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An English flag, delicately embroidered, drooped beside the dripping tatters of the Confederacy. A Roman eagle was lifted high beside the crudely beautiful banner of the Choctaws on which Odin could barely make out the three arrows and the unstrung bow. Chinese vases, thin as egg shells, most of them broken, lay in a tumbled pile beside ancient cradles and spinning wheels.

The worship of sacred animals is found, in every part of the globe, to be part of the sanction of the most stringent and important of all laws, the laws of marriage. It is an historical truth that the society of Ashantees, Choctaws, Australians, is actually constructed by the operation of laws which are under the sanction of various sacred plants and animals.

Numerous parties of Indians, Creeks and Choctaws, roamed about from place to place, mostly drunk, or seeking to become so as quickly as possible: with each party of the natives I observed a negro-man, the slave of some one present, but commonly well dressed in the European manner, having an air of superior intelligence to his masters, and evidently exercising over them the power and influence derived from superior knowledge: the negroes, in fact, appeared the masters, and the red-men the slaves.

To the south-west and west of us the French have erected a considerable town, near Fort Thoulouse on the Moville river, and several other forts and garrisons, some not above three hundred miles distant from our settlements; and at New Orleans on the Mississippi river, since her late Majesty Queen Anne's war, they have exceedingly increased their strength and traffic, and have now many forts and garrisons on both sides of that great river for several hundred miles up the same; and since his most Christian Majesty has taken out of the Mississippi Company the government of that country into his own hands, the French natives in Canada come daily down in shoals to settle all along that river, where many regular forces have of late been sent over by the King to strengthen the garrisons in those places, and, according to our best and latest advices, they have five hundred men in pay, constantly employed as wood-rangers, to keep their neighbouring Indians in subjection, and to prevent the distant ones from disturbing the settlements; which management of the French has so well succeeded, that we are very well assured they have now wholly in their possession and under their influence, the several numerous nations of Indians that are situated near the Mississippi river, one of which, called the Choctaws, by estimation consists of about five thousand fighting men, and who were always deemed a very warlike nation, lies on this side the river, not above four hundred miles distant from our out-settlements, among whom, as well as several other nations of Indians, many French Europeans have been sent to settle, whom the priests and missionaries among them encourage to take Indian wives, and use divers other alluring methods to attach the Indians the better to the French alliance, by which means the French are become throughly acquainted with the Indian way, warring and living in the woods, and have now a great number of white men among them, able to perform a long march with an army of Indians upon any expedition.

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.

With the Chickasaws and the Choctaws, their neighbors in western Alabama and in Mississippi, they were at war, and had more than held their own. White was their peace color, and red their war color. And when Tecumseh gave them the red sticks, on which to count the days, he did nothing new. The war parties of the Creeks already were known as Red Sticks.

However, the Choctaws and Chickasaws enlisted with the United States; Chief Macintosh's friendly Creeks did not falter; and speedily the fiery Andy Jackson was marching down from Tennessee, at the head of two thousand picked men, to crush out the men of Menewa and Weatherford. Other columns, from Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, also were on the trail.

The Algonquins were spread over nearly all the rest of the country on the east of the Mississippi River, and north of North Carolina. The Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws were in the South. But this spirit was not always shown by the whites, and wrongs done by an individual are avenged by savages upon his race.

Powerful and populous tribes were left high and dry in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama peoples who in their day of necessity could hope to find new homes only by long migrations past the settled river districts that lay upon their western frontiers. Of these encircled tribes, four were of chief importance: the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and the Chickasaws.

The contests excited the most intense interest, were waged with desperate resolution, and were preceded by solemn dances and religious ceremonies; they were tests of tremendous physical endurance, and were often very rough, legs and arms being occasionally broken. The Choctaws were considered to be the best ball players. The Cherokees were likewise fond of dances.