Koasati

The Koasati, or Coushatta, are a Muskogean people whose earliest known towns stood in the Tennessee River valley of present-day Tennessee, where Hernando de Soto's expedition met them in 1540. Maize farmers and noted basket-makers, they drifted southwest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, founding towns on the Tennessee before settling at Coosada and joining the Muscogee Creek Confederacy as Upper Creeks, closely intermarried with the Alabama.

After 1763 colonial pressure pushed them further west across Mississippi into Spanish Louisiana and Texas: a Coushatta band reached the Big Thicket of eastern Texas in 1795, while kin who remained in Alabama were swept into the removals to Indian Territory in the 1830s.

Their language belongs to the Muskogean family. Together with Alabama and the extinct Apalachee it forms the family's Apalachee-Alabama-Koasati branch.