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Five women had the cruelty to cast their children into the fire, in sight of the French who recounted it to me; and but for the French there would have been a great many more children burned." But an arrogant and cruel commandant, by his ill-judged severity, at a time when the warlike Chickasaws were inciting the Natchez to rise, produced a fearful explosion.
"Tell me, Captain de Mouret, what have you learned of the Chickasaws, for our time grows short." Glad to change the current of his thought I went on in detail to give the results of my reconnaissance. Everywhere we found preparations among the allied tribes, and felt sure we saw signs of a secret understanding between them and the Spaniard.
They placed even more reliance upon the war-like confederacies of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, thrust in between themselves and the frontier settlements; and while protesting to the Americans with smooth treachery that they were striving to keep the Indians at peace, they secretly incited them to hostilities, and furnished them with arms and munitions of war.
But in the course of weeks only a few men came back, sent by the Chickasaws, to tell about the fate of their leaders. The troops from New Orleans did not keep the appointment, arriving too late and then retreating. D'Artaguette, urged by his Indians, made the attack with such force as he had, and his brave array was destroyed.
Most of the pages were written in the towns of the Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother," but from whose "natural jealousy" and "prying disposition" he was obliged to conceal his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was a literary work begun and carried on with more disadvantages!" Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing interest.
"Let 'em have all the heaven they can git," he would remark, wiping his bloody knife upon the mane of his horse. "I expec' to smoke the pipe o' peace with all I meet on Canaan's shore, Cherokees, Creeks, or Chickasaws, Reg'lars, Millish, or Settlers."
Indian Territory was set apart as a permanent home for the tribes, and the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles were removed thither from the Southeastern States.
He had sent messages to Stuart, the British Indian agent in the south, directing him to give war-belts to the Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, that a combined attack on the frontier might take place as soon as the weather opened. He himself was to be joined by reinforcements from Detroit, while the Indians were to gather round him as soon as the winter broke.
Their men were brave and honest but lacking in energy. In the Muskhogean family of Indians, comprising the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, who occupied the Gulf States from Georgia to Mississippi, all the tribes were agricultural and sedentary and occupied villages of substantial houses.
The tribes of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks settled in the Territory set apart for them west of Arkansas are rapidly advancing in education and in all the arts of civilization and self-government, and we may indulge the agreeable anticipation that at no very distant day they will be incorporated into the Union as one of the sovereign States.
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