Gansĕ′ʻtĭ, already mentioned, states that when he was a boy the Natchez were scattered among the Cherokee settlements along the upper part of Hiwassee, extending down into Tennessee. They had then no separate townhouses. Some of them, at least, had come up from the Creeks, and spoke Creek and Cherokee, as well as their own language, which he could not understand, although familiar with both of the others. They were great dance leaders, which agrees with their traditional reputation for ceremonial and secret knowledge. They went west with the Cherokee at the final removal of the tribe to Indian Territory in 1838. In 1890 there was a small settlement on Illinois river a few miles south of Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, several persons in which still spoke their own language. Some of these may have come with the Creeks, as by an agreement between Creeks and Cherokee about the time of the Removal it had been arranged that citizens of either tribe living within the boundaries claimed by the other might remain without question if they so elected. There are still several persons claiming Natchez descent among the East Cherokee, but the last one said to have been of full Natchez blood, an old woman named Alkĭnĭ′, died about 1895. She was noted for her peculiarities, especially for a drawling tone, said to have been characteristic of her people, as old men remembered them years ago.
Haywood, the historian of Tennessee, says that a remnant of the Natchez lived within the present limits of the State as late as 1750, and were even then numerous. He refers to those with the Cherokee, and tells a curious story, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of other writers. According to his statement, a portion of the Natchez, who had been parceled out as slaves among the French in the vicinity of their old homes after the downfall of their tribe, took advantage of the withdrawal of the troops to the north, in 1758, to rise and massacre their masters and make their escape to the neighboring tribes. On the return of the troops after the fall of Fort Du Quesne they found the settlement at Natchez destroyed and their Indian slaves fled. Some time afterward a French deserter seeking an asylum among the Cherokee, having made his way to the Great Island town, on the Tennessee, just below the mouth of Tellico river, was surprised to find there some of the same Natchez whom he had formerly driven as slaves. He lost no time in getting away from the place to find safer quarters among the mountain towns. Notchy creek, a lower affluent of Tellico, in Monroe county, Tennessee, probably takes its name from these refugees. Haywood states also that, although incorporated with the Cherokee, they continued for a long time a separate people, not marrying or mixing with other tribes, and having their own chiefs and holding their own councils; but in 1823 hardly anything was left of them but the name.[26]
Another refugee tribe incorporated partly with the Cherokee and partly with the Creeks was that of the Taskigi, who at an early period had a large town of the same name on the south side of the Little Tennessee, just above the mouth of Tellico, in Monroe county, Tennessee. Sequoya, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, lived here in his boyhood, about the time of the Revolution. The land was sold in 1819. There was another settlement of the name, and perhaps once occupied by the same people, on the north bank of Tennessee river, in a bend just below Chattanooga, Tennessee, on land sold also in 1819. Still another may have existed at one time on Tuskegee creek, on the south bank of Little Tennessee river, north of Robbinsville, in Graham county, North Carolina, on land which was occupied until the Removal in 1838. Taskigi town of the Creek country was on Coosa river, near the junction with the Tallapoosa, some distance above the present Montgomery, Alabama. We find Tasquiqui mentioned as a town in the Creek country visited by the Spanish captain, Juan Pardo, in 1567. The name is evidently the same, though we can not be sure that the location was identical with that of the later town.
Who or what the Taskigi were is uncertain and can probably never be known, but they were neither Cherokee nor Muscogee proper. It would seem most probable that they were of Muskhogean affinity, but they may have been an immigrant tribe from another section, or may even have constituted a distinct linguistic stock, representing all that was left of an ancient people whose occupation of the country antedated the coming of the Cherokee and the Creeks. The name may be derived from taska or tasha′ya, meaning “warrior” in several of the Muskhogean dialects. It is not a Cherokee word, and Cherokee informants state positively that the Taskigi were a foreign people, with distinct language and customs. They were not Creeks, Natchez, Uchee, or Shawano, with all of whom the Cherokee were well acquainted under other names. In the townhouse of their settlement at the mouth of Tellico they had an upright pole, from the top of which hung their protecting “medicine,” the image of a human figure cut from a cedar log. For this reason the Cherokee in derision sometimes called the place Atsĭnă′-kʻtaûñ, “Hanging-cedar place.” Before the sale of the land in 1819 they were so nearly extinct that the Cherokee had moved in and occupied the ground.
