History:

By the 1820 Treaty of Doak’s Stand, the Choctaw Nation sold their northwestern lands to the United States, and for the first time the large area of Mississippi in which Yazoo City was to be located was opened to settlement by white and black Americans.

In 1823, the Mississippi legislature created Yazoo County, several times larger than it is today before other counties to the north were carved out of it.

In 1825, by additional terms to the 1820 treaty, a new, young, Choctaw Chief, Greenwood LeFlore, whose mother was Choctaw and father was French, was granted one square mile of land for himself, the exact site of Yazoo City today, even though it was now in the newly-bought American territory.

LeFlore wanted the location as a speculation for future sale. He could see that it was the only sport on the entire length of the continuous Coldwater-Tallahatchie-Yazoo River system, that snaked southward throughout the Delta, where the Yazoo abruptly made a hairpin curve eastward to touch the foot of the bluffs that border the Delta from present-day Memphis down to Vicksburg. It would bed a unique and ideal situation for a year-round steamboad port for shipping cotton to New Orleans, even during the times of high water in the rest of the Delta each spring before the levees existed. And surely cotton would soon be widely grown in the new counties of Central Mississippi to the East.