Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal

By James R. Atkinson

A thorough examination of the Chickasaw Indians, tracing their history as far back as the documentation and archeological record will allow
 
Before the Chickasaws were removed to lands in Oklahoma in the 1800s, the heart of the Chickasaw Nation was located east of the Mississippi River in the upper watershed of the Tombigbee River in what is today northeastern Mississippi. Their lands had been called "splendid and fertile" by French governor Bienville at the time they were being coveted by early European settlers. The people were also termed “splendid” and described by documents of the 1700s as “tall, well made, and of an unparalleled courage. . . . The men have regular features, well-shaped and neatly dressed; they are fierce, and have a high opinion of themselves.”
The progenitors of the sociopolitical entity termed by European chroniclers progressively as Chicasa, Chicaca, Chicacha, Chicasaws, and finally Chickasaw may have migrated from west of the Mississippi River in prehistoric times. Or migrating people may have joined indigenous populations. Despite this longevity in their ancestral lands, the Chickasaw were the only one of the original "five civilized tribes" to leave no remnant community in the Southeast at the time of removal.

Atkinson thoroughly researches the Chickasaw Indians, tracing their history as far back as the documentation and archaeological record will allow. He historicizes from a Native viewpoint and outlines political events leading to removal, while addressing important issues such as slave-holding among Chickasaws, involvement of Chickasaw and neighboring Indian tribes in the American Revolution, and the lives of Chickasaw women.

Splendid Land, Splendid People will become a fundamental resource for current information and further research on the Chickasaw. A wide audience of librarians, anthropologists, historians, and general readers have long awaited publication of this important volume.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817383374

Book preview

SPLENDID LAND, SPLENDID PEOPLE

SPLENDID LAND, SPLENDID PEOPLE

The Chickasaw Indians to Removal

JAMES R. ATKINSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2004

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Minion

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atkinson, James R.

   Splendid land, splendid people : the Chickasaw Indians to removal / James R. Atkinson.

        p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8173-1339-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8173-5033-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8173-8337-4 (ebook)

1. Chickasaw Indians—History—Sources. 2. Chickasaw Indians—Government relations. 3. Chickasaw Indians—Wars. 4. Tombigbee River Valley (Miss. and Ala.)—History—Sources.

I. Title.

  E99.C55A75 2004

  976.004′973—dc21

2003008300

Dedicated in memory of my father, Robert F. Atkinson (1915–1993),

and to my mother, Evelyn House Atkinson

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

1. Land of the Bones

2. Down a Long Road

3. The Long Road Narrows

4. The Road Has No Fork

5. The Road Lengthens

6. A Better Road Traveled

7. A Road Unexpected

8. The Strange Road Ends

9. A Short but Dangerous Road

10. The War Road Ends

11. The Road West Begins

12. The Road West

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Locations of Indian groups and sites in the present-day states of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana

2. Examples of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chickasaw cultural material

3. Recent painting of a Chickasaw warrior

4. Locations of the Chickasaw settlement villages by 1736

5. Pen tracing of part of Henry Lusher’s U.S. Land Office survey map of 1835

6. The Chickasaw settlement villages in the large and small prairies by 1736

7. Present view of approximate site of the Natchez village

8. Part of the contemporary Broutin map of the 1740 French-Indian invasion of the large prairie of the Chickasaw, showing the 1736 attack route of Pierre d’Artaguette

9. Present view of approximate site of Ogoula Tchetoka

10. Pen tracing of the primary features on the contemporary 1736 Broutin map of Bienville’s invasion of the small prairie

11. Contemporary anonymous map of Bienville’s 1736 invasion of the small prairie of the Chickasaw

12. Locations of major late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Chickasaw nation sites and various cities, towns, and roads in the present-day states of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana

13. Obverse of the Washington Peace Medal probably owned by Piomingo

14. Lower Chickasaw Bluffs, ca. 1796

15. Approximate Chickasaw domain prior to the treaties of 1805, 1816, and 1818

16. Drawing of part of an 1834 U.S. Land Office survey township plat showing the location of the last Chickasaw Council House north of Pontotoc Creek

17. Chickasaw domain prior to the removal treaties of 1832 and 1834

Preface and Acknowledgments

In 1492 when Christopher Columbus and some of his subordinates walked a sandy island beach in the West Indies, one of the numerous native populations of the present southeastern United States was occupying territory on an ancient river that flowed south into the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually the Chickasaw chiefdom people would learn of the alien arrival via word of mouth, and those still alive in A.D. 1540 would actually meet, communicate, and cooperate with the strangely dressed humanoids from another world. By then the Chickasaw people had learned that the alien world lay far to the east, on the other side of what they and other indigenous people called the Great Lake.

This is a story of the Chickasaw people gleaned from the historical and archaeological records left behind as they traveled through the centuries. It is a story of conflicts in culture, the detrimental consequences of European contact, and remarkable survival to the present.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because I began this work over twelve years ago and went several years at a time without returning to it, there may be some people now forgotten who provided assistance. I remember well, however, Pat Galloway’s reading of my first draft in 1990 and her making valuable comments and suggestions and encouraging me to lengthen it into a book rather than the article I initially intended it to be. I finally took her advice in late 1999. To her I offer a belated thank you.

As always when I write papers of a historical nature about the Old Southwest, Jack D. Elliott, Jr., has been of assistance with regard to clarifications of some of the numerous inaccuracies in the secondary literature and in bringing to my attention a few obscure sources. Others who have contributed varying amounts of assistance include, especially, Joseph Peyser, Jim Knight, Princella Nowell, Alexander Moore, Richard Colbert, Joyce Bushman, and Mary Ann Wells. The latter appears to be the first researcher in Mississippi to discover that an obscure but extremely valuable French map of some of the early eighteenth-century Chickasaw villages had been published in a general history book in 1967.

