Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal

Preface and Acknowledgments

In 1492 when Christopher Columbus and some of his subordinates walked a sandy island beach in the West Indies, one of the numerous native populations of the present southeastern United States was occupying territory on an ancient river that ®owed south into the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually the Chickasaw chiefdom people would learn of the alien arrival via word of mouth, and those still alive in a.d. 1540 would actually meet, communicate, and cooperate with the strangely dressed humanoids from another world. By then the Chickasaw people had learned that the alien world lay far to the east, on the other side of what they and other indigenous people called the “Great Lake.” This is a story of the Chickasaw people gleaned from the historical and archaeological records left behind as they traveled through the centuries. It is a story of con®icts in culture,the detrimental consequences of European contact, and remarkable survival to the present. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Because I began this work over twelve years ago and went several years at a time without returning to it, there may be some people now forgotten who provided assistance. I remember well, however, Pat Galloway’s reading of my ¤rst draft in 1990 and her making valuable comments and suggestions and encouraging me to lengthen it into a book rather than the article I initially intended it to be. I ¤nally took her advice in late 1999. To her I offer a belated “thank you.” As always when I write papers of a historical nature about the Old Southwest , Jack D. Elliott, Jr., has been of assistance with regard to clari¤cations of some of the numerous inaccuracies in the secondary literature and in bringing to my attention a few obscure sources. Others who have contributed varying amounts of assistance include, especially, Joseph Peyser, Jim Knight, Princella Nowell, Alexander Moore, Richard Colbert, Joyce Bushman, and Mary Ann Preface and Acknowledgments Wells. The latter appears to be the ¤rst researcher in Mississippi to discover that an obscure but extremely valuable French map of some of the early eighteenthcentury Chickasaw villages had been published in a general history book in 1967. I also wish to thank the Natchez Trace Parkway library at Tupelo, Mississippi , for being just across the hall from my of¤ce between 1984 and 1997 when I was employed by the National Park Service as a prehistoric and historic archaeologist . The collections of copies of early documents and maps located there were invaluable, as were the thousands of research note cards and typed reports written over the years by people who had worked there, such as Dr. Dawson A. Phelps and Dr. Jesse D. Jennings. Other libraries that provided assistance through having books I needed, or by acquiring them through interlibrary loan, include the Lee County, Mississippi, Public Library, the Mitchell Memorial Library at Mississippi State University, and the Fant Memorial Library at Mississippi University for Women. With regard to the MSU library, special thanks are due Mattie Sink of Special Collections, as well as others in that division. Assistance of personnel at other libraries and archives is also much appreciated, such as the NationalArchives depositories at Suitland, Maryland , and Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the United States Court of Claims in Washington, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the Tennessee State Library and Archives, especially Susan Maszatos. I also appreciate the constructive comments provided by reviewers Patricia K. Galloway , Jay K. Johnson, and Tony Paredes. Lastly, I extend my sincere gratitude to Kathy Cummins for her laborious and excellent editorial work on the manuscript . xii / Preface and Acknowledgments SPLENDID LAND SPLENDID PEOPLE ...