Native Americans in the American Revolution by Ethan A.. Schmidt

Author:Ethan A.. Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE CHICKASAW WAR FOR AUTONOMY

The Chickasaws occupied a very important place in British strategy at the outbreak of the Revolution, and the British were quite certain that Chickasaw loyalty would not be an issue. According to John Stuart, the Chickasaws as well as the Choctaws were “absolutely at our disposal.” Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit even planned to utilize a combined force of Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Ohio country Indians to raid American frontier settlements up and down the entire length of the Mississippi River, though his plans never quite came to fruition. Additionally, the Chickasaws, as well as the Choctaws, were to be employed to patrol the Mississippi River to prevent the Spanish from resupplying American frontier settlements and posts in the Illinois and Ohio countries.50

Time and again, Stuart’s confidence in the willingness of the Chickasaws to do his bidding was disappointed. In 1776, the Chickasaws, citing their oncoming hunting season, refused to patrol the Mississippi, and Spanish boats proceeded up the river unimpeded that fall and winter.51 In early 1777, John Stuart sent his deputy and cousin Charles Stuart to investigate Chickasaw inaction. Stuart reported back that the Chickasaws were “a spoiled Nation, Proud and Insolent.”52 Stuart interpreted this to mean that the Chickasaws had come under the spell of the rebels, but there is very little evidence to support that conclusion. Instead, this response to the demands of the British was wholly consistent with Chickasaw desires for independence to live according to their long-standing desire as “a people to ourselves.”53 Their claim that to patrol the Mississippi in late 1776 would interfere with their hunting season is certainly a very plausible one. The Chickasaws did not see themselves as British minions, but rather as an independent people who would act in concert with the British only if it served their interests. In this case, hunting very possibly achieved their ends more so than patrolling the river for Spanish boats destined for locales beyond the Chickasaws’ borders. To skip the hunt would mean to forego both critical food stores needed to see their people through the coming winter and fewer skins for trade. Given the problems the British were already facing securing adequate trade goods to supply groups closer to them like the Cherokees and Creeks, the Chickasaws would most certainly have known that they could not count on food and supplies sufficient to sustain them from that quarter. Additionally, they may well have experienced the same kinds of factional divisions that were at that time threatening to tear the Cherokees and Creeks apart. While the Chickasaws, unlike the Cherokees and Creeks, had always been their undivided ally, British reaction to the Chickasaws’ recent retaliatory killings of some formerly French-allied Indians from the Illinois country just prior to the outbreak of the revolution had seriously damaged the relationship between the two.54 Given the rather steadfast loyalty they later demonstrated to the British and their relative lack of demonstrated contact with American representatives, it seems more likely that

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