I also wish to thank the Natchez Trace Parkway library at Tupelo, Mississippi, for being just across the hall from my office between 1984 and 1997 when I was employed by the National Park Service as a prehistoric and historic archaeologist. The collections of copies of early documents and maps located there were invaluable, as were the thousands of research note cards and typed reports written over the years by people who had worked there, such as Dr. Dawson A. Phelps and Dr. Jesse D. Jennings. Other libraries that provided assistance through having books I needed, or by acquiring them through interlibrary loan, include the Lee County, Mississippi, Public Library, the Mitchell Memorial Library at Mississippi State University, and the Fant Memorial Library at Mississippi University for Women. With regard to the MSU library, special thanks are due Mattie Sink of Special Collections, as well as others in that division. Assistance of personnel at other libraries and archives is also much appreciated, such as the National Archives depositories at Suitland, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the United States Court of Claims in Washington, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the Tennessee State Library and Archives, especially Susan Maszatos. I also appreciate the constructive comments provided by reviewers Patricia K. Galloway, Jay K. Johnson, and Tony Paredes. Lastly, I extend my sincere gratitude to Kathy Cummins for her laborious and excellent editorial work on the manuscript.

1

Land of the Bones

The splendid and fertile land on the upper Tombigbee River (Figure 1) in present-day northeast Mississippi contains the bones of the vast majority of the many thousands of Chickasaw people who have lived upon the earth to the present. Some of the progenitor people of the population that evolved into this sociopolitical entity, originally written Chicasa, may have migrated from west of the Mississippi River in remote prehistoric times. Unless such people were so numerous and superior militarily that they forced a mass exodus of the indigenous people, these possible westerners more likely would have joined and amalgamated with the indigenous people, who are archaeologically documented to have been present there on a consistent basis since at least 6000 B.C. It really makes no difference. The Chickasaw, whose name meaning has become obscure, came to be and continue to be.¹

Nearly all of the various origin myths of both the Chickasaw and Choctaw give an unspecified trans–Mississippi River location for the earlier home of both of these groups, and they were supposedly one people until separating after arriving east of the river. Most historians and anthropologists have asserted that this is evident as a result of alleged similarities in their cultural manifestations. This is not the case, however, because archaeological evidence and ethnographic descriptions show a marked disparity between their pottery, burial customs, hairstyles, physical characteristics, and other traits. The only significant similarity was their language.²

The Tombigbee River (Figure 1) flows slightly southeast from the Chickasaw area into the present-day state of Alabama and on to Mobile Bay after its juncture with the Alabama River. Today, that part of the river north of the juncture is known as the Tombigbee and the remainder from there to Mobile Bay is known as the Mobile River, but the entire source from the bay to the Chickasaw villages was referred to by the Europeans as the Mobile River, the River of the Chickasaw, or the River of the Choctaw.

From remote times the native people of the southeast built secure homes, obtained sustenance from the land, made comfortable clothing, and constructed efficient tools, weapons, adornments, and household items from natural resources. In winter they lived in secure, well-insulated round houses constructed by placing closely spaced posts in the ground, weaving cane or sapling strips horizontally among them, and plastering the resulting walls with wet mud, which was allowed to dry. The cone- or dome-shaped roofs were covered with thick layers of long grass oriented toward the ground. The summer houses were usually square or rectangular with peaked roofs. The winter houses had fire basins in the centers of the earth floors, and other fire basins for cooking were located outside the houses. Trash was thrown away near the houses or buried in dug or natural pits. If houses were located near streams, water was procured from them in large earthen jars and transported to the houses for storage and use. In instances similar to the customs of the historic Chickasaw whose houses were usually built on ridge tops far from springs or flowing streams, pit cisterns with clay linings were constructed to catch rainwater. Sometimes small erosional ravines on the sides of ridges were dammed to create small reservoirs. Clothing and footwear were made from animal skins, and cordage was made with inner fibers of the bark of trees. After European cloth woven from cotton, flax, and wool became available, clothing was made from these materials. In historic times blankets purchased from European traders supplemented their animal-skin wraps and bed coverings. Food was partially procured from wild-growing plants and trees until domestic fruit trees such as peach were introduced by the Europeans. Fish, shellfish, turtles, and crustaceans were captured from streams, rivers, and natural ponds. After about A.D. 500 domesticated crops such as maize (corn) were introduced and planted near villages or isolated houses. Nearly all species of mammals and large birds were hunted for food, especially deer, bears, raccoons, opossums, rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, geese, and ducks. Introduction in about A.D. 500 of the stringed bow with arrows tipped by small chipped stone points had made hunting more efficient and less time consuming. Tools, weapons, and personal adornments were made from local Tombigbee River chert and exotic stone and from wood, bone, and shellfish. Baskets were made from cane and sapling strips. Pottery, made from local clays by hand molding, made its appearance in the southeast around 2000 B.C. Numerous changes in decoration techniques, motifs, and other elements of pottery making occurred through the centuries. Examples of native seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century cultural materials related directly to the Chickasaw are shown in Figure 2, and a Chickasaw warrior wearing archaeologically documented ornaments is shown in Figure 3.³

