Author’s Note: Most accounts of even small servings of 18th century Chickasaw history contain significant gaps. The great majority of non-Indians had little interest in Chickasaw culture and the tribe had no written language.

While the writer of any version of history should acknowledge these gaps, plugging them with well-informed speculation often promotes further scholarship. If more evidence exists, it may be discovered by a researcher whose curiosity was kindled by a plausible but unconfirmed explanation.

At roughly the same time, 1722-23, two important and possibly inter-related events in Chickasaw history were recorded-- one by the French and one by the English.

First, a letter by Louisiana Governor Bienville noted that Choctaws had destroyed three Chickasaw villages and in the process “brought in about four hundred scalps and taken one hundred prisoners.” Second, the English colony of Carolina in 1722 invited the entire Chickasaw Nation to relocate to an area that is today in the state of Georgia, midway between Augusta and Atlanta.

While the Nation as a whole declined the invitation, some 80 to 100 Chickasaws under the leadership of a chief called Squirrel King apparently did relocate. Although colonial documents don’t reveal exactly when this came to pass, English botanist Mark Catesby in 1723 arrived at Fort Moore (across the Savannah River from what would become Augusta, GA.) and mentioned he had contact with the Chickasaws.

Furthermore, a group of Chickasaws in September 1723 met with Carolina Governor Francis Nicholson and exchanged presents. It is also likely that Squirrel King gave Nicholson a deerskin map, perhaps painted by himself, to show the homeland tribe’s precarious position almost encircled by the enemy French allied tribes, including the Choctaw, Illinois, Miamis, Quapaws and Kickapoos.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Squirrel King-led group may have been from one of those villages noted by Bienville. Furthermore, artifact evidence from much of the two settlement areas closest to the Choctaws also suggests that some villages were abandoned in the early 1720s.

Period maps indicate that many of the villages, using the same names, relocated to other Chickasaw homeland settlement areas. For example, Hykehah and Phalacheho, which were located in1720 on a 10-milelong ridge, according to English trader James Adair, were shown on a 1737 French map to be part of a consolidation of several villages in another location that we know today is a few miles to the northeast.

On the other hand, another of Adair’s 1720 villages, Yaneka, located along a six-mile-long ridge, is absent from post-1720 maps and documents. There is no colonial document saying or even hinting that Squirrel King led his people from Yaneka 600 miles to the Savannah River area near Carolina’s Fort Moore. Yet it seems unlikely that these two events happened coincidentally.

Moreover, Squirrel King was said by Nicholson to be a renowned warrior with reputedly many kills to his credit. This could help explain two things. First, since factions of the Chickasaws and Choctaws had been raiding one another for years, it would behoove both tribes to place their best warriors in their barrier villages, and Yaneka was the closest to the Choctaw villages. Second, the followers of such an aggressive warrior could be expected to continue fighting for or along the tribe’s long-time ally, Carolina. And by moving 600 miles closer to Charles Town, the tribe would have much better access to arms, food (if need be) and clothing.

Tony Carr
Still, more research is needed to solidify the Yaneka--Savannah River Chickasaw link. Fortunately, a retired university history professor, Dr. Edward Cashin, is conducting research for the first book-length manuscript on these expatriate Chickasaws. While he hasn’t turned up anything so far on the Yaneka link, he has, among other discoveries, found and contacted a man, Tony Carr, who claims that he and many others living in the area of North Augusta, South Carolina, are descendants of the Savannah River Chickasaws.

Carr, a long-time land surveyor who was raised and lives in North Augusta, says his family always knew they were part Chickasaw. Later, he found some documentation. While they doesn’t prove his link to the 18th century Chickasaws, he presented his evidence to a South Carolina state department, which certified him to be 25 percent Native American. The documentation shows Carr is descended from area persons listed on the 1870 census as Indian. The birth certificates of their descendants, however, identified them as white, Carr says, because a stigma was attached to being Indian in the early part of the 20th century. He says at least 200 others in the North Augusta area also claim a Chickasaw ancestry.

Soon after being certified as Native American by South Carolina, Carr publicly requested in January 2004 that a North Augusta riverfront development project be halted pending results of an archaeological survey. He and Cashin have copies of colonial documents showing that the Savannah River Chickasaws lived in the North Augusta area for more than half a century.

