From Spying on the South (Tony Horwitz, 2019) pp119-
In the 1830s, steamboats performed another grim transport, carrying tribes exiled west of the Mississippi as part of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy. During the third day of my cruise on the American Queen, we passed the site of a steamboat collision in 1837 that drowned most of the seven hundred Creek packed aboard.
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124-5
In writing about estates like Rosedown, Olmsted also quoted a phrase common to ordinary Mississippians, who termed owners of grand properties “big bugs.” When I mentioned this to Rainwater, he nodded and said,
“My people were the little bugs who got squashed.”
His striking surname derived from Choctaw ancestors forced from their land in the 1830s. “People such as that” he said, gesturing at Rosedown’s Big House, “took land from us so they could grow cotton and get rich.”
They also profited from the forced labor of Turnbull’s 444 slaves, who serviced a white household of seven. At Rosedown, slaves duties included the creation and maintenance of Martha’s pleasure ground. Skilled gardeners propagated and potted exotic plants, while “invalids” unable to work in the fields did lighter labor such as polishing the statues.
Rainwater knew firsthand how much skill and sweat labor went into the care of these grounds, particularly during the blazing Louisiana summer—a season the Turnbulls usually spent in Europe, at Saratoga Springs, or at other resorts. “We returned home 13th of Sept,” Martha wrote of a five-month European tour in 1852, “had a fine garden.”
Rainwater headed off to trim hedges. “The lady of the house gets the credit, but who made this place, really?” he said. “Must have been a nice life, so long as you were the ones in charge.”
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