mail: Bill Thayer	Help	Up	Home
previous: Preface This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Southern Indians by R. S. Cotterill University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Oklahoma, 1954 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 2

 p3  I
The Southern Indians

The Indians who at the close of the American Revolution occupied those regions of the South then claimed and partially possessed by the United States were comparatively late comers to the land. Preceding them had been a branch of those people who were called Siouan by their unadmiring neighbors and who in some remote, pre-Columbian period had broken from their Northern brethren in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes to become (as far as ethnology knows) the oldest inhabitants of the South. About the time of the discovery of America they were wandering out again, but the first explorers of the South found some of them lingering in broken tribes between the James and the Cooper and traces of their long-continued stay in the Piedmont of Virginia and in the valley of the upper Ohio. Their migration went down the Ohio to divide at its mouth, sending one group up the Mississippi to rejoin the parent stock and a second one down the river to become the Quapaw and Osage; little Siouan fragments, such as the Ofo in northern Mississippi and the Biloxi on the Gulf of Mexico, at this time perhaps became detached from the main current and were left in isolation. The migration was apparently a mass movement under pressure from Indians recently arrived whose enmity later destroyed such Siouan groups as now rejected emigration or escaped expulsion. For the other Indians of the South regarded the Sioux not with the routine intertribal animosity, but with a loathing not  p4 to be appeased short of extermination. The Siouan characteristics of head-flattening, tattooing, long hair, and professional prostitution impressed the other Indians as heathenish and even as subhuman.⁠1

The Siouans seem to have occupied principally the perimeter of the South: the Algonquian family penetrated only into Maryland and Virginia, where they were entirely underfoot by the time of the American Revolution. An eccentric and isolated bit of Algonquian penetration that broke loose from the Sac in Illinois flanked the mountains to the west and reached so far south as to gain the name Shawnee. Settling on the Cumberland at a place later called French Lick and now Nashville, these Indians became thoroughly identified with the river which bore their name for eighty years until 1749 when Dr. Thomas Walker, with more regard for current events than for native tradition (of which he may have been ignorant), renamed it. From the Cumberland some of the Shawnees went, perhaps on Cherokee invitation, to the Savannah River, on which they settled and to which they gave their name. Encountering, and probably provoking, the hostility of their Siouan neighbors and the enmity of the Carolinians, a part of the Savannah band joined the Creeks in Alabama, while the main portion migrated to Pennsylvania to rejoin their brethren who had fled thither from French Lick under the compulsion of Chickasaw attack. In 1747 the Shawnee element among the Creeks was increased by the coming of certain of their Pennsylvania brethren who had tried to settle near Muscle Shoals and had been driven out by the unrelenting Chickasaws. The Shawnees among the Creeks were few but influential; until the War of 1812 they served as liaison agents between Northern and Southern Indians and frequently brought them into combination.⁠2

 p5  The incorporation, expulsion, and destruction of the Siouan and Algonquian families left the Indian South in the stronger hands of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, the first belonging to the Iroquoian, the last three comprising the Muskhogean family. The Cherokees were the mountaineers of the South, their villages clung to the four slopes of that high hip roof which forms the four corners of Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Their forty towns, with a population (in 1775) somewhat in excess of fifteen thousand, were grouped by the Carolina traders as Lower (on the Savannah waters), Middle (on the Tuckaseegee and headwaters of the Little Tennessee), and Upper, comprising the valley towns (on the Hiwassee) and Overhills (on the lower reaches of the Little Tennessee). Between the Lower and the others there was a difference of dialect sufficient to distinguish but not to separate them. From their villages in the extreme southeastern corner of their domains, the territorial claims of the Cherokees ran from the northward-flowing Tennessee on the west to the Kanawha, Broad, and Edisto on the east; from the Chattahoochee, Coosa, and Black Warrior on the south to the Ohio on the north. Although none of these boundaries was conceded by their neighbors, the Cherokees succeeded in transmitting their claims thereto into an owner­ship sufficient for sale.

