page_title: Chickasaw
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Chickasaw / History
caption_attribution_description: English: "Map of the Several Nations of Indians to the Northwest of South Carolina" or the "Catawba Deerskin Map", an annotated copy of hand-painted deerskin original made by a Catawba chieftain to Governor Francis Nicholson "This map describing the scituation [sic] of the several nations of Indians to the NW of South Carolina was coppyed [sic] from a draught [sic] drawn &amp; painted on a deer skin by an Indian Cacique and presented to Francis Nicholason Esqr. Governor of South Carolina by whom it is most humbly dedicated to his Royal Highness George, Prince of Wales."
context_page_description: The Chickasaw are an indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands. Their traditional territory was in the Southeastern United States of Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Their language is classified as a member of the Muskogean language family. In the present day, they are organized as the federally recognized Chickasaw Nation.
  Sometime prior to the first European contact, the Chickasaw migrated from western regions and moved east of the Mississippi River, where they settled mostly in present-day northeast Mississippi, Alabama, and into Lawrence County, Tennessee, where they encountered European explorers and traders. They had interaction with the French, English, and Spanish during the colonial years. The United States considered the Chickasaw one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast, as they adopted numerous practices of European Americans. Resisting European-American settlers encroaching on their territory, they were forced by the US to sell their country in the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek and move to Indian Territory during the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s.
  Most of their descendants remain as residents of what is now Oklahoma.
context_section_description: The origin of the Chickasaw is uncertain; 20th-century scholars, such as the archaeologist Patricia Galloway, theorize that the Chickasaw and Choctaw split into distinct peoples in the 17th century from the remains of Plaquemine culture and other groups whose ancestors had lived in the lower Mississippi Valley for thousands of years. When Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in what is now northeastern Mississippi.
  The Chickasaw are believed to have migrated into Mississippi from the west, as their oral history attests. They and the Choctaw were once one people, and migrated from west of the Mississippi River into present-day Mississippi in prehistoric times; the Chickasaw and Choctaw split along the way. The Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere spanned the Eastern Woodlands. The Mississippian cultures emerged from previous moundbuilding societies by 880 CE. They built complex, dense villages supporting a stratified society, with centers throughout the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys and their tributaries.
  In the 15th century, proto-Chickasaw people left the Tombigbee Valley after the collapse of the Moundville chiefdom. They settled into the upper Yazoo and Pearl River valleys in present-day Mississippi. Historian Arrell Gibson and anthropologist John R. Swanton believed the Chickasaw Old Fields were in Madison County, Alabama.
  These people (the Choctaw) are the only nation from whom I could learn any idea of a traditional account of a first origin; and that is their coming out of a hole in the ground, which they shew between their nation and the Chickasaws; they tell us also that their neighbours were surprised at seeing a people rise at once out of the earth.
  — Bernard Romans, Natural History of East and West Florida
  Another version of the Chickasaw creation story is that they arose at Nanih Waiya, a great earthwork mound built about 300 CE by Woodland peoples. It is also sacred to the Choctaw, who have a similar story about it. The mound was built about 1400 years before the coalescence of each of these peoples as ethnic groups.
  The first European contact with the Chickasaw ancestors was in 1540 when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto  encountered them and stayed in one of their towns, most likely near present-day Tupelo, Mississippi. After various disagreements, the Chickasaw attacked the De Soto expedition in a nighttime raid, nearly destroying the force. The Spanish moved on quickly.
  The Chickasaw began to trade with the British after the colony of Carolina was founded in 1670.  With British-supplied guns, the Chickasaw raided their neighbors and enemies the Choctaw, capturing some members and selling them into Indian slavery to the British. When the Choctaw acquired guns from the French, power between the tribes became more equalized and the slave raids stopped.
  Allied with the British, the Chickasaw were often at war with the French and the Choctaw in the 18th century, such as in the Battle of Ackia on May 26, 1736. Skirmishes continued until France ceded its claims to the region east of the Mississippi River after being defeated by the British in the Seven Years' War (called the French and Indian War in North America).
  Following the American Revolutionary War, in 1793-94, Chickasaw fought as allies of the new United States under General Anthony Wayne against the Indians of the old Northwest Territory. The Shawnee and other, allied Northwest Indians were defeated in the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794.
  A 19th-century historian, Horatio Cushman, wrote, "Neither the Choctaws nor Chicksaws ever engaged in war against the American people, but always stood as their faithful allies." Cushman believed the Chickasaw, along with the Choctaw, may have had origins in present-day Mexico and migrated north. That theory does not have consensus; archeological research, as noted above, has revealed the peoples had long histories in the Mississippi area and independently developed complex cultures.
caption: A c. 1724 English copy of a deerskin Catawba map of the tribes between Charleston (left) and Virginia (right) following the displacements of a century of disease and enslavement and the 1715–7 Yamasee War. The Chickasaw are labeled as "Chickisa".
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