Adair, in 1775, mentions the Tae-keo-ge (sic—a double misprint) as one of several broken tribes which the Creeks had “artfully decoyed” to incorporate with them in order to strengthen themselves against hostile attempts. Milfort, about 1780, states that the Taskigi on Coosa river were a foreign people who had been driven by wars to seek an asylum among the Creeks, being encouraged thereto by the kind reception accorded to another fugitive tribe. Their request was granted by the confederacy, and they were given lands upon which they built their town. He puts this event shortly before the incorporation of the Yuchi, which would make it early in the eighteenth century. In 1799, according to Hawkins, the town had but 35 warriors, “had lost its ancient language,” and spoke Creek. There is still a “white” or peace town named Taskigi in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory.[27]
The nearest neighbors of the Cherokee on the west, after the expulsion of the Shawano, were the Chickasaw, known to the Cherokee as Ani′-Tsĭ′ksû, whose territory lay chiefly between the Mississippi and the Tennessee, in what is now western Kentucky and Tennessee and the extreme northern portion of Mississippi. By virtue, however, of conquest from the Shawano or of ancient occupancy they claimed a large additional territory to the east of this, including all upon the waters of Duck river and Elk creek. This claim was disputed by the Cherokee. According to Haywood, the two tribes had been friends and allies in the expulsion of the Shawano, but afterward, shortly before the year 1769, the Cherokee, apparently for no sufficient reason, picked a quarrel with the Chickasaw and attacked them in their town at the place afterward known as the Chickasaw Old Fields, on the north side of Tennessee river, some twenty miles below the present Guntersville, Alabama. The Chickasaw defended themselves so well that the assailants were signally defeated and compelled to retreat to their own country.[28] It appears, however, that the Chickasaw, deeming this settlement too remote from their principal towns, abandoned it after the battle. Although peace was afterward made between the two tribes their rival claim continued to be a subject of dispute throughout the treaty period.
The Choctaw, a loose confederacy of tribes formerly occupying southern Mississippi and the adjacent coast region, are called Ani′-Tsa′ʻta by the Cherokee, who appear to have had but little communication with them, probably because the intermediate territory was held by the Creeks, who were generally at war with one or the other. In 1708 we find mention of a powerful expedition by the Cherokee, Creeks, and Catawba against the Choctaw living about Mobile bay.[29]
Of the Indians west of the Mississippi those best known to the Cherokee were the Ani′-Wasa′sĭ, or Osage, a powerful predatory tribe formerly holding most of the country between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers, and extending from the Mississippi far out into the plains. The Cherokee name is a derivative from Wasash′, the name by which the Osage call themselves.[30] The relations of the two tribes seem to have been almost constantly hostile from the time when the Osage refused to join in the general Indian peace concluded in 1768 (see “The Iroquois Wars”) up to 1822, when the Government interfered to compel an end of the bloodshed. The bitterness was largely due to the fact that ever since the first Cherokee treaty with the United States, made at Hopewell, South Carolina, in 1785, small bodies of Cherokee, resenting the constant encroachments of the whites, had been removing beyond the Mississippi to form new settlements within the territory claimed by the Osage, where in 1817 they already numbered between two and three thousand persons. As showing how new is our growth as a nation, it is interesting to note that Wafford, when a boy, attended near the site of the present Clarkesville, Georgia, almost on Savannah river, a Cherokee scalp dance, at which the women danced over some Osage scalps sent by their relatives in the west as trophies of a recent victory.
Other old Cherokee names for western tribes which can not be identified are Tayûñ′ksĭ, the untranslatable name of a tribe described simply as living in the West; Tsuniya′tigă, “Naked people,” described as living in the far West; Gûn′-tsuskwa′ʻlĭ, “Short-arrows,” who lived in the far West, and were small, but great fighters; Yûñ′wini′giskĭ, “Man-eaters,” a hostile tribe west or north, possibly the cannibal Atakapa or Tonkawa, of Louisiana or Texas. Their relations with the tribes with which they have become acquainted since the removal to Indian Territory do not come within the scope of this paper.