The Cherokees (as practically every Indian tribe) were given their name not by themselves but by their neighbors. Their name Cherokee (people of the cave country) was given by the Choctaws, whose estimate of them was far less flattering than that the Cherokees themselves expressed in Aniyunwiya, "the principal people." Their language revealed their Iroquoian ancestry; their dialect, an ancient separation from the parent stock. Their Algonquin-given name, Allegewi, points to Pennsylvania as their former home, while Delaware traditions picture their movement to the South as a tribal expulsion punishing a treacherous attack on a Delaware ally. Several generations of warfare were probably  p6 required to effect their migration until they finally halted in North Carolina around their foundation town, Cuttawa (Bryson City). Although this occurred (so far as it occurred at all) in remote pre-Columbian times, the Cherokees continued until 1768 to feel, through continuous Iroquois raids, the effects of the ancient family quarrel. At the time of their earliest white contacts the political center of the tribe was at Echota on the Little Tennessee.⁠3

The three main members of the Muskhogean family had a common migration legend of a removal from some indefinite trans-Mississippi region to new homes in the Southeast. There are many indications to suggest, although insufficient evidence to prove, that the Choctaws and Chickasaws, then united as a single tribe, formed the van of this migration and spread themselves thinly over the South from the Tennessee to Tampa. It was possibly this early wide dispersion of the Choctaws that caused their language to become the basis of that Mobilian trade language known to all the Southern tribes. From this overextension the Choctaws contracted until, at the time when the first Europeans found them, they were living on the waters of the Pearl, the Chickasawhay, and the Pascagoula in the present Mississippi where their sixty or seventy towns, containing some twenty thousand people, were grouped in a southern, a western, and an eastern district. The southern district, composed of towns on the waters of the Chickasawhay and the Pascagoula rivers and having as its nucleus a group called the Six Towns, contained a large element of Siouan people whom the Choctaws had incorporated and whose dialect they found difficult to understand. The western district, with a thin population, faced the Mississippi; the eastern district contained most of the towns and the Choctaw "capital" at Koweh Chito. The name Choctaw is derived from the Creek word cate or chate, red; their Indian neighbors called them, derisively  p7 no doubt, Pansfalaya (long-haired people), from a Siouan custom they had adopted. Their modest territorial claims ran only from the Mississippi and the Gulf to the Cahaba and the Oktibbeha.⁠4

The separation of the Chickasaws from the Choctaws is the first recorded instance of secession in Southern history, but in historic time neither tribe could say either when or why it occurred. It might not be implausibly conjectured that the schism came after they had entered the South and as a result of Chickasaw contempt for the Choctaw adoption of such heathenish Siouan customs as wearing their hair long, flattening the heads of their infants, and picking the flesh from the bones of their dead. The antiquity of the separation is suggested by the development of different dialects by the two adjacent and often intermingling peoples, although they seem to have retained a common ceremonial language. The Chickasaws possessed the fewest towns, the smallest population, and, proportionately, the most extensive territory in the Indian South. Their four or five towns were located on the Yazoo-Tombigbee divide in north central Mississippi, but their territorial claims extended from the Oktibbeha to the Ohio and from the Mississippi eastward to the Tennessee-Cumberland divide; the existence of a Chickasaw Old Fields on the Tennessee east of Muscle Shoals attested their former residence there before they retired, probably as a result of Cherokee pressure, to the safer ground of Mississippi. Their population, never more than five thousand in their palmiest days, was probably small at the time of their secession from the Choctaws and was maintained only by a policy of constant adoption of alien people. So extensive was this assimilation that by 1775 it would have been difficult to find in the tribe any "native" Chickasaw; the realistic traders in colonial days called them bluntly "The Breeds," as they did their  p8 Choctaw kinsmen the "Flat Heads." The undoubted Chickasaw courage, so often noted in history, was the result of accretion and not of native spirit.⁠5

