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This chapter shows how the Chickasaws, as well as the other Southern Indians, segued from trading in Indian slaves to trading in skins, mostly those of the white-tailed deer. Throughout the slaving era, skins and furs had been a part of the trade system, but they took second place to the more highly valued Indian slaves. After the Yamasee War, when slaving was proving to be more difficult, Indian men and women throughout the South increased the amount of skins they were trading, until the deerskin trade came to be one of the most profitable eras in southern history for the English colonies. The deerskin-trade era had its own disruptions and violence, but relative to the earlier slaving era, general stability settled over much of the region, and especially over the large coalescent societies in the interior. Maps from this time period would look quite different from the maps presented in this book.

This chapter sheds light on the period when King George II declared war on France in 1744. The focus of the campaigns fought elsewhere shifted from the south to the west and the southeast became more complex and more dangerous with Georgia's role overshadowed by that of the far stronger colony of South Carolina. The British had an unstable coalition of Chickasaws, Cherokees, and a few Choctaws. The Lower Creeks enjoyed this position as they were lured by all the imperial powers and received gifts from all of them. In 1738 the British government relieved the Georgia Trustees of the responsibility for military affairs, and Oglethorpe as the British commander in chief, had the main responsibility for maintaining Indian relations. His appointment of Captain William Horton as his successor as chief negotiator and his subsequent relieving by his superior officer lieutenant colonel Alexander Heron are some of the topics looked at in this chapter.

Representations of land such as maps and surveyors’ notes played an important role in facilitating the institutionalized removal of nineteenth-century Mississippi Chickasaws. This chapter discusses the epistemology of maps and property claims, and the social implications of land division and commoditization. It also follows the multidirectional tactics of displacement and nascent articulations of modern indigenous land rights. Weik illustrates how archaeologists can play a role in tracking Native American experiences before, during, and after removal.

This chapter sketches the record of early European contact with the native people of the Mississippi region, from intermittent Spanish exploration along the Gulf Coast in the early sixteenth century through the beginning of French Louisiana at the end of the seventeenth century. Called the Protohistoric period, these two centuries are a time of mystery. Debates continue over causes of the sweeping demographic changes that occurred between the De Soto invasion and La Salle’s Mississippi River voyage. Woven into the De Soto chronicles is the first glimpse of the probable ancestors of some of the region’s eighteenth-century tribes such as the Chickasaws, Chakchiumas, and Alabamas, along with accounts of powerful Mississippi Valley chiefdoms with exotic names like Quizquiz and Quigualtam.

This chapter covers the rise of the deerskin trade and more than forty years of bitter client warfare among the Mississippi tribes. The period saw the privatization of France’s colonial venture and proliferation of French settlements in the Lower Mississippi Valley, an initiative abruptly halted by the violence at the Natchez and Yazoo posts in 1729. These clashes led directly to the futile French campaigns against the Chickasaws in the 1730s. French and English competition for the allegiance of the Choctaws, the most powerful military force in the region, helped to fuel the catastrophic and enigmatic Choctaw civil war, a unique and still poorly understood episode in Mississippi history. The French and Indian War finally decided the European contest for North America in England’s favor and signaled the beginning of the end of the Indians’ game of playing colonial powers against one another.

This chapter describes the sequence of treaties spanning less than forty years, through which commissioners such as Thomas Hinds and Andrew Jackson employed bribery and threats to coerce the Choctaws and Chickasaws to surrender all of their tribal land in Mississippi. While contending with the relentless demands for land cessions, the tribes provided the U.S. government with military support in the Redstick War and made use of Protestant missionary schools to better prepare their children for an uncertain future. The options of the Chickasaws and Choctaws began to diminish when the Mississippi state legislature supported the federal removal effort with acts in 1829 and 1830, which placed the tribes under state law. The federal officials who orchestrated Indian removal claimed that they were saving the tribes from annihilation. This sentiment may well have been genuine, but by opening up a vast amount of agricultural land in the Southeast, Indian removal meshed conveniently with the United States’ accelerating economic engine fueled by the cotton boom and the profits of the interstate African American slave trade. Removal also assuaged racial concerns of whites who nurtured the stereotype of the drunken and intractable savage.

This chapter shows that, at the time of the Soto entrada, Chicaza had little intercourse with people on the Mississippi River. Perhaps as early as 1650, however, the Chickasaws entered into the new European trade system; by 1690 they had become primary slave raiders in the region; and by 1702 they controlled a western axis of trade that spanned from the Tombigbee River into Louisiana, unleashing even more turmoil in an area already reeling from eastern shock waves. The Chickasaw experience reflects the rapid expansion of the Indian slave system and Atlantic trade from the eastern seaboard to beyond the Mississippi River and the entanglement of numerous Indian polities in it. It also reflects the abilities of at least one Native group, the Chickasaws, to take advantage of the new trade by becoming militarized Indian slavers.

This chapter begins with Pickens’s rapid transformation from a renowned Indian fighter to a peacemaker. South Carolina state leaders entrust Pickens with the conduct of diplomacy with the Cherokees and with the Creeks, specifically Creek leader Alexander McGillivray. In 1785 he is appointed as a federal treaty commissioner and plays an important role in concluding the Hopewell treaties with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians at his Hopewell property in December 1785 and January 1786. These treaties are the first ones between the new United States and the Indian tribes south of the Ohio River. The chapter stresses the tension between men like Pickens and Benjamin Hawkins who hoped the federal government could negotiate permanent and just agreements with the Indians and other whites and state leaders who resented the federal government’s role and were anxious to take over more Indian land.

This chapter covers Pickens’s service in the state general assembly between 1798 and 1800, when Pickens’s fellow legislators relied on his advice as the state and the nation prepared for a possible war with France. The chapter also covers his service on another treaty commission under the Jefferson Administration in 1801 and 1802 that concluded treaties with the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks. It suggests that Pickens was disgusted with the way the Creeks were treated at the Treaty of Fort Wilkinson in 1802.