as auto tourists — the first time we had been there or anywhere in the deep South — then drove to Selma, Alabama where I resumed bicycling the next day.

The above photo was taken in Crawford. I have no idea whether there is any historical significance to the old building. It’s just something that caught my eye.

We stopped at the city hall, and drove a couple of miles west of town. A meeting place with Tecumseh was supposedly somewhere in the background of the photo below, among those trees in the distant left. Not very photogenic, I admit. This was about as close as I could get on the public roads.