The Creeks were not a tribe, but a confederacy in which the dominant element was the Muscogee. Neither the word Muscogee nor the word Creek is Muskhogean; the latter term, of doubtful meaning, was apparently coined by the Shawnees as a labor-saving device for designating their friends who seemed to lack a collective name, and the former name was given by the South Carolina traders because the Indians to which it applied were then living on Ocheesee (Ocmulgee) Creek in Georgia. The frail testimony of place names tentatively suggests that the Muscogees preceded the Cherokees and followed the Choctaws into the South; that their inland drive forced the main body of the Choctaws westward to their historic homes in Mississippi, and that one Choctaw fragment, the Alabamas, became by force or persuasion united with them. To these two elements of the confederacy was added in time by conquests or guile the Hitchitee people who, before the coming of the Muscogees, had occupied southern Georgia and at least that part of Florida between the Apalachicola and the Aucilla rivers. To the Hitchitees in Florida the Creeks gave the name Seminole, which means, roughly, "frontiersmen." The fourth, and last, people to be incorporated in the Creek confederacy were the Euchees, who were known to their Algonquian enemies as Tohogalega and gave a corrupted form of their name, Hogaloge, to the Tennessee River, on which they had their earliest-known homes. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Euchees, perhaps an isolated Siouan fragment, drifted south in several bands to settle on the Savannah and the Choctawhatchee. Incorporated, traditionally by fraud, into the Creek confederacy, they moved their towns to the Chattahoochee.

 p9  The English traders, ignoring although not ignorant of these ethnic distinctions, divided the confederacy into two geographical groups which they called the Lower Creeks and the Upper Creeks. The Lower Creeks, comprising all the Euchee and Hitchitee towns as well as a minority of the Muscogee, lived on the Flint and the Chattahoochee; the Upper Creeks, made up of the majority of the Muscogee towns, and all the Alabamas (who were Muskhogean) lived on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama rivers. The Seminoles were sometimes counted as a part of the Lower Creeks, but generally considered as a third division. The confederacy contained fifty or sixty towns with a population of fifteen to eighteen thousand. Their towns were located roughly in the center of their claimed territory, which ran from the Gulf to the Tennessee and from Tombigbee to the Savannah.⁠6

Notwithstanding their differences of ancestry, language, and environment, the Southern Indians possessed an extensive community of culture and custom and a great similarity of social and economic patterns. A primitive distaste for isolation made them all town dwellers, with only their outcasts and pariahs living their lives alone. Their towns, located invariably on the banks of a stream or, if inland, close to a spring, commonly straggled prodigiously over areas wholly disproportionate to the population thereof. The dwellings widely scattered and haphazardly placed, centered, socially rather than geographically, around a "square," on the sides of which were such buildings for government and public utility as the town possessed. The dwelling places of the people, after the introduction of axes, were log cabins with makeshift roofs, without floors, bunks doing double duty as beds and chairs, and a fireplace in the center, from which the smoke (and most of the heat) ascended through a hole in the roof. There was no kitchen, for cooking was done whenever possible in the open. The houses were dirty, flea-ridden, uncomfortable, and unsightly  p10 but they served their purpose as points of departure. The Southern Indian, being both Southern and Indian, regarded his house as a place in which to sleep at night and to find haven from inclement weather; he lived out of doors. But each family tried to possess a "hot-house," in which it could live during cold weather in warm but unventilated comfort.

From these towns, of no typical size or shape, the Indians went out to their work in field and forest. All Southern Indians depended for their subsistence on agriculture, and every town and village had around it its cultivated fields from which it drew its food supply. The favorite crop, and the largest, was everywhere corn, the importance of which to them was shown by their custom of timing their festivals and councils to its appearing and ripening grain. They raised melons for current consumption, and beans, potatoes (Irish and sweet), squash, and pumpkins for deferred as well as immediate use. Their fields were, in fact, "truck patches," and their agriculture limited to subsistence farming: only the sedentary and thrifty Choctaws ever had a surplus stock for sale. Planting and harvesting were communal enterprises in which both men and women participated; cultivation was scanty, not, it is to be supposed, because it was done by the women but because of the crude implements in use. Returns were generally as scanty as the cultivation, but as a rule each family raised enough, when supplemented by hunting, to feed itself and to place some portion in the public storehouse on the square for common use in emergencies. When a field wore out, as it eventually did even under the lenient and undemanding Indian cultivation, there was no recourse but to abandon it and move the town to another location. The Creeks called an abandoned town site a tallahassee, and the name, modified sometimes to talassie or tulsa, is common in the South; one of these tallahassees has become a state capital.

