Pearl River

About

Pearl River and the 1820s Settlements. Long before Bienville renamed it in 1699, the Pearl River basin was the geographic and cultural heart of the Choctaw Nation. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians still maintains its tribal headquarters at Pearl River in Neshoba County — one of the most significant sites in Choctaw history and the location of the annual Choctaw Indian Fair. The 1802 Pinckney Treaty, officially the Treaty of San Lorenzo of 1795, established Spanish cession of the lands east of the Pearl to the United States. In the 1830s, Pearl River Indian settlements formed the basis of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which ceded 7.5 million acres of Choctaw lands.

As settlement pushed inland, the river became a commercial channel. The December 1835 voyage of the steamboat Choctaw upstream to Jackson linked the capital into regional trade. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Pearl River watershed was logged to support the regional timber industry of 1850 to 1910 and the railroad expansion of 1860 to 1910. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The exhaustion of old-growth stands in 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s brought large-scale logging to a close.

The river's flow was measured early and often. The USGS survey of the 1870s to 1890s, the gauging-station establishment of the 1880s to 1910s, and the state geological survey streamflow assessments of the 1910s to 1930s were the first comprehensive hydrological studies of the Pearl. State water pollution control studies in the 1950s to 1970s, followed by Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000, addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Today gauge 02482000 tracks the Pearl, which averages 4,800 cubic feet per second, with an optimal paddling range of 500 to 5,000 CFS on Class I water.

The modern river is shaped as much by engineering as by history. The Ross Barnett Reservoir was completed in 1960 on the Pearl north of Jackson, creating a 33,000-acre lake that serves as the capital city's primary water supply and a major recreation destination. Downstream, the river runs 444 miles through three distinct characters: an upper reach of 60 miles from Philadelphia to Carthage through Choctaw country, a middle reach of 80 miles from the Jackson metro to Georgetown that shifts from urban to rural, and a lower reach of 100 miles from Bogalusa to the Gulf through the swamps of the Mississippi-Louisiana border.

Conservation now anchors the Pearl's identity. The Pearl River Wildlife Management Area, established in 1951, is the largest wildlife management area in Mississippi at more than 35,000 acres. The river also remains prone to dramatic flooding — the 2014 Pearl River flood, driven by Tropical Storm Cindy, was the worst in more than 30 years. Between the reservoir at Jackson, the border swamps below Bogalusa, and a fish and mussel diversity ranking among the richest on the continent, the Pearl endures as a working river and a living one at once.