hile ambitious and warlike chiefs kept forming new
settlements, and if successful drew large numbers of young warriors from
the older communities. Thus the boundary lines between the confederacies
were ever shifting.[2] Judging from a careful comparison of the
different authorities, the following estimate of the numbers of the
southern tribes at the outbreak of the Revolution may be considered as
probably approximately correct.

The Cherokees, some twelve thousand strong,[3] were the mountaineers of
their race. They dwelt among the blue-topped ridges and lofty peaks of
the southern Alleghanies,[4] in the wild and picturesque region where
the present States of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas
join one another.

To the west of the Cherokees, on the banks of the Mississippi, were
the Chickasaws, the smallest of the southern nations, numbering at the
outside but four thousand souls;[5] but they were also the bravest
and most warlike, and of all these tribal confederacies theirs was the
only one which was at all closely knit together. The whole tribe acted
in unison. In consequence, though engaged in incessant warfare with
the far more numerous Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, they more than
held their own against them all; besides having inflicted on the
French two of the bloodiest defeats they ever suffered from Indians.
Most of the remnants of the Natchez, the strange sun-worshippers, had
taken refuge with the Chickasaws and become completely identified with
them, when their own nationality was destroyed by the arms of New
Orleans.

The Choctaws, the rudest and historically the least important of these
Indians, lived south of the Chickasaws. They were probably rather less
numerