Chickasaw people

“ BOUNDARY BETWEEN CHEROKEES, CREEKS, CHOCTAWS, AND CHICKASAWS.
The lines of demarkation between the respective possessions of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations had long been a subject of dispute between them. People living in a state of barbarism and principally dependent upon the chase for a livelihood, necessarily roam over a vast amount of territory within which no permanent habitations have been established by themselves. ”

“ At the treaty, Tassel, on behalf of the Cherokees, said-'We will mark a line for the white people; we will begin at the ridge between the Tennessee and Cumberland, on the Ohio, and run along the same, till we get round the white people as you think proper. We will mark a line from the mouth of Duck river to the said line, and leave the remainder of the lands to the south and west of the lines to the Chickasaws.' And according to this the Chickasaw limits to the east were recognized by the parties to the Cherokee treaty, in the absence of the Chickasaws. ”

“ This ecomium on the Chickasaws finds full confirmation on the part of historians and travelers, French, Spanish and English:
“The nation of the Chickasaws is very warlike. The men have regular features, well shaped and neatly dressed; they are fierce, and have a high opinion of themselves. The nations who border upon them who speak the Chickasaw language best value themselves upon it.” (Du Pratz.)
“They are accounted and esteemed the bravest Indians upon the main, which makes good the common observation that the bravest soldiers are generally the most civil to prisoners.” ”

“ He did not for one moment doubt Anthony's honesty; nobody ever did. It was plain that the news was true.
"By Chickasaws on land and English on sea French and Spaniards are to be cracked like bugs between two boards. What is your advice, du Gay?"
The answer was prompt: "Release my Chickasaw and your buccaneer to tell their different peoples the plot is discovered. It will not be carried out this time. It is much easier to discourage than it is to defeat the English. Send [132] de Graaf to warn the fort at Mobile and let the Indian and the buccaneer see him get away so they may report that too." ”

“ He had courted the good will of the chief of Chickasaws, and had been requited by a return of civility, but the Spaniard really had a contempt for Indian character, and contempt always clouds justice, and when exercised, leads often to serious error.
Now that he was about to quit his encampment, DeSoto made a peremptory order on the Chickasaw chief for 200 of his ablest men to become his burden bearers. The Chickasaws were the proudest and most arrogant of the Indian tribes, and rather than be humbled, they preferred death. As allies, they were valuable, as foes, formidable. ”

“ The Chickasaws were a large and powerful tribe living in the fertile region of the upper Tombigbee; the French knew that they had incited the Natchez against them, and now Bienville resolved to attack them. In 1736 he sailed from New Orleans to Mobile with a strong force of French troops and twelve hundred Choctaw warriors. From Mobile he ascended the Tombigbee River in boats for five hundred miles, to the southeastern border of the present county of Pontotoc. The Chickasaw fort was a powerful stronghold about twenty-five miles from that point. ”

“ But the more enlightened are married by preachers, or authorized civil officers.
With the united nation of Choctaws and Chickasaws, the executive power is vested in four chiefs, called in Choctaw mingoes, who are selected one from each of the districts into which the country is divided, {267} and of which the Chickasaw tribe constitutes one. [199] These chiefs are vested with the usual veto and pardoning powers, and are elected [p311] for four years. Most of their other constitutional provisions resemble those of the Cherokees. ”

“ Richard C. Wiggs filed an application before the Dawes commission to be admitted to citizenship in the Chickasaw Nation, asserting, among other things, that he was a white man, and, prior to October 13, 1875, a citizen of the United States, on which day he lawfully married Georgia M. Allen, a native Chickasaw Indian, and member of the Chickasaw tribe ”

“ They continued eastward across the Mississippi until they arrived at Chickasaw Old Fields, where, the pole standing erect, they settled. Cushman (History of the Choctaw, etc., Indians, 62) gives the same tradition as being handed down by old men to missionaries in 1820, and that the Indians at the time named the “great water” Misha Sipokni (the Mississippi) . Buttrick gives a migration legend of the Chickasaws coming from the West across a great river; and the tradition fixes the crossing place at the bluffs, later known as the Chickasaw Bluffs, on one of which stands the city of Memphis. ”

