[195]. Col. George Chicken, Ibid.
[196]. Col. Fox, see [n. p. 254] ante.
[197]. Henry Foster (sometimes Francis), son-in-law of James Francis. See Introduction, p. xiii ante.
[198]. See Introduction on this Memorial.
[199]. There must be a misprint here, since there was no such disparity between the water and land routes, and Adair was well posted on the point.
[200]. “The tribal name is Tciaca. The suffix aca denoting people collectively; another form Tcikocokela, okela denoting tribe, is in common use.” Frank G. Speck in Journal of American Folk Lore, XX, 50-58.
[201]. Adair is corroborated by Cushman (History of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, etc., 19-20, 242-246, 361, 494). The languages were for the most part identical. It appears that in speeches made by Chickasaw chiefs in councils held by the British with them and the Choctaws, jointly, the former spoke as “elders” to the Choctaws.
[202]. Adair does not go further back than 1720 in his account of the Chickasaws. The expedition of De Soto in 1540-41 crossed their country, called by its historians or narrators “Chicaca provincia,” and suffered a defeat by the tribe. In La Salle’s own account of his expedition of 1682 he mentions the “river inhabited by the Sicachas,” as having “its source near Carolina”—the Tennessee River, manifestly. His men came in contact with “five of the Chikacha nation” at one of the Chickasaw Bluffs on the Mississippi in the present West Tennessee. In 1687, Father Anastasius Douay records respecting a party of La Salle’s force, “we went to the Sicachas, where we had not been,” previously. “This nation is very numerous; they count at least four thousand warriors; have an abundance of peltry.” But Tonty, in 1693, noted the tribe as having “2,000 warriors.” By 1720-21 that the Chickasaws were a thorn in the side of the French is demonstrated by Charlevoix and Diron D’Artaguette. For all their accounts, see Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, passim. In the closing years of the seventeenth century Carolina traders were among the Chickasaws, initiating a commerce that Adair carried forward. For later glimpses: Du Pratz, History of Louisiana, II, 217; for a few customs, Bossu, Travels in Louisiana, passim; Roman’s East and West Florida, and authorities later cited. Having in view the part played by the Chickasaws in aiding the English in holding the Mississippi Valley against the French, all too scant attention has been paid to that gallant and remarkable nation of red men by the historians of America.
[203]. The best account of the Natchez Indians is Swanton’s Lower Tribes, passim, supplemented by his Early History of the Creeks.
[204]. For the three humiliatingly unsuccessful campaigns of the French against the Chickasaws, due to their giving asylum to the Natchez, see: Primary, Rowland and Sanders, Mississippi Provincial Archives, I, passim; Ga. Col. Recs., XXI and XXII, and Shea’s reprint of [Bouache] Journal de la Guerre du Micissippi contre les Chicachas en 1739-40, translation in Claiborne’s Mississippi. Secondary, Pickett’s History of Alabama, Hamilton, Colonial Mobile, and Williams, Beginnings of West Tennessee, chs. IV and V.