Religious beliefs and practices of the native southeastern people, especially belief in an afterlife, extended into remote prehistoric times, as demonstrated by burial thousands of years ago of personal possessions with the dead. Religious ceremonies in various forms were conducted, and funeral rites of various types were performed. The Chickasaw sometimes buried their dead inside the house and under the frame bed belonging to the deceased individual. Those who died at home or nearby were buried soon after death, but those who died too far away to carry home immediately were normally either placed on elevated scaffolds or covered with tree branches, logs, or stones; normally the bones were later retrieved and given a typical funeral at his or her home. With regard to the historic Chickasaw, the deceased was buried either in a round or oblong grave large enough to accommodate an extended on the back, flexed on the side, or bundle (disarticulated) position. The flexed position was sometimes referred to by early Euro-Americans as in a sitting position.⁴

In general, early social organization among southeastern native Americans consisted of extended family clans led by headmen; one of these might also serve as overall chief of the village in which he resided. There were peace chiefs and war chiefs, but only a man belonging to a hereditary line could advance to great chief or king over the entire tribe, as further addressed below. Each village had a head war chief, a position acquired through personality and personal accomplishment. One of them could rise to the position of head war chief over the entire tribe. A more complex feature of social organization was the moieties, among which the clans were divided. In most tribes, descent of an individual was through the female lineage rather than the male, meaning that children became members of their mother’s clan and were the responsibility of the mother and her blood relatives. A resigning or deceased great chief or king (an alternate title applied by Europeans) was nearly always succeeded by a maternal nephew.⁵

By around A.D. 1200 the early Chickasaw had probably accepted most or all of the widespread cultural practices and customs of a lifestyle known archaeologically as the Mississippian Tradition, named after the Mississippi River where it appears to have originated. Its most prominent physical remains to be seen today are the small to very large rectangular, flat-topped earthen pyramids, which when in use had wooden temples or important officials’ houses on their tops. Such pyramids had actually been constructed on a limited scale in the Mississippi drainage several hundred years prior to the appearance of the Mississippian Tradition, but erection of them fell by the wayside until the practice was rejuvenated in about A.D. 1000. Once introduced prior to A.D. 1000, corn and its extensive cultivation seems to have been instrumental in giving rise to larger populations, which in turn necessitated more sophisticated and complex government, the hallmark of the Mississippian Tradition. Social evolution, however, resulted in the governments of the Tradition becoming somewhat totalitarian, with religion and politics enmeshed. It is believed that hereditary priest rulers in some areas of the southeast came to be overlords, with authoritarian power that allowed only limited personal freedoms. Some of the Tradition societies became so powerful that other smaller Mississippian societies located far away were brought under their control. Resulting were Mississippian chiefdoms made up of as many as three or four societies, or towns, each sometimes having its own similar customs and sometimes ceremonial pyramids, but each subject to a central government and its subordinating, powerful officials who had control of the military.⁶

In the present northeast quadrant of Mississippi there is only one classic Mississippian mound group, the Owl Creek site in present-day Chickasaw County on a third-rank tributary of the Tombigbee River (Figure 1). It originally had seven small to medium-sized mounds in addition to a large pyramidal mound, which has survived almost intact. A site with only one mound (Lyon’s Bluff) is present on the south side of Line Creek in present-day Oktibbeha County between Columbus and Starkville, Mississippi. In addition, there are several pyramidal mound sites along the upper Tombigbee River proper south of Columbus, Mississippi, with only one mound each (Coleman Mound, Butler Mound, and two Chowder Springs Mounds). Partially as a result of almost no archaeological excavations at these river sites, possible political and temporal affiliations with one or both of the two sites that have seen limited investigation (Owl Creek and Lyon’s Bluff) are undetermined. At least one pyramidal mound is also found farther south near the city of Macon, Mississippi. A prominent mound in that area is located on the south side of the Noxubee River near the southwest part of the city. The Owl Creek site, partly because of its relative closeness to a huge Mississippian settlement area located in Lowndes, Clay, and Oktibbeha Counties and the documented settlement of the eighteenth-century Chickasaw north of there, was once assumed by lay people to be one of the sites visited by the famous Hernando De Soto Spanish expedition in 1540 (discussed below), but evidence for such has yet to be found. In fact, recent acquisition of a number of radiocarbon dates strongly indicates that the mounds were built prior to A.D. 1200 and abandoned by A.D. 1400. In any case, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of the documented Chickasaw discussed below were descendants of at least some of the people who were affiliated with some of these mound sites.⁷

A site likely occupied in 1540 is the aforementioned Lyon’s Bluff site on the upper course of Tibbee Creek (called Line Creek in that area), which has produced native ceramics typical of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and where a piece of orange micaceous earthenware typically associated with the sixteenth-century Spanish colonies of the circum-Caribbean area has been recovered. At Harmon Lake just to the north of Lyon’s Bluff was found a non-Indian artifact strongly resembling Damascene metal clothing buttons documented to have been in common use in Europe during the sixteenth century. This and other archaeological evidence indicate that the core area of the mid-sixteenth century Chickasaw was probably located on the west side of the Tombigbee River within a general area formed by drawing imaginary lines connecting the present-day cities of Columbus, Okolona, Starkville, and Macon, Mississippi.⁸

