Chatot

The Chatot, now more often called Chacato, were a Muskogean-speaking people of the Florida panhandle, occupying the upper Chipola and Apalachicola river basins in the seventeenth century.

The Spanish founded two missions among their villages in 1674, but pressure to adopt full Christian practice sparked a rebellion in which converts tried to kill a missionary; many rebels fled to the Tawasa or joined the Spanish-hostile Chiscas, while the rest resettled in Apalachee Province missions. When Carolinian raiders and Native allies destroyed the Apalachee missions in 1704, surviving Chatot moved west with the Apalachee and settled around Pensacola and Mobile bays, some later absorbed into the Choctaw.

After West Florida passed to Great Britain in 1763, others crossed into Louisiana. Spanish writers called them chato, flat-nosed, perhaps for artificial cranial deformation, and the Choctawhatchee River and Bay may preserve their name.