The Early Chickasaws: Profile of Courage (review)

In comparison to the volume of materials about other American Indian tribes, few pivotal works about the Chickasaws have been written. In his Early Chickasaws: Profile of Courage, Fulsom Scrivner attempts to fill this vacuum of scholarship by painting an intriguing portrait of the Mississippi tribe. As the title suggests, the book brings together a variety of sources to present a narrative of the Chickasaws from prehistory through removal. Scrivner presents several overarching themes, which include the peopling of the Southeast, contact, trade, education, and removal.

The book consists of ten chapters and a conclusion, though oddly no introduction. The chapters' titles are self-explanatory. "Early Migration" focuses on the peopling of North America after the crossing of the Bering Strait land bridge. Chapter 2, "The Chickasaws as the Europeans Found Them" presents a cultural sketch of the Chickasaws at first contact with Europeans and reactions to cultural differences. "The Coming of the Spaniard," "French Influence: The Coming of the French and the First Attempt to Destroy the Chickasaws," and "Attempts to Destroy the Chickasaw" specifically focus on cultural collision and trade negotiations. They also discuss Chickasaw roles in French and Spanish wars, including the French and Indian War between 1754 and 1763. After the French and Indian War, the British claimed ownership to lands once belonging to the French. The new owners proceeded to promote trade relations with the Chickasaws, the subject of chapter 6. The last four chapters, titled "The Chickasaw Land Problem," "Relations with the United States," "Effect of the Louisiana Purchase," and "The Last Two Decades," present what Scrivner portrays as a reckoning of fate, namely the inevitable approach of removal. He includes pertinent information about the failures and successes of the civilization process by which the United States hoped to assimilate and Christianize Indians, including the Chickasaws, and the difficulties surrounding removal.

Unfortunately, several significant problems mar what could have been an excellent presentation of Chickasaw history. The primary problem concerns the sources. Although John Swanton's materials serve as an excellent reference, some of his factual evidence has been, for the most part, proven wrong. Particularly, Scrivner implicitly claims that the Chickasaws existed as an autonomous, distinct cultural group before the mid-1650s. Through meticulous anthropological and archaeological research, anthropologist James Atkinson posed a different view that the Chickasaws were made up of various members of other tribes which fell with the desolation wrought by European contact and failing trade networks during the 1500s. Atkinson's findings, presented in his Spendid Land, Splendid People, correlate with Patricia Galloway's Choctaw Genesis. Galloway found that the Choctaws also formed from various Mississippian tribes, which had fallen prey to disease and the destruction of trade between about 1500 and 1700. Both Galloway and Atkinson seem to have stumbled upon an intriguing and significant trend among Muskogean tribes, which formed only after the desolation wrought by first contact and failing trade networks. Furthermore, the author relies too heavily on the same sources throughout each chapter.

A second problem concerns various biases about the Chickasaws. The author exalts the Chickasaws as having more courage and better adapting to foreign pressures than any other tribe in the Southeast. While all American Indian tribes deserve much respect when appearing in the historical record, they also must be portrayed as human to preserve objectivity. Many tribes aside from and including the Five Civilized Tribes faced several hardships between contact and removal and afterward, and each adapted to face those conflicts in different ways. Rather than presenting the Chickasaws as the best and brightest of the tribes, readers would benefit more from knowing the bare facts and learning that the Chickasaws were indeed a brave, adaptive, and intelligent people. By not apotheosizing the culture, the author could have better placed the tribe within a wider historical context in which profitable comparisons could be made between the Chickasaws and other tribes both in the South and throughout North America.

Early Chickasaws is recommended for introductory courses, with a few...