Chickasaw

CHICKASAW. The Chickasaw Indians were an important eighteenth-century Indian nation that inhabited the lower Mississippi Valley, on the borderlands between British North America (later the United States) and Spanish Louisiana. In the eighteenth century, Chickasaw settlement was concentrated in the northern part of modern-day state of Mississippi, although their settlements also ranged into modern-day Tennessee and Alabama and some Chickasaw located villages among other Indian nations, such as the Creeks. The Chickasaw sided with the British and against both the Spanish and the United States during the War of the American Revolution.

The Chickasaw spoke a Muskogean language and lived in the region from the period before European contact. The people subsisted on an economy that combined agriculture and hunting and lived in established, named towns. European observers recorded eighteen different Chickasaw towns in the early eighteenth century, but by the middle of that century only ten named towns were recorded. English traders made contact with the Chickasaw in the 1680s, and the Chickasaw generally remained allied with the British throughout the years of the American Revolution.

The Chickasaw often attacked their French-allied neighbors, the Illinois and the Choctaw, and, with the Creeks, openly attacked the French garrison at Mobile during Queen Anne's War (1702–1712). The Chickasaw continued hostilities toward other French-allied Indians throughout the 1740s. The Chickasaw fought alongside the British forces in the Seven Years War. Their alliance with the British was reaffirmed by the negotiations of Indian Agent John Stuart at the Augusta Conference of 1763. Stuart sent a succession of deputies to the Chickasaw villages, which helped keep them loyal to the British during Pontiac's rebellion (1763–1766), and this same policy preserved the Chickasaw-British alliance during the Revolutionary war, albeit on their own terms.

The Chickasaw directed their hostility primarily against the Spanish government in Louisiana, which was under the command of Governor Bernardo de Galvez.. As the Revolutionary War drew to a close, the Spanish and American governments competed for access to trade with the Chickasaw, with the Americans finally winning out. Chickasaw leaders signed the Treaty of Hopewell (1786) with the United States. In the early national period, the Chickasaw pursued a variety of strategies to cope with the expansion of American power, most often signing treaties that ceded progressively greater amounts of the lands they had claimed in the eighteenth century. The Chickasaw were removed west of the Mississippi River in accordance with the Treaty of Pontotoc (1832), which was signed after the passage of the Indian Removal Act (1830).

SEE ALSO Pontiac's War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brightman, Robert A., and Pamela S. Wallace. "Chickasaw." In Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 14: Southeast, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

Calloway, Colin G. "Tchoukafala: The Continuing Chickasaw Struggle for Independence." In The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Salisbury, Neal. "Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600–1783." In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Vol. 1: North America, edited by Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.