Before the coming of the white trader, the Indians hunted, as they farmed, only for subsistence. Hunting was a species of work, and, although it is not to be supposed that it was unenjoyable, the Indians seemed rarely to have indulged in it as a sport. They killed apologetically only what they needed, nor so much in a provident preserving of their farm supply as in superstitious awe of  p11 the departed animal spirits. Hunting on foot with bow and arrow and rarely using even the dog as an accessory, the hunters served materially to replenish the domestic larder but little to diminish the game supply. Not until the white trader came among them did hunting become a source of profit and hunting grounds a subject of contention.

There is much to suggest that previous to their contact with white men the Southern Indians were ardent neither for hunting nor for war. The frantic mourning in an Indian town over the death of a warrior reveals their high regard for human life and suggests that they would not lightly risk in war what they so highly valued. There were few occasions for intertribal quarrels: boundaries were matters of indifference when hunting grounds were so wide, game so plentiful, and hunters so few; there were no conflicting economic interests because there were no economic interests to conflict; there was no struggle for power because there was no use to which power could be put; and the Southern Indians no more considered war a sport than they considered hunting a pastime. Even if it is not admitted that the inclination for war was lacking, it must be conceded that the means for it were few. Because their food supply was always scanty, Indian war parties were rarely able to enlist large numbers or to take them far afield; as long as they fought with bow and arrow, they were unable because of a lack of supplies either to long sustain or to bring it to a quick conclusion. Their ordnance and commissary arrangements were always defective. Scalping, if not unknown, was rare before the white men brought the steel knife; prisoners experienced adoption more often than torture; and burnings at the stake occurred among the Indians about as frequently as lynchings among the white men and, like lynchings, were indulged in when passions were high. Since even in colonial days the Indian tribes rarely fought each other except in wars fomented by white allies, it may be doubted whether there ever existed among them any of those "hereditary feuds" to which reference is often made. The Chickasaws and Choctaws seem to have separated in peace and to have agreed on a dividing line (the only one in the South really needed because of the nearness of their respective towns) so early  p12 that both tribes had forgotten the date and only remembered the fact. The "feud" between Creeks and Choctaws permitted them to trade, to interchange ceremonial visits, to engage in ball games against each other, and occasionally to ally themselves against a common foe. Creeks and Cherokees, Cherokees and Chickasaws met each other often in amity, infrequently in war.

Certainly at home among his own people the Indian was orderly (as the Indian estimated order) and peaceable, but not as a result of legislation, of which he had little, or of restraint, of which he had still less. The Southern Indians (and other Indians as well) had managed to reconcile a system of economic communism with a retention of individual liberty — a combination that no modern society has been able to effect. They did this by reducing their government so nearly to anarchy that it operated only by practically unanimous consent and, consequently, had no dissident minorities to restrain. In all four nations, if it be proper so to refer to them, the unit of government was the town with its elective, permanent civil chief and elective, temporary war chief. The town chiefs composed the national council, which met generally twice a year, in May (when vegetables were plenty) and in September (when the grain was harvested). Then, with elaborate ceremony and prolific oratory, it declared the national policy and occasionally made a law. There is little evidence that prior to contact with the Europeans any Southern Indian tribe had a head chief or even regional chiefs. These positions seem to have been instituted by the French and English in order to secure responsible agents with whom they might deal. Among the Chickasaws the head chieftain­ship, perhaps by English suggestion, took the odd, un-Indian turn of becoming hereditary, being handed down, according to Indian custom, from ruler to brother or nephew. Englishmen and Americans always called the Chickasaw head chief the king. Hereditary or elective, the head chief's authority was legally little and actually only what his influence and ability could make it. The decisions of the national council did not bind any town which chose to dissent; even the decrees of the town councils bound no individual who wished to disobey. Notwithstanding this virtual absence of authority, life among the Indians was  p13 perhaps as tranquil as among the white people. Civil wars were almost unknown; the abnormality of murder is shown by the horror in which it was held; civil disputes were settled by arbitration; lesser crimes were compounded rather than punished. The paradox of anarchy and order is, of course, to be explained by the strength of custom which regulated conduct and disregard of which made the Indian a pariah.

