It lay in the crotch where the river forked. Protected by water on two sides, and by open barrens on the third, its location had attracted wandering Cherokees into building here their huts and log stockades, until guarded Tallulah became the Indian heart of the region. The persistent seeping of pioneer migration from the eastern seaboard eddied around it; the white interloper treated here with the native, coveted the prosperous red fortress, and made it his own. Its name was changed later to that of the popular hero who drove back the redcoats from the rich levees of New Orleans, and scattered before him the redskins of the palmettoed peninsula at the southeast land's end. When the young nineteenth century brought statehood, bustling Jackson became the capital. It is hard for those who remember Jackson, or Charleston, or Richmond, in the sleepy glamor of their later years, to think of these as uncouth pioneer clearings: but such was their beginning. The first town hall in Jackson was a blockhouse, and more than once the straggly strings of huts at the split of the river, which constituted the settlement, had seen marauding Indians repelled from its main street. Political dignity transfigured the village out of its buckskin and bowie-knife existence, into a leisurely civic siesta. Governors and legislators peopled its walks; pillared mansions grew at the heads of long avenues of water oak. The hilly barrens and sedgy river-fields were combed into ordered rows of large-bladed corn and stocky cotton bushes. Slavery came early, and the slave quarters stretched behind the mansions and in the parched treeless opens. The anomalous shanties of the poor whites sprang like fungoids on outlying poor lands, and bunched near the river pier, where the fussy side-wheelers, the _Tallulah_ and the _Southern Star_, churned the muddy water, eager to paddle away past swampland and sandy waste to the gulf. Idling negroes sprawled along the pier, and on the bales before gin and compress; vehement orators in the Capitol fisted their defiance to the dastardly Liberty Men coiled like vipers in the arid North. The heavy pour of the sun, and the formal courtesy of the lords of the dark soil and the dark soul, mellowed the manner of the place, shaped it into that unhealthy beauty and charm men call the Old South.