“ John Wesley.)
“Not so numerous as the Choctaws, but more terrible on account of their intrepidity. The Chickasaws are tall, well made, and of an unparalleled courage.” (Bossu.)
“A brave, warlike people; tall, well-shaped and handsome featured.” (Rogers.)
“These brave Indians, our ancient allies and steady friends; irreconciliable enemies of the French.” (Sir Jeffrey Amherst.)
“There is no Indian nation on the continent near so handsome as the Chickasaws ”

“ He exulted like a sleek and lordly animal in this thrilling vitality, this imperious and insistent demand for conquest.
Chickasaw Pete's place, as he soon discovered, was no more pretentious in appearance than the San Gorgonio. It also was a long, low frame building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with their infinite and haunting suggestions of the tropics. ”

“ Seeing this, the Shyela also began to grin—a grin that broadened until it touched his eyes and set them dancing. And seeing this, the Chickasaw snickered. Then Thunder Sounds snickered; and all at once both began to laugh so loud that the steeps along the narrow valley roared with mirth, and the four ponies yonder in the deep green grass lifted up their voices all together in screaming laughter. If there had been anyone there to see, he might have said: ‘These young men are dying of the bellyache the way they hold their bellies and howl. ”

“ In the war that followed, the Choctaws sided with the French, the Chickasaws and Yazoos with the Natchez. Finally the French, under St. Dénis, won a complete victory, the women and children taken at Fort Rosalie were recaptured and brought to New Orleans, and the Natchez tribe was completely broken up. The prisoners were sent to die in the cruel slavery of the San Domingo sugar plantations, while a few who escaped the French were adopted into the Chickasaw nation. ”

“ The Chickasaws, occupying a tract of country now stretching across northern Mississippi and western Tennessee, were friendly to the English and willing to encroach on the French. They interrupted river traffic and practiced [115] every cruelty on their prisoners. D'Artaguette knew as well as the early explorers that in dealing with savages it is a fatal policy to overlook or excuse their ill-behavior. They themselves believed in exact revenge, and despised a foe who did not strike back, their insolence becoming boundless if not curbed. ”

“ Blunt thinks superior to Kansas tribes, 294; intent upon recovery of Fort Gibson, 311; troops pass resolution of reënlistment for war, 328-329
Chicago Tribune: 75, footnote
Chickasaw Battalion: 152, 155; Tonkawas to furnish guides for, 184, footnote
Chickasaw Home Guards: 184, footnote
Chickasaw Legislature: 306, footnote, 329, footnote
Chickasaw Nation: Pike arrested at Tishomingo, 200; funds drawn upon for support of John Ross and others, 215, footnote; Phillips communicates with governor, 323, footnote
Chickasaws: discord within ranks, 29; attitude towards secession, 63, footnote ”

“ CHICKASAWS, a tribe of North American Indians of Muskhogean stock, now settled in the western part of Oklahoma. Their former range was northern Mississippi and portions of Tennessee. According to their own tradition and the evidence of philology, they are closely connected with the Creeks and Choctaws; and they believe that they emigrated with these tribes from the west, crossed the Mississippi, and settled in the district that now forms the north-east part of the state of that name. ”

“ MacDonnell noted no Cherokee in sight, that is to say, not a living one. Several of the dead lay on the ground, their still faces already bearing that wan, listening, attentive look of death; they were heedless indeed of the hands that had rifled them of their possessions, for there were a few of the Chickasaw allies intent on plunder. ”

“ Meanwhile, after the year 1726, when Louisiana began to give some signs of hope as a colony, enterprising and dauntless English traders, with pack-horses laden with goods, had begun to penetrate the wilderness from Carolina and Georgia, driving a brisk traffic with the Chickasaws. Those Chickasaws, in opposition to the Choctaws, had come into alliance with the scattered fragments of the Natchez Indians, and harried the French. The French, under Bienville, with their Choctaw allies, made a rush upon the Chickasaws in 1736, but the Chickasaws secured a bloody victory. ”