Since federal funds were involved in part of the development project, the survey has been ordered and according to Chad Long, South Carolina state archaeologist, will be conducted by a private archaeological firm within the next few months. Meanwhile, several tribes, including the Chickasaws, with historic ties to the area, have been notified by the South Carolina Department of Transportation.

That Carr and others would be descendants of the Savannah River Chickasaws is initially surprising only because historians familiar with these Indians note that they vacated their lands about the time of the American Revolutionary War. Most historians believe the Chickasaws eventually returned to their homeland in northeastern Mississippi. But, the idea of some Chickasaws remaining in this area for more than half a century (1723 to 1770s) isn’t that novel. The family histories of some Mississippians and Alabamans include claims to their Chickasaw heritage.

Even if all Chickasaws did leave the Savannah River area before or during the Revolutionary War, it is documented that some returned after the war to reclaim the Chickasaw land west of Horse Creek and north of the Savannah River. According to a 1783 South Carolina ordinance, the lands of the Chickasaw were confiscated because they had “deserted to the enemy [the British].” In a move to reclaim their land in 1791, Chickasaw “beloved men” Thomas Brown and George Sutusky and “several other Chickasaw Indians” appealed this decision to the South Carolina lawmakers. The Chickasaws said when the war commenced, the majority of them proclaimed their neutrality and moved back to the homeland, maintaining that only a few sided with the British.

Of course, the Chickasaw appeal was denied. Not only did the state of South Carolina not need the Chickasaw in 1783, as the English colony of Carolina had needed them in 1739, the state didn’t want them getting in the way of the white settlers. Even so, some of these Chickasaws may have resettled in the area, especially if they considered themselves to be Savannah River Chickasaws.

Reasons for Relocation
More research also may better document the Chickasaws’ motive for moving to the Savannah River area. Some of them, possibly opposed to the lengthy and incessant warfare with the French and their Indian allies, may have been seeking refuge. This doesn’t necessarily mean that this group of Chickasaws were pacifists or fearful. It is important to note that these Chickasaws and subsequently other emigrants always settled on trading routes to the homeland. This suggests that they were strategically placed to played a role in keeping the routes open and protected.

If most Chickasaws accepted Carolina’s invitation to relocate closer to English support and protection near Fort Moore (on the bank of the Savannah on the Carolina side), they understood that the quid pro quo was aiding or buffering the colony against enemy Indian attacks. According to Thomas Nairne in 1708, a fane mingo or squirrel king, usually an esteemed warrior, was chosen by one family to protect another one. It is possible that the warrior who became Squirrel King took the name because he had been selected by the English to help protect their colony. He may have felt duty bound to accept, but it is also true that the Chickasaws received annual gifts, scalp bounties and rewards for the capture of runaway slaves. In 1739, the Carolina Assembly granted the Chickasaws a deed to the land, upon which they had settled, of some 21,774 acres.

Historian Wendy St. Jean interprets the Chickasaw motive a bit differently. In a sense, Savannah River Chickasaw warriors, “conducted war in distant places to get firearms for their homeland’s defense because their presence in the vicinity of the British colonies kept the British mindful of the far Chickasaw nation’s welfare.

“Because Choctaws were ambushing English packtrains, warriors in the far Chickasaw nation [homeland] were hard pressed to obtain firearms from Carolina, making Squirrel King’s relocation near the colony imperative.” English arms and supplies via two overland trade routes were the crucial lifelines to the Chickasaw homeland in the 1750s.

Squirrel King’s Leadership
If Squirrel King was valuable to the homeland, he and English officials also held each other in high esteem. Once, when relations between his warriors and the English had grown tense, he told his men that the English were their “best friends,” and warned them that further quarreling would result in his abandoning them “to be made French slaves.” He and his warriors defended Carolina against French and Spanishallied Indians. In campaigns against Spanish Florida, Squirrel King’s warriors were described by an English officer as the finest “pickt Men.”

All this being so, their warfare with the Catawbas, who also were English allies, demonstrated that their need to defend and avenge themselves took priority over the tribe’s alliance with the English. This warfare with the Catawbas angered Carolina Governor James Glen, who initially admired them and then called them a “pack of renegadoes.” Perhaps as punishment, he relaxed enforcement of the rigid restrictions on whites settling on Chickasaw land.

On the other hand, Edmond Atkin, the Indian superintendent for Britain’s southern colonies, believed that Squirrel King had “more personal Weight and Authority than any other [chief], his talks being listened to attentively by other Nations as well as his own.” The Carolina Commons House in 1748 presented the chief a “personal cutlass, pistol and munitions” for his service to the colony.

As early as the 1730s, some of the Chickasaws moved across the Savannah River into Georgia to new settlements, and some of them assisted with the construction of Fort Augusta in 1737. (The fort’s site today is within a stone’s throw of the Savannah River adjacent to downtown Augusta, Ga.) Perhaps clan differences led to the separation, but English official Daniel Pepper wrote that increasing white encroachment and horse and livestock thievery later led the Chickasaws to exchange part of their Horse Creek land with trader Lachlan McGillivray for land about 12 miles downriver from Augusta in an area that became known as New Savannah.

By the 1750s, the reign of Squirrel King (then in his 50s or 60s) apparently was drawing to a close. Other leaders, such as Mingo Stoby (also known as Succatabee) and a medicine man known by the British as the “Old Doctor” replace Squirrel King’s prominence in the colonial journals. Since Squirrel King’s name doesn’t appear after 1757, he may have died about that time, but there is no death notice.

His successor, Succatabee, told Carolina officials in 1765 that not even the elders could recall the boundaries of their Horse Creek reservation, and he asked for a resurvey of the 1739 land grant of 21,774 acres. References to this land grant and the plat exist in the colonial records, but the original plat has been missing for many years.

But by 1765, identification of boundaries wasn’t the issue. Boundaries were irrelevant to white settlers because British officials looked the other way.

Saving Savannah River Sites?
This uncertainty over the boundaries of the Chickasaw reservation was relevant to Tony Carr in 2004 when he was calling for an archaeological survey of the proposed riverfront development project. In response to the ambiguity, a local historian, Bettis C. Rainsford, wrote a paper for the Edgefield County (S.C.) Historical Society, in which he analyzed the pertinent colonial records to plot on a map his presumed location of the Chickasaw reservation.

He concluded that the proposed development project was near but not within the reservation. He also stated that the Chickasaws, who “were somewhat nomadic,” could have settled for a time in the development area. Rainsford’s well-informed but speculative plotting of the Chickasaw reservation seems to be credible scholarships, says the state archaeologist of South Carolina, Chad Long, who e-mailed me a copy of Rainsford’s graphic interpretation of the reservation.

But in order to preserve the tribal sites that are doubtless within the Chickasaws’ historic Horse Creek lands from more than a half century of occupation, two other kinds of evidence would be helpful. One is a concentration of physical evidence on the ground, such as potsherds and other artifacts. The other is records or recollections of excavations. If and when further evidence turns up, we will keep you advised.

*****

Bibliography
Harold S. Maness, Forgotten Outpost, Fort Moore and Savannah Town, 1685-1765, self- published book, 1986. Copy available in Chickasaw Library, Ada.
James Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004).
Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729-1765, (Kingsport TN: Southern Publishers, Inc., 1940).
Chapman Milling, Red Carolinians, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940).
Wendy St. Jean, Trading Paths: Chickasaw Diplomacy in the Greater Southeast, 1690s- 1790s, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2004.
Interviews with Tony Carr, Nov. 5, 2005.
Tony Carr ancestry documentation.
Copies of Carolina colonial maps from South Carolina Archives and History provided by Tony Carr.
Preston Sparks, “Development Upsets Resident,” The Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 3, 2004.
Preston Sparks, “Indians Once Called Riverfront Home,” The Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 8, 2004.
Chad Long, Personnel Communication, Nov. 10, 2005.
Edward Cashin, Personnel Communication, several times in recent months.
Bettis C. Rainsford, “The Chickasaw Indians of South Carolina,” Edgefield County Historical Society, Feb. 12, 2004.
Richard Green, “18th Century Deerskins Map Chickasaw Diplomacy,” The Chickasaw Times, October 2003.
South Carolina Commons Journal, selected correspondence from 1759 to 1762.