At the time of the De Soto expedition, the Mississippian chiefdom system was still distinctively in place, although it was probably in decline in some areas of the southeast visited by the Spanish. Although the Chickasaw were apparently no longer maintaining, building, or using Mississippian mounds by the beginning of the eighteenth century, trader James Adair recorded that they had a word, Aiambo Chaah, for their old round earthen forts. Because most early writers described Indian mound sites as forts, Adair’s reference is undoubtedly to artificial earthen mounds or defensive earthworks built by the Mississippian ancestors of the Chickasaw. The defensive earthworks usually encircled compact villages or ceremonial centers possessing one or more pyramidal mounds. Such applies at least to the Cotton Gin Port mound site on the west side of the Tombigbee River in present-day Monroe County, Mississippi, and the aforementioned Owl Creek site. Although the encircling earthworks are now obliterated at these sites by cultivation and erosion, they were still present through the late nineteenth century, as attested to by early white visitors such as Dr. Rush Nutt, who described the Owl Creek Mounds and earthworks in 1805. Although definite archaeological evidence has yet to be discovered, quite possibly the Lyon’s Bluff site also originally had an encircling earthwork prior to modern cultivation and resulting erosion. An early visitor to the Chickasaw, Englishman Thomas Nairne, recorded in 1708 that some old men here show the way [the Spaniards of 1540] Entered and Departed out of their Nation with the Hill where they Encampt. Unfortunately, he gave no indication as to even the general location of this hill.⁹

After wintering in present-day Tallahassee, Florida, among the Apalachee, the De Soto expedition left there in early 1540 and traversed parts of the present-day states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama prior to spending the winter of 1540–1541 among the Chicasa/Chickasaw on the Tombigbee River in present-day northeast Mississippi. Arriving at the river in December, the populous expedition was confronted across the water by Indians, but no communication ensued. The Spaniards built rafts and later crossed the river, arriving after dark of the same day at an abandoned village called Chicaca by the Spaniards. This village, situated on a ridge, may have contained one or more pyramidal mounds, but the sketchy writings of the chroniclers do not mention any. The chief of the Chicaca province, which had a dispersed population, was brought to meet with De Soto by attendants carrying him on a litter. The chief presented little dogs, rabbits, deer hides, and blankets to the Spaniards, and other Chicacas brought many rabbits and other foods in the days following. While encamped at the village, the almost 500 Spaniards undoubtedly put a strain on the food resources of the Chicaca and as well those of another group called the Saquechuma, which was subject to the former, thus indicating that a chiefdom existed. Because the Saquechuma would not pay tribute to the Chicaca, some Chicacas and a force of Spaniards marched to a village of the former but found it abandoned; the Chicacas then set it afire. Little else was recorded about the four-month stay of the Spaniards, but when preparing to continue the expedition De Soto asked the probably already disgruntled Chicaca chief for 200 people (undoubtedly both men and women) to help carry baggage and perform other jobs (earlier, De Soto had punished a Chicaca for stealing pigs by cutting off his hands). In early March the Chicaca launched a ferocious night attack on the camp, burned its structures, killed about twelve Spaniards, wounded many others, and killed or captured as many as sixty horses (some died in their burning stalls) and 300 to 400 pigs. Only one Chicaca warrior was killed; he was said to have been lanced by De Soto. Apparently fear of loose horses running all about during the mayhem of battle caused the Chicaca warriors to retreat, believing that Spaniards were riding them. Thereby the expedition was saved from total destruction, as admitted to by the chroniclers of the expedition. The army then moved less than two miles away to another village called Chicacilla, where an encampment was established on an adjacent slightly sloping hillside. The Chicaca chief had lived at Chicacilla prior to its apparent abandonment after the battle.¹⁰ Because the chief had lived here, this village was more likely to have had a pyramidal mound or mounds than the first. The Lyon’s Bluff site may well have been Chicacilla.

At Chicacilla the Spaniards repaired as best they could their weapons burned in the battle and made new shields, saddles, and lances, but before they could leave the Chicaca territory, the Chicacas launched another attack. This time the Spaniards were alert and repulsed them with some loss of life. In April the expedition headed northwest toward the Mississippi River after camping for a few days at a nearby small village of the Alimamu, or Alibamu, a group apparently part of the Chicaca chiefdom. While there they ravaged the countryside for provisions. Soon after leaving the camp, however, they had to do battle at a palisade fort of the Alimamu, which was captured. The expedition escaped from the area to continue its exploration for two more years on the west side of the Mississippi River.¹¹

The Spaniards left behind a Chickasaw culture whose participants, as a result of meeting the alien Spaniards, had a different perspective on themselves and their rigid social/political system, a circumstance that is speculated to have eventually resulted in notable changes. Devastating loss of life through the diseases introduced by the Spaniards is also speculated to have further altered the Mississippian system. The same was applicable to most other native American cultures encountered directly or indirectly by the De Soto expedition. Just as the American civil war disrupted the cotton/slavery social system of the southern United States in the nineteenth century, European contact and its negative effects are believed to have contributed greatly to the disruption of Mississippian society. In both cases a more egalitarian society eventually evolved.¹²

In the 144 years following the De Soto expedition, during which there were no European incursions into present-day northeast Mississippi, Chickasaw society underwent the changes mentioned above, and the primary settlement area shifted northward to the headwater creeks of the Tombigbee River (Figure 1). By 1690 the southernmost village or settlement area was Yaneka, as recorded by English trader James Adair. This settlement was primarily located in present-day southeastern Pontotoc County on Chiwapa Creek (earlier labeled Yaneka Creek on French maps) and probably also on the nearby much smaller Tubbalubba Creek in present-day Lee County. According to Adair, Yaneka was the habitation area first settled by the Chickasaw upon moving into the upper Tombigbee River drainage. The other villages were located to the northeast on present-day Old Town Creek and its northwest-oriented tributaries of Coonewah, Little Coonewah, and Kings Creeks in present-day Lee County in the northernmost part of the Black Prairie physiographic zone that extends south into Monroe, Chickasaw, Clay, Oktibbeha, and Noxubee Counties and on into Alabama.¹³ At this time the tribal name was usually spelled Chickasah or Chickasaw by the Europeans.

