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The Southern Indians
The Story of the Civilized Tribes before Removal

by
R. S. Cotterill

The Author and the Book

Robert Spencer Cotterill (b. Ewing, KY Aug. 12, 1884, d. Tallahassee, FL, Jul. 15, 1967) was a historian by trade: a graduate of Kentucky Wesleyan College, he went on to receive a Master's from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, then made his career as a professor, teaching at several colleges in the eastern United States: Western Maryland College, the Florida State College for Women, and Florida State University. In addition to a number of journal articles —

— he wrote several books: among them History of Pioneer Kentucky (1917), The Old South The geographic, economic, social, political, and cultural expansion, institutions, and nationalism of the ante-bellum South (1936), A Short History of the Americas (1939); and the book before you, The Southern Indians, published in 1954.

The book is more than adequate, but the reader will discover the title to be a bit misleading: it does indeed cover the story of the five great tribal groups of the Southeast "before removal" but only in the sense that it's an account of the process that eventually led to their great westward removal. It's a shocking tale and told with both impartiality and humanity — to his great credit, Cotterill has succeeded in balancing the two — but almost all of it is nineteenth-century history inevitably focused on their interaction with white immigrants, and you should not expect to read a comprehensive history of these native Americans here. The fact that this is rather understandable, given that we have no written sources for the preceding centuries or millennnia (as our author will acknowledge in his preface), does not make it any the less regrettable: for an understanding of past ages of native American life we are of necessity thrown back primarily on the evidence afforded by archaeology, a discipline still not fully developed or applied.

Finally, by my lights, one further if lesser cavil is in order: I would have liked to see important figures properly introduced and placed in context. Although McGillivray, Bowles, and Tecumseh get their own chapters, others, although not quite of the same standing, would have benefited from an intro: Mushulatubbe for example is first mentioned on p171 with no indication whatever of who he might be, and even in chapter 9 where he is an important player, we get no information about the man himself or how he came to be chief of the Choctaws. The flaw also extends to events and context generally; for example, "the Moore raid of 1704" appears on p231 — which treats of the period from 1825 to 1835 — as having been relatively important, but is only mentioned once before that, pretty much in passing, and rather obliquely, on p18.

 p. xi  Contents

[The page numbers of the print edition, given in the right-hand column, are the links to the corresponding webpages.]

 (p. xiii)  Illustrations

Maps

Technical Details

Edition and Copyright

The edition I transcribed was my copy of the first edition, published in the United States, at Norman, Oklahoma, by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1954, as Volume 38 of The Civilization of the American Indian Series; more precisely, of its third printing (December, 1966). The copyright was not renewed in 1981 or 1982 as required by United States law at the time, and it therefore rose into the public domain on January 1, 1983. Details on the copyright law involved can be found here.

Illustrations and Maps

In the printed book, all the illustrations and maps are in black-and‑white. I've colorized the maps for readability, however, according to my usual scheme; and as for the other illustrations, I've sometimes replaced the book's image with a better printed one from another source — provided they were both versions of the identical original image: and in three of those cases (William McIntosh on p50, Mushulatubbe on p146, Major Ridge on p163) I found and substituted a full-color version of the original.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was very well proofread. I fixed the few errors, all trivial, and therefore marked the corrections each time only by a dotted underscore like this; or by one of theseº if in linked text. Similarly, underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, seemingly duplicated citations, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ): it's hardly fair to give you "pp53‑56" as a reference and not tell you where p56 ends. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. (If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.)

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite reproduces a form of the Solar Cross: a broadly religious symbol common among many native American tribes, and especially those whose homelands are in what is now the southeastern United States.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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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.

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