Communism, therefore, among the Indians represented not the will of the rulers (of whom they had none), but the unity of the tribe. By combining it with anarchy the Indians kept it free from those encroachments on individual liberty which seem inseparable from all its modern expressions and practiced it purely as an economic device. The Indians did not have, and have never willingly accepted, any conception of private owner­ship of land. They insisted that the land belonged to the tribe as a whole and could not be engrossed by individuals, towns, or districts. Custom permitted or recognized the control of each town over the adjacent fields and over their annual allotment to families for cultivation. It permitted private owner­ship of the crops raised by private effort subject to a reserve for public use. Private owner­ship of personal property was recognized but hampered by the scarcity of personal property to own. War and hunting equipment, houses, dogs, horses, and clothing about completed the list of things available to the Southern Indians in 1775.

Communism freed the Indian from ambition to acquire wealth as anarchy freed him from temptation to seek power. It made him improvident of the future, minimized class distinctions, re-emphasized co-operation, promoted tribal solidarity. It may be that the hospitality for which the Indian was noted sprang from his inability to store up wealth; his generosity, from the inutility of saving; his idleness, from a lack of incentive to thrift. His large amount of uncensured leisure gave him an opportunity to visit and entertain and to lounge in the sun in the square, where he listened with respect to the admonitions of the old men and with pleasure to the talk of the young. Ordinarily he was as garrulous as he was gregarious, inveterate in gossip, and much given to the telling of jokes which depended on neither subtlety nor refinement  p14 for their appeal. Taciturnity he reserved for state occasions, for meetings with suspected strangers, and for negotiations with known enemies, at all which times he could remain silent with dignity and decorum. He was neither sad nor desolate. His release from the bonds of ambition and his sense of security made him cheerful and tolerant; his cruelty resulted from temporary passion and not from innate disposition. He had a primitive talent for domestic life, deferred prudently to his wife (to whom by Indian custom the home and household furnishings belonged), and was devoted to his children, over whom he had no control and whose lineage he traced, realistically, through their maternal forebears. He painted himself artistically for personal adornment, sparingly for identification, horribly for war, grotesquely for amusement, and seasonally as a kind of mosquito control. Both as spectator and participant, he delighted in games and gambling, the combination of which frequently sent him home, bereft of all worldly goods, to his family, for the same reason equally bereft. What religion he had was private, unorganized for public expression, without missionary duties, and wholly unrelated to his morality, which he drew from tribal custom. He held women in high esteem, admitting them to share his private labors as well as his public counsels, imparting to them secrets which they frequently, unpenalized and apparently uncriticized, revealed, and conceding to them a freedom of action and an immunity to regulation such as modern women have nowhere obtained.

Finally, the Southern Indian was a child of the forests whom the open country filled with great uneasiness. Through these unbroken forests he was accustomed to travel on private visiting and on public business in and war parties and hunting groups, as trader and even as tourist. So doing, he made innumerable paths leading from town to town, from home to hunting camp, and from tribe to tribe. These paths were literally "highways," since to avoid jungles and swamps and low lands made impassable by overflowing streams, the Indians journeyed, whenever possible, along the divides. The narrowness of the paths was a laborsaving device which resulted in the Indian custom of travel single file. So numerous were the paths and so intricate the network with its  p15 variants and detours that no Indian, whatever his native instinct or acquired woodcraft, could, without direction, long keep his course. Therefore the Indian roads, as distinguished from the animal trails, were commonly marked; a painted tree, a cabalistic sign on a rock, a pattern of small mounds, and other signs guided the traveler as he journeyed through the forests. Many of these roads, adapted from buffalo trails, graduated into traces for white traders, evolved into the pioneer dirt roads, and finally became the paved highways for modern traffic. Such has been the history of the great Warrior's Path through Kentucky, the Occaneechee Path through the Siouan tribes of North Carolina, the Natchez Trace through the Choctaw and Chickasaw country of Mississippi and Tennessee, and many others.⁠7

