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The southern part of this country was once occupied by a people called the Biloxi, who had kept pace with the Aztecs in civilization and who cultivated especially the art of music. In lives of gentleness and peace they so soon forgot the use of arms that when the Choctaws descended on their fields they were powerless to prevent the onset.
I would merely mention in passing such smaller affairs as relate directly to my own narrative. Short and sharp was the conflict which, under God, gave our arms the victory at Pensacola. Swarming over the palisades or boldly tearing them down, the Choctaws, led by Tuskahoma, swept the Spaniards from their works. It so happened that Tuskahoma and I mounted the fortifications together.
Fiske, that at the cry "A Mohawk!" the Indians of New England fled like sheep. It was especially hostile to some alien branches of its own kindred, the Hurons and Eries in particular. South of the Algonquins was the Maskoki group of Indians, of a decidedly high class, comprising the Creeks, or Muskhogees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, and, later, the Seminoles.
I saw it all then; they were in league with Jerome to play a game of "bait the bear," with me for bear. So I pitched in and sang, such a song I warrant as my lords and ladies had never bent their ears to hear before, a crooning death incantation of the Choctaws, which fell as naturally from my lips as my own mother tongue.
I sat moodily upon a gun at the port, and fixing my eyes on shore vainly endeavored to make out what the French and Choctaws were doing there. To the left were the meager camp fires of the Indians; further up the hills a more generous blazing line marked the French position.
As there is no new thing under the sun, and what has been may be again, who knows but that the Cherokees and Choctaws, the Chippewas, the Hurons, the Pottowatomies and Kickapoos, may hereafter become most attached to our government, and afford us Judges, Secretaries of State, Admirals, Generals, Governors of Provinces, Grooms of the Poet's Stool, and Historians?
Since that period the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks have had several war councils, and I doubt not that they are only waiting for an opportunity to retaliate, and will eventually sweep off the entire eastern population of Texas. The fact is, that a democratic form of government is powerless when the nation is so utterly depraved.
Our peasantry, settled around our own frontier, and around the shores of our lakes, have a notion that the Scotch Highlanders were, not long since, the same kind of wild, half-naked people compared with the true English, that the Choctaws, Cherokees, Pottowatomies and Kickapoo Indians are to the common inhabitants of these United States; and that less than an hundred years ago, these Scotchmen were in the habit of making the like scalping and tomahawking excursions upon the English farmer, that the North American savage makes upon the white people here.
He signaled the Frenchmen, lowered a boat, and sent his lieutenant aboard the flagship with credentials and a letter signifying his readiness to engage in any enterprise. From Admiral Champmeslin, in command of the squadron, he learned that Bienville and Serigny, combined with the Choctaws, had invested Pensacola by land, and on the morrow a simultaneous attack by land and sea would be made.
I could then see him quietly standing guard at the door, waiting for the turmoil to cease, for it was then quite evident that the day was ours. Already the Choctaws were busy tearing the reeking scalps from the living and the dead. De la Mora's face grew deathly pale at the sight; his cheeks did play the woman, and one might deem him my lady's dapper page, catching his maiden whiff of blood.
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