The Chickasaw Wars: The Nation That Never Surrendered

Chickasaw women on a bluff forty feet above the Tombigbee scrape and smoke the hides from the winter's hunting. Each skin, properly worked, will buy powder and lead, a hatchet with an English steel bit, a wool blanket that will not rot in the wet, or a string of sky-blue glass beads. In the 1720s the deerskin is the coin of the interior, and the Chickasaw towns sit astride the trails between English Carolina and French Louisiana.

That position made them rich, and it made them a target. France could not bend a confederacy of independent towns that traded with the English and answered only to their own councils, so it tried to break them. In 1736 two French columns converged on the Chickasaw country, one from Illinois and one up the Tombigbee from Mobile with Choctaw allies, and the Chickasaw defeated both. The French came back in 1739 and again in 1752, and never broke them.

Between those campaigns run the deerskin road, the Choctaw civil war, and the partnership with English traders who married into Chickasaw families to do business in their towns. In 1763 it was France, not the Chickasaw, that gave up the contest for the interior, signing away its whole empire on the North American mainland.