Prior to the Baron de Crenay map of 1733, which first located most or all of the villages, habitation locations in the upper Tombigbee River basin had not been recorded with any significant specificity, but many names had been recorded by 1702. The earliest known list of Chickasaw villages or towns appears on a map of the Mississippi Valley by Vicenzo Coronelli in 1684. These villages/towns, some of which are recognizable in later lists, were Fabatchaous (Falatchao), Malata (Amalata), Archebophoni (Apeony?), Totchinaske (Tonasqui), Chichafalara (Choukafalya), Ontcha Patafa, Pakaha (Ackia?), and Chikoualika (Chuckalissa). Of interest is the apparent absence of the Yaneka settlement discussed by Adair, who may have rendered the name incorrectly. In 1702 Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville listed eighteen villages, some of which were undoubtedly minor subdivisions of major habitation locales. Most do not subsequently appear in historical records. A total of 588 houses are tabulated for the eighteen villages. In another 1702 document d’Iberville stated that in addition to the main Chickasaw settlement the Chicacha have additional people on the Ouabache [Wabash] River, in two villages where they have about 120 men. In those days, before an understanding had been acquired of the various confluences of the many streams and rivers, the Ohio River was often referred to as the Wabash River, and sometimes the Tennessee River was referred to as the Wabash as well. In this case the Tennessee is probably the river addressed. According to a relation from five traveling Canadians in 1701, there was a Chicacha village on the Wabash, which in this case was definitely the Tennessee. Also, a map dated 1701 by Guillaume de Lisle shows four unnamed Petit village des Chicachas below villages of other Indian tribes on the Tennessee, apparently in present-day north Alabama. Another map by de Lisle dated 1703 is similar but shows only two unnamed villages that are labeled similarly to those on the 1701 map. Significantly, both of these maps and a third (apparently prepared prior to 1697), which shows no Chickasaw villages on the Tennessee, depict the Chickasaw settlement in present-day northeast Mississippi. Probably the mysterious villages on the Tennessee were actually base camps occupied intermittently by Chickasaw hunters. Some of the eighteen village names reported by d’Iberville could be applicable to these possible camps or villages. Possibly the occupants of the villages on the Tennessee River were not actually Chickasaw, for this name also appears among other Muskhogean Indian groups. For example, a village of Choctaw-affiliated people living near the Gulf Coast was called Chickasahay.¹⁴

Choctaw research by Patricia Galloway led her to contend in two publications that the Chickasaw had not yet moved into the Lee–southeast Pontotoc County area by 1700. However, her contention is based on what I consider a flawed interpretation of where Frenchman Henri de Tonti visited the Chickasaw in 1702 after traveling from Mobile Bay. She had used Tonti’s leagues traveled per day, as recorded by him, to calculate where certain natural features, Indian sites, and other places were located, including his northernmost point of travel, the Chickasaw villages. Using 2.5 miles to a league, as Galloway had done, my subsequent figuring of the Tonti route based on my previous research placed the historic period Chackchiuma Old Fields in the Starkville-Columbus area and the Chickasaw villages no farther south than present-day adjacent southern Lee and Pontotoc Counties, whereas she had placed the Chackchiuma Old Fields some forty miles south of there in Kemper County, Mississippi, and the Chickasaw villages in Clay County, some forty miles south of present-day Lee County.¹⁵

By the turn of the eighteenth century the Chickasaw villages appear to have been scattered over a large area of the extreme northern part of the Black Prairie, which terminates just north of present-day Tupelo in Lee County. Thomas Nairne wrote from the villages in 1708 that the Chicasaw Tribe at present consists of about 700 men devided in 8 villages, the chief whereof is that of Hollatchatroe.¹⁶ Nairne went on to say that the villages were located within fifteen miles of the head of navigation on the Tombigbee, and he described the country as being pleasant open forests of oake chesnuts and hickery so intermixt with savannas as if it were a made lanskape. These savanas are not perfectly Levell, like our’s in Carolina, but full of gentle Ascents, which yet are not too steep for the plough, on the Top of these knowlls live the Chicasaws, their houses a Gunn or pistole shot asunder, with their improved ground peach and plum trees about them.¹⁷ The fifteen miles mentioned by Nairne with regard to the head of navigation on the Tombigbee is significant in that all early historic documents and maps that mention this place locate it just below the fork of the Tombigbee River and its western branch, present-day Old Town Creek, on which most of the Chickasaw resided. The documented southern end of the main part of the Chickasaw settlement in the Tupelo area west of Old Town Creek is about fifteen miles from the fork, and the site of the southernmost part of the settlement on present-day Chiwapa Creek, Yaneka, is about seventeen miles slightly northwest of the fork.