There was (what is often overlooked) a considerable amount of trade over these roads and a professional class of Indian traders who carried it on. The peddled salt from the many "licks," pipes from the Cherokee country, farm products from the Choctaw, shells from the seacoast for wampum and decoration, flint for arrows, and a variety of other objects. The Shawnees were avid traders, whose Eskippakithiki town in central Kentucky, where the Warrior's Path entered, or emerged from, the mountains, had many of the features of a "fair" town resorted to by Indians from north and south seeking an interchange of goods. The professional traders were professional neutrals whose activities were so valued that they could continue them practically unhampered in the midst of war. Like most professionals they had a peculiar jargon (called Mobilian), a sort of "pidgin" Indian, employing words from every Southern Indian language, especially the Choctaw, and everywhere well enough understood to make trade possible. It was the Indian's familiarity with the benefits of trade that made them accept the white trader so avidly as to affect their development and to alter their destiny.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 The definitive account of the southern Siouan tribes is James Mooney's The Siouan Tribes of the East, Bureau of American Ethnology (hereafter cited as B. A. E.) Bulletin No. 22. Chapman J. Milling, in Red Carolinians, chapters XII and XIII, discusses the culture and history of the various Siouan tribes of the Carolinas. James B. Griffin, "On the Historic Location of the Totero and the Mohetan in the Ohio Valley," American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. XLIV, 275‑80, and John R. Swanton, "Siouan Tribes in the Ohio Valley," ibid., XLV, 49‑66, deal with the location and migrations of Siouans of the upper Ohio.

2 Charles A. Hanna's The Wilderness Trail contains the fullest account of the Shawnee wanderings. More local detail is given in Lucien Beckner, "Eskippakithiki: The Lat Indian Town in Kentucky," The Filson Club History Quarterly, Vol. VI, 355‑82. John R. Swanton, in Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors, B. A. E. Bulletin No. 73, gives considerable data on the Shawnees among the Creeks.

3 For the early Cherokees there is nothing else that approaches in value James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee, B. A. E. Nineteenth Annual Report. Cyrus Thomas, in The Cherokees in Pre-Columbian Times, traces the origin of the Cherokees and their enforced migration to the South. James Adair, in History of the American Indians, gives a description of the Cherokees at the beginning of their relations with the United States. It is most available in Adair's History of the American Indians, edited by S. C. Williams.

4 John R. Swanton's Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians, B. A. E. Bulletin No. 103 gives practically all that is known of Choctaw culture and customs. In the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society are several articles by Henry S. Halbert: "Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound of the Choctaws," Vol. II, 123‑34; "Funeral Customs of the Mississippi Choctaws," Vol. III, 353‑66; and "The Choctaw Creation Legend," Vol. IV, 267‑70. His "District Divisions of the Choctaw Nation," Publications of the Alabama Historical Society, Misc. Colls. I, 375‑85 is very detailed.

5 John R. Swanton's Social Beliefs and Usages of the Chickasaw Indians, B. A. E. Forty-fourth Annual Report, is the most comprehensive account of Chickasaw life. Adair's History of the American Indians is chiefly concerned with the Chickasaws, but a considerable part of its firsthand information is made suspect by the author's obsession with the idea that the Chickasaws were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.

6 The definitive account of the Creeks is given in two works by John R. Swanton: Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors, and Social Organization and Social Usages of the Indians of the Creek Confederacy, B. A. E. Forty-second Annual Report. Because of liberal quotations from contemporary accounts, both are practically source books. Benjamin Hawkins, in A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, gives much earlier history in connection with a contemporary description.

7 W. E. Myer's "Indian Trails of the Southeast," B. A. E. Forty-second Annual Report, describes the Indian roads in detail, with a helpful accompanying map. This article and John R. Swanton's "Aboriginal Culture of the Southeast," in the same volume, are indispensable for any understanding of the Southern Indians.

◂ previous						next ▸
Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		The Southern Indians	Native American History	History of the Americas	Home
			American & Military History
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility