Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge

Most visitors see Reelfoot Lake from the state park side. The national wildlife refuge holds much of the rest: lands around the lake that are not in the state park, set aside by the federal government in 1941 and expanded since. The visitor center has exhibits and volunteers, a 3.5-mile auto tour loops through the bottomland hardwoods, and viewing towers look out over water that the 1811-12 earthquakes left behind. If you have a canoe or kayak, the refuge keeps marked canoe trails across the still, cypress-edged water. Birders and photographers come for waterfowl in the cold months. Some of the refuge is farmland leased under stricter soil rules than private owners once used, meant to slow the silt that would otherwise fill the lake.

Under the water and the soybeans, this was Chickasaw (Chikasha) country. The Chickasaw hunting range took in all of West Tennessee, and the treaties of 1805, 1816 and 1818 stripped it away. Historians say Andrew Jackson and the other commissioners used threats, economic coercion and bribery to get nearly 20 million acres, and that the 1818 agreement, the Jackson Purchase, ended every remaining Chickasaw claim in Tennessee. Gibson and Carroll counties, among others, were cut from that cession.

Removal followed after the Indian Removal Bill of 1830. Most of the Chickasaw crossed the Mississippi in 1837 and 1838, after great suffering, and the Chickasaw Nation is now centered in Oklahoma. The refuge is a quiet place to think about who the land belonged to first.