About

About this site

Catfish Capital covers the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta: the farm-raised catfish industry centred on Belzoni, the flood and the levee system that made the plain farmable, the geology behind its soils, and the tenancy, mechanisation and railroads that shaped who lived on it.

The plain is not a river delta. It is an alluvial floodplain between the Mississippi and the Yazoo, roughly two hundred miles long, bounded on the east by the loess bluffs at Vicksburg. Five sections divide the subject.

• The crop the town is named forLevee ponds, feed, plants and a labelling fight.
• The flood that changed federal policy1927, the levees, and the Corps.
• A plain, not a deltaAlluvium, loess bluffs, and the rivers that made it.
• Where the music was actually playedPlantations, players, and the trail markers.
• Shares and trainsSharecropping, the Great Migration, and the lines north.