Chickasha

The Chickasha, or Chickasaw, are a Muskogean people of northern Mississippi and western Tennessee, kin to the Choctaw, splitting in the seventeenth century. Their migration story recalls a journey from west of the Mississippi, archaeology linking their ancestors to the fifteenth-century collapse of Moundville.

Hernando de Soto knew them as the Chicaza, and in 1540 a Chickasaw night raid nearly destroyed his army. From 1670 they acquired firearms from Carolina merchants, and as British allies fought the French and Choctaw through much of the eighteenth century, beating a French attack at Ackia in 1736.

They backed the United States at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the 1813 to 1814 Creek War, when the Colberts, descendants of a Scots trader and high-ranking Chickasaw women, rose to lead them. Matrilineal, they ceded lands in the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek and were forced west on the Trail of Tears after 1834.