Whiskey Chitto Creek

Whiskey Chitto Creek, or Ouiska Chitto Creek, also known officially as Whisky Chitto Creek[1] is an 86.4-mile-long (139.0 km)[2] spring-fed creek located in Allen, Beauregard, and Vernon parishes, Louisiana, in the United States. It is a tributary to the Calcasieu River and is located between present-day Mittie and Reeves, Louisiana.

Description

Whiskey Chitto Creek is part of the Calcasieu River Basin.[3] The creek is surrounded by a mixed pine-hardwood mid-growth forest and passes through low hills. Common wildlife around this creek are livestock, turkeys, deer, and raccoons. It contains largemouth bass, spotted bass, and bream.

It passes through the Kisatchie National Forest, and is a landmark and common vacation spot for many locals in the region. It is overseen by the Vernon Unit of the Calcasieu Ranger District. It is a designated "scenic waterway" by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declared it to be a 'navigable stream of the United States' in 2008. The stream near Mittie, Louisiana, is the site of where a federal agent found evidence of illegal cutting and floating of logs off federal lands that began the Calcasieu Log War of 1877-1879 <article published by Dr. Tom Watson, Dept. of History, McNeese State University, Lether Frazar Library Archives>. Federal agents shut down logging operations on streams in Imperial Calcasieu Parish for some time until issues were resolved.

Ouiska Chitto, meaning "Big Cane Creek," is a transliteration of the name given to the creek by the Choctaw people, the original settlers in this area. The Choctaw words were uski for cane and chito for large. French-speaking colonists and Anglo-American settlers adopted this derivation. later it was called "Whiskey Chitto Creek."

The United States Board on Geographic Names, the official arbiter of geographic names in the United States, decided in 1963 that the official name for the creek is spelled Whisky Chitto Creek.[1]

References
  1. U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Whisky Chitto Creek
  2. U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. The National Map, accessed June 20, 2011
  3. LADOTD: Calcasieu-Mermentau Basin: pp 2- Retrieved 2017-03-23

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