A dispersed configuration of the Chickasaw settlements apparently continued until the early 1720s when frequent attacks from the Choctaw to the south began. For mutual protection the villages were thereafter consolidated into a relatively small area in present-day Lee County that became known as the Chickasaw Old Fields on present-day Old Town Creek and its tributaries (Figures 4 and 5). This entailed the abandonment or relocation of outlying settlements such as Yaneka. The sizes of the villages were also reduced because the previous dispersed configurations of the houses that made up the village areas were not conducive to safety from surprise attacks. Moreover, by 1724 the Chickasaw population had been significantly reduced as a result of European diseases and intensified warfare, the latter also a repercussion from European interactions. Thus clusters of villages came to characterize the now consolidated Chickasaw settlement. After the French-Chickasaw-Choctaw wars ended in the mid-1760s, the settlement retained its same general location on the Old Town Creek drainage until the late 1790s. The groups of villages that made up the settlement were called towns by the English. As an example with regard to village constriction, archaeological evidence shows that the Choukafalya settlement/town area in present-day south Tupelo had extended for at least three miles south from the compact village by that name that was present by 1736. Such was also the case with the Chuckalissa settlement/town in northwest Tupelo, which had earlier extended northwest into the edge of present-day northeast Pontotoc County.¹⁸

The Chickasaw people who lived upon this land were generally described in glowing terms by nearly all of the Europeans who associated with them in the eighteenth century. Le Page du Pratz, for example, said, The men have regular features, well shaped and neatly dressed; they are fierce, and have a high opinion of themselves. Jean-Bernard Bossu stated that the Chickasaws are tall, well made, and of an unparalleled courage. John F. D. Smyth opined that they are a very brave and respectable nation, not for their numbers, for they are few, but for their virtue, and unconquerable spirit. With regard to Chickasaw women, Major Robert Rogers described them in 1762 as far exceeding in beauty any other nation to the southward, and with regard to the men and possibly the women also, he wrote that they were tall, well-shaped and handsome featured. Thomas Nairne, writing in 1708, stated that the Chickasaws are to the Talapoosies as men of Quality among us are to the peasants, look much more brisk, airy and full of life . . . ; add to that both sexes of the Chickasaws are proper handsom people, exceeding the others.¹⁹

Although Chickasaw adult males are normally perceived as the military defenders of the homeland and the only sex to engage in attacks against an enemy in their territory and in external raids, the participation of women in such activities seems to have at least occasionally occurred in the eighteenth century. In 1708, Thomas Nairne reported the following: The Chickasaws ussually carry 10 or Twelve Young women with them to the Warrs, whose business is to sing a fine Tune, dureing any action. If their own men succeed, they praise them highly and Degrade the Enimy but if they give Back [retreat] the singers alter their praises into reproaches, Thus changing notes according as their party advance or give way. During a French and Indian attack on a Chickasaw village in 1736, singing women with hatchets in their hands are reported to have led the reinforcements from a nearby village. In the late eighteenth century women sometimes, at least, were still accompanying men on war parties, as illustrated by documentation that the wife, named Wayther, of mixed-blood William Colbert always went with him to war and on other travels.²⁰ Thus Chickasaw women were valuable in boosting the morale of the warriors, in addition to their numerous other roles and tasks of bearing and raising children, planting, tending, and harvesting crops, fishing, gathering wild plant foods and firewood, cooking, making clay pottery and wooden baskets, and so on.

Prior to 1734, according to Le Page du Pratz, five Yazoo River tribes had become so depopulated that they joined the Chickasaw and make now but one nation with them. These were the Yazoo, Koroa, Chackchiuma, Ofogoula, and Tapoussa. Du Pratz was not entirely accurate, however, for not all of the populations of some of these tribes joined the Chickasaw, especially those of the Chackchiuma, Ofogoula, and Koroa. By 1736 the northwest villages constituted the area known by the French as the large prairie and those located to the southeast were in the small prairie. The three villages in the southern division, or town, of the large prairie were named Tchitchatala, Falatchao, and Etokouma. Those in the northern division, collectively called the town of Chuckalissa by the Chickasaw and English, were Amalata, Taskaouilo, Achoukouma, and Ogoula Tchetoka. Chuckalissa was also referred to as great town by 1771, as recorded by Bernard Romans. It later came to be called Big Town and Old Town as well. Following dispersal of the Natchez Indians by the French in 1730, a sizable contingent of that nation was given asylum by the Chickasaw. Most of them became established in a separate village for which no name other than Natchez has been recorded; it was located just east of Amalata in the large prairie (Figures 6 and 7). Numerous Natchez pottery sherds have been recovered on the east side of the large prairie in the approximate area where the Natchez village is shown on the de Batz map of 1737. By 1736 the compact small prairie town was made up of the villages named Choukafalya, Ackia, and Apeony. This town was in the northern part of a once larger settlement referred to by Adair as the Long House. Eventually the area exclusively came to be called Long Town. The prairie area in which all these villages lay was called the Chickasaw Old Fields as early as 1752 and was delineated and labeled as such on the official Chickasaw Cession survey map dated 1835 (Figure 5). All of these towns in present-day Lee County are now archaeologically documented, and portions have been infrequently excavated by professional archaeologists over the years from 1935 to the present.²¹ Professional excavations, however, no longer occur except with the consent of the present Chickasaw government in Oklahoma when a site is threatened by development. Digging of graves by local artifact collectors in search of valuables, however, has been ongoing regularly for over a hundred years. Such digging is now illegal, but it continues.

Of interest is that after focused historical and archaeological studies conducted in the 1930s and 1980s regarding the specific location of the early to late eighteenth-century Chickasaw settlement had been completed, a unique primary source never used before by amateur or professional historians and archaeologists came out of obscurity to verify the accuracy of the studies. Totally supporting the conclusions of the location studies is the following quote from Malcolm McGee, a white resident of the Chickasaw nation between 1767 and 1848, who served as Chickasaw interpreter for dozens of years after becoming an adult: The ‘Old Fields’ lay on the Southern bank of Old Town Creek, stretching from some four or 5 miles above [northwest] to down four or five miles below Long Town—making it some 13 or 14 miles long by about 4 broad, with here & there a copse of wood to dot the wide & long extended expanse. Long Town was 4 miles down Town Creek from Old Town, & the Post Oak Town was about the same distance in a southerly direction on Coppertown viz Techatulla creek [present-day Coonewah Creek].²²

