Ask Rufus: A Basket of Sorrows Until World War I, groups of Choctaws would still travel through Lowndes County. The men would hunt and work on farms, and the women made baskets for trade. This Choctaw basket is more than 100 years old and was passed down through the Billups family, who had a farm in southern Lowndes County near where Tisha Homa, a Choctaw captain known as Red Pepper, once lived. Courtesy photo
In the 1970s, I found an old Choctaw basket in the attic of my great aunt Marcella Sykes Billups Richards‘ home in Columbus. It was not a tourist-trade basket but a well-made, reinforced work basket more than 100 years old.