“ The narratives of the expedition, however, do not give sufficient data regarding this site, so that it is impossible to fully identify the place by them, there being nothing beyond the statement already quoted that it was located on a sloping hill, a league distant from Chicaza. This being the only ancient Chickasaw village site properly lying on sloping ground, and at about the right distance from the burned town; it is more than probable that the position given above is the correct one. ”

“ The prairie, in which these villages were situated, covered a space of about six miles. The villages were small, and built in the shape of a triangle, on a hillock sloping down to a brook which was almost dry; further off was the main body of the Chickasaw villages, and the smaller ones seemed to be a sort of vanguard. The Choctaws having informed Bienville that he would find water no where else, he ordered the army to file off close to the wood which enclosed the prairie, in order to reach another hillock that was in sight. There the troops halted to rest and take nourishment. ”

“ It seemed to him the veriest reversal of all the probabilities that he should now be called upon to take his orders from Choolah the Fox, the savage Chickasaw. Yet he felt no immediate vocation for the command, had it been within his reach. With all his military talent and training he could [Pg 274] devise no other resource than to withstand the attack of the larger party with half their number; to swim the river, and drown there with a musket-ball in his brain; to flee into the woods to certain capture. ”

“ Supplementing Adair’s statements as to the strength of the Chickasaws, only a few authorities are here quoted: Sir Nathaniel Johnson, Sept. 17, 1708, stated in a report that “the Chikysaws have at least 600 men. These Indians are stout and warlike.... Slaves is what we have in exchange for our goods, which these people take from several nations of Indians that live beyond them.” Rivers, Historical Sketch of South Carolina, 238. In 1715, the census taken by South Carolina authorities gave 700 warriors. Gov. Bull, of South Carolina (1742) : “They do not exceed 400 men.” ”

“ The paleface has driven the red man to his death. My people share not the needs nor desires which civilization brings to the white brethren, nor the society demands which make our paleface sister a slave to her calling. Jack, I have lived among my white sisters, I have been one of them, been sought for, banqueted, heralded and had tributes of honor thrust upon me. No school, no church, no institution of science, no club, no society, no matter how select, has been other than glad to have Chiquita honor them with her presence. ”

“ His quiet life, his kindness, his charity, his knowledge of the simple arts of healing, so endeared him to every warring faction that at his house the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, the Frenchman, Spaniard and the Englishman met alike in peace. So the needless fortifications fell into unrepaired decay.
Many an afternoon I had paddled across the bay and spent a quiet hour with him, as far from the jars and discord at Biloxi as if we were in some other world.
As, this night, we drew nearer the house we saw no signs of life save the chinks of light creeping beneath the door. ”

“ They cannot declare themselves until they are placed in a defensible position. The Administration of the North is concentrating his forces at Fort Washita, about twenty-four miles from the Texas line, and within the limits of the Chickasaw Nation. ”

“ In 1860 there were a few Louisiana Caddoes in the northwestern part of the Chickasaw country, most likely the same that, in 1866, were reported to have been driven out of Texas in 1839 by bushwhackers and then out of the Washita country at the opening of the Civil War. They continued throughout the war loyal to the United States. In 1853 the Choctaw General Council passed an act admitting to the rights of citizenship several Catawba Indians; and from that circumstance, the Office of Indian Affairs surmised that the Choctaws would be willing to incorporate Catawbas yet in the Carolinas. ”

“ As in North America the Chickasaws believed that the spirits of the dead in their bodily shape moved about among the living in great joy; as the Aleutian islanders fancied the souls of the departed walking unseen among their kindred, and accompanying them in their journeys by sea and land; as Africans think that souls of the dead dwell in their midst, and eat with them at meal times; as Chinese pay their respects to kindred spirits present in the hall of ancestors ”