The village called Achoukouma by 1737 may have originated as a result of the documented incorporation of part of the Chackchiuma, whose population and settlement became fragmented in the early eighteenth century. Romans reported that the Ashuck hooma village name meant red grass. The name spelled this way indeed means red grass, but the original meaning of the village name could have been red crawfish, the English translation of the Chackchiuma Indian tribal name. This is supported, in fact, by the de Crenay map of 1733, which spells the village name Chochuma. Romans also states in his book that in 1771 all the villages of the Chickasaw were in an irregular area about one mile and a half in length, but this is undoubtedly an error on his part. He probably only meant to be referring to the Chuckalissa/Old Town settlement. In fact, the description is contradicted in notations on the Roberts map of circa 1773, which was made using data obtained by Romans. The notation states that the villages do not take up more than 2 1/2 miles in length & about half that Breadth.²³ Still, the areal size was somewhat understated.

That all of the upper Tombigbee River Chickasaw villages were in the present-day Tupelo area by 1736 is proved by French governor Bienville’s statement that the Natchez village in the large prairie was only one league (about 2.5 to 3 miles) from Choukafalya and Ackia in the small prairie. The Natchez village was only a short distance from Ogoula Tchetoka, as shown on the de Batz map of 1737 (Figure 6). Moreover, and as substantiating proof, a map drawn in 1740 by Ignace Francois Broutin, Louisiana’s chief engineer and surveyor, shows one or more of the large prairie villages and the route of d’Artaguette’s attack on them in 1736. As translated by Joseph Peyser, who brought the map out of obscurity in the late 1980s, a notation along a watercourse just south of the villages shown states small branch of the Mobile River which passes between these villages and those attacked in 1736. This small stream is present-day Kings Creek, which indeed flows southeast from the large prairie to the north side of the small prairie and on to its junction with Old Town Creek in present-day east Tupelo.²⁴

In addition to various writers of history in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, even some modern professional historians, including Arrell Gibson (The Chickasaws), have presented highly erroneous locations for the early Chickasaw villages. The cause in all cases was reliance on an undocumented statement by H. B. Cushman in 1899. In his poorly documented writings in History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, Cushman made the totally erroneous statement that Pakitakohlih, supposedly the original version of the present name Pontotoc, was a town known to the French . . . by the name Chickasahha and afterward to the English as Chickasaw Old Town and then to the Americans as The Chickasaw Old Fields. As if that were not enough, he further stated that it was the same ‘Old Town’ in which De Soto wintered with his army in 1540. In fairness to Cushman, I must point out that he conceived these notions without having seen pertinent early French and English maps and numerous eighteenth-century French, English, and Spanish documents and without knowledge of modern archaeological data that prove that the Chickasaw had no villages until the late eighteenth century in that part of present-day Pontotoc County. These mistakes have been perpetuated in subsequent historical literature even to the present by history writers unaware of the numerous modern anthropological/archaeological studies of the Mississippi Chickasaw. Moreover, with regard to Gibson’s 1971 history of the Chickasaw, both published and unpublished twentieth-century scholarly archaeological and historical research that contradicts Cushman and others was either overlooked or ignored. Gibson’s work contains other frequent misinterpretations and factual errors but is otherwise a scholarly overview of Chickasaw history. Unfortunately, because Gibson’s history is a modern work, his erroneous locations for the Chickasaw are being assumed correct and repeated by scholars unfamiliar with some of the pertinent sources.²⁵

Apparently associated with reopening of official trade with the English following the disruptive Yamasee War to the east in 1715, a group of Chickasaws migrated in about 1717 to near Fort Moore (on the site of an old Shawnee village called Savannah Town) on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. Motivated by the desire for protection of the western part of the colony, the South Carolina government encouraged Chickasaw migrations to near the New Windsor township area (where Fort Moore was located), and in 1722 proposed that the entire Chickasaw nation settle at the place they desire, and we will assist them with all the corn we can from the Savannah Town. Others indeed soon migrated to the Savannah River, but the main nation rejected the proposal, stating that they resolved to maintain themselves on that Spot of Ground, where their fore Fathers had kindled their Fires & laid their Bones for so many generations. The second group of migrants, led by a chief known as Squirrel King, formed a separate village about ten miles from the first at the mouth of Horse Creek. In 1739 the South Carolina government set aside 21,774 acres for Chickasaw settlement in New Windsor township. By 1748 the second group was the largest, comprising about seventy men and their families. The first group was composed of about twenty men and their families.²⁶

The Chickasaws who moved to South Carolina were undoubtedly some or all of that part of the population who had found intolerable the Choctaw and northern Indian attacks instigated by the French in Louisiana and in New France in the region of what is now southern Canada and the northern United States. Distressed by the killings associated with the conflicts, these Chickasaws saw South Carolina as a refuge far removed from the violence. That their leader was called Squirrel King is significant in this regard. According to Thomas Nairne, writing in 1708, the Chickasaw had a custom whereby any family so inclined could choose a man from another family as its protector. This man was nearly always an esteemed and respected warrior, who after being chosen for the duty was expected to take steps to ward off potential harm to the family by other Chickasaws or by people from other tribes. Upon being bestowed with this duty, he was thereafter referred to as a Fane Mingo or Squirrell king.²⁷ Thus it seems clear that the noted leader of the South Carolina Chickasaws named Squirrel King had been persuaded by at least the second group of migrants to accept the invitations of the colony whites and lead them out of the main nation to a safer location. Alternatively, perhaps the Squirrel King himself instigated migration of the family he had been chosen to protect. It is possible that some of the migrants were from the same family as the Squirrel King.

Some of the Carolina Chickasaws became disgruntled and moved across the river into Georgia, where a man named Roger Lacy had run out a little town near him for their habitation in gratitude for the Chickasaws’ helping him establish the town of Augusta by assisting in building a fort in 1737. This was not a permanent move; a disastrous flood in 1741 is probably what caused them to move back to South Carolina. Later, all of Squirrel King’s Chickasaws moved from Horse Creek to the Ogeechee River in Georgia, but all except ten returned in 1747. However, by 1752 and as late as 1762 the eastern Chickasaws were living about ten miles below Augusta on the Georgia side of the river at a place called New Savannah. In 1758 an aging Chickasaw leader called The Doctor by the English stated that they had exchanged their land with Lachlan McGillivray and were then occupying and planting land that belonged to him in both Georgia and South Carolina, the location in Georgia being at New Savannah. South Carolina officials were perturbed over this unauthorized and unfair exchange of land (the Chickasaw got only 1,000 acres, 500 on each side of the river). In 1756, McGillivray had caused the land he obtained from the Chickasaw to be surveyed and had allotted parcels to other white men besides himself. Edmond Atkin, a colony official, scolded the Chickasaw for exchanging so much land for so little and tried unsuccessfully to recover the Horse Creek property by canceling McGillivray’s original title. By 1766, the Georgia settlement may have been abandoned; some or all Chickasaws were occupying South Carolina land at that time. At least some of the eastern Chickasaw moved to the Creek territory, where they resided for a time before all or some of them joined the main Chickasaw in present-day northeast Mississippi. Although John Swanton determined that some eastern Chickasaw joined an old ally in the Creek country, the Kashita, possibly others went to the Chickasaw village called the Breed Camp near the Coosa River (discussed below). In early 1772 a Chickasaw group possibly from South Carolina was in the process of making a settlement in the same general area as the Breed Camp, as discussed by David Tait: Chickasaws are making a settlement on the side of a creek called Caimullga about 15 miles north from this [a Natchez and Creek village called Natchie] and falling into the Coosa River at the Chickasaw Trading path. Some Chickasaws, however, could have earlier (prior to 1767) left South Carolina and founded the mysterious settlement located at a place on the north side of the Tennessee River in present-day Madison County, Alabama, that was later referred to (in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century) as Chickasaw Old Fields. The Chickasaw living there had been attacked by Cherokees, supposedly in 1766. Although the attack was repulsed, the Chickasaws evidently abandoned the site because of continuing hostilities from that nearby tribe. As discussed in Chapter 5, however, the old fields on the Tennessee may have been settled earlier by Chickasaws documented to have migrated to the Cherokee domain in the 1740s and 1750s to escape the violence occasioned by war with the Choctaw and French. The Chickasaw were still claiming that area, as were the Cherokee, as late as 1805; in that year the former relinquished claim to it. Efforts in the first half of the 1790s by Chickasaw leaders to reclaim some of the old South Carolina property or be compensated for it were fruitless.²⁸

Squirrel King apparently only maintained limited association with the main population in the interior. The western Chickasaw who chose to remain and bear the hardships of the conflicts with the Choctaw and other groups instigated by the French apparently had little or no respect for the colony Chickasaw who had abandoned their homeland. Governor Glenn of South Carolina stated in 1750 that the eastern Chickasaw who live upon lands given them by this Province upon Savannah River and sometimes stroll over to the Georgia side . . . dare not return to their own Nation. The next year he stated, quite probably inaccurately, that they had been banished [from] their own country. In 1756 after depletion of the western population as a result of war and disease, the headmen and warriors of the western Chickasaw requested that the South Carolina colony send back the eastern Chickasaws to help them keep our lands from the French and their Indians. Such did not occur, although it is possible that some Chickasaws rejoined the nation.²⁹

According to Edmond Atkin, writing in 1755, Squirrel King was reputed to have killed more men with his own Hands, than any other Indian on the continent. This statement is probably much exaggerated, and another Atkin reference to Squirrel King that indicates he was the man who opened the Indian War in 1715 seems to be totally unfounded. However, Atkin’s contention that Squirrel King had more Personal Weight and Authority than any other; his talks being listened to attentively by other Nations as well as his own is probably true, but only with regard to the eastern Indians. Subchiefs under Squirrel King included Tuski Suki, Captain Coates, and Mingo Stobi (or Mastobey). All four of these men tried in mid-1746, with the blessing of the South Carolina House of Commons, to gain Crown approval for a visit to England on board a man-of-war.³⁰ They were apparently unsuccessful but support for such a journey by the House of Commons does reflect that the Chickasaw were considered valuable inhabitants of the colony.

The eastern Chickasaw indeed proved valuable to the South Carolina colony. In 1727 Squirrel King and his warriors provided significant aid to South Carolina in warring with the Yamasee. In 1740, during a declared war between Spain and Britain (War of Jenkins’ Ear), they assisted the English in a military campaign against and siege of Spanish St. Augustine, during which an English general was highly critical of Squirrel King for presenting him the head of a Spaniard. In 1742 Squirrel King and his warriors aided in the repulse of a Spanish attack on Fort Frederic in Georgia. According to one report they were the major factor in the victory. The eastern Chickasaw also occasionally became enmeshed in Indian conflicts, the Cherokee, Yamasee, Shawnee, and Mohawk being their most common adversaries. During the Cherokee War of the late 1750s and early 1760s, trader James Adair prepared to lead eastern Chickasaws against the Cherokee but withdrew his services when he could not obtain orders to march ahead of the colony