The Choctaw and the French: Alliance and Civil War in the Lower Mississippi

The canebrake makes a sound like something breathing in the last dark before sunup, as stalks thirty feet tall lean together and rub in the river damp. A Choctaw woman who has known that sound all her life stands on the ridge above it, looking out past the barrier islands at a ship riding at anchor. She is not a chief, and nothing about her would tell a stranger that her opinion matters. But she has walked six miles in the dark to see this, and she is weighing what the ship will cost her grandchildren.

The ships brought the French. The Choctaw, a confederacy of perhaps twenty thousand people in the cane and longleaf country between the Pearl and the Tombigbee, became French Louisiana's great ally, trading deerskins and warriors for guns and cloth for more than sixty years. In the late 1740s the partnership turned inward, as the towns split over whether to hold to France or trade with the English and civil war set kin against kin.

The uneasy peace that followed, the British and their boundary line after 1763, and the treaties that shrank the Choctaw country all lead to the removal of the 1830s, the first carried out under the Indian Removal Act, and to the nation rebuilt in Indian Territory.

The woman on the ridge could not have known that her grandchildren's grandchildren would be forced west to a new country. That morning she said only that the water in the canebrake was rising, and turned for home.