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The others he had won in the course of a long, furious, and stubborn contest of the tribe with the Chickasaws, who, always impolitic, headlong, and brave, were now reduced by their own valor in their many wars from ten thousand fighting men to a few hundred. He had attained the "warrior's crown" when he had shown their kindred Choctaws a mettle as fierce and a craft as keen as their own.
The Kentuckians, as we have seen, were bottled up in Harrodsburg and Boonesborough; and, while the northern Indians led by Girty and Dequindre darkened the Bloody Ground anew, the Cumberlanders were making a desperate stand against the Chickasaws and the Creeks. So terrible was their situation that panic took hold on them, and they would have fled but for the influence of Robertson.
There is a story that a young girl reached the gate of Fort Chartres, starving and in rags, from wandering through swamps and woods. She was the last of a family arrived from France, and sought her sister, an officer's wife, in the fort. The Chickasaws had killed every other relative; she, escaping alone, was ready to die of exposure when she saw the flag through the trees.
But, admitting it was the correct theory, the vast difficulty of locating the boys still confronted him. They might be journeying far southward in the land of the Creeks and Chickasaws, or to the homes of the Dacotah in the frozen north, or westward toward the Rocky Mountains.
In 1702, we find a royal order to the effect that La Forest is henceforth to reside in Canada, and Tonty on the Mississippi; and that the establishment at the Illinois is to be discontinued. In the same year, Tonty joined D'Iberville in Lower Louisiana, and was sent by that officer from Mobile to secure the Chickasaws in the French interest.
Even as they sighted it, it shot in among the trunks of a dense cypress forest, and disappeared. Before the Seminoles became the powerful tribe into which they finally grew they were a band of outlaws, composed of those who, for some good reason, had fled or been driven from the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other tribes of the South.
The Cherokees lived among the mountains, "where the present states of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas join one another." To the west, on the Mississippi, were the Chickasaws, south of whom lived the Choctaws, while to the south of the Cherokees were the Creeks. The Catawbas had their villages on the border of North and South Carolina, about the headwaters of the Santee river.
That tribe numbered three hundred warriors, who, in their distant hunting-excursions, had been engaged in frequent skirmishes with some of the British colonists in South Carolina. When the French landed, they were informed that, two days previous, the village of the Colapissas had been attacked by a party of two hundred Chickasaws, headed by two Englishmen.
"No," he said, "It was not I, but your courage and tenacity. I had the rare good fortune to find the letter among the Chickasaws and obtain it. It was sent by the Shawnees and Miamis as a sort of token, a war belt as it were. It was only a remote chance that brought it back to New Orleans, and even then Alvarez confidently expected to be Governor General."
Still, by cutting down cottonwood-trees, and letting the animals browse on the small soft branches, we managed to keep them up till, finally even this wretched food beginning to grow scarce, I had all except a few of the strongest sent to Fort Arbuckle, near which place we had been able, fortunately, to purchase some fields of corn from the half-civilized Chickasaws and Choctaws.
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