 | ||
The Yazoo lands were the sparsely populated, central and western regions of the U.S. state of Georgia, when its western border stretched back to the Mississippi River. The Yazoo lands were named for the Native American Yazoo tribe, that lived on the lower course of the Yazoo River, in what is now the present-day state of Mississippi.
The Yazoo lands would later become large portions of the present-day states of Alabama and Mississippi, with the exclusion of Spanish West Florida, which became the lower third of each state, and a narrow northern strip of land claimed by South Carolina in the Treaty of Beaufort that also stretched westward to the river, which became the two states' border counties with Tennessee.
In the 1790s, the Yazoo lands were the subject of a major political scandal in the state of Georgia, called the Yazoo land scandal. It led to Georgia's cession of the land to the U.S. government in the Compact of 1802.