YAZOO RIVER



Facts

• The River was given its name by the French Explorer, La Salle, in 1682 when the found a small Indian tribe with that name living near its mouth.


• It is the second longest tributary of the Mississippi flowing into it from the east. Only the Ohio is larger.


• The first electrically detonated underwater mine was invented and used by Confederates on the Yazoo River in 1862 near Vicksburg to sink the Federal ironclad USS Cairo. A second, non-electrical mine, sank its sister ship, the USS Baron DeKalb near Yazoo City in 1863. Its hull is still visible during low water.


• There are 29 sunken ships from the War Between the States beneath the Yazoo River.


• Mississippi has 15 river ports, Yazoo City being one of them.


• The River was the cause of Yazoo City’s founding, and was its lifeline to the outside world for its first 50 years.

The Name

• Yazoo (a strange, exotic sound)…Yachou…Yakou…Yasoux…Yason…Yasoons…Illasus. Then there was Oalsees…Yahaas, Yassa, Yasoves, Yasus. The word became slightly distorted with the “S” sound becoming a “Z”.


• What does it mean?: River of Death, Leaf, Hunting Ground, To Blow on an Instrument? The meaning is actually unknown. Attempts to give it meaning all evolved when European settlers tried to fit the strange sounding word into the patterns of the language of the Choctaws. The Choctaws had a village in eastern Mississippi named Yazoo. According to linguists who have studied the language patterns of the Choctaws, it was a word remaining from the Yazoo Indians’ language, which like the tribe itself, was entirely separate from the Choctaws.


• There is one legend that Yazoo means “death” because the French, who named the river witnessed scored of Indians, defeated in battle but refusing to surrender, march into the river to their deaths.


• Another surmise is that it is from the Choctaw for “hunting ground”. Yashu means “to go”, and owa meaning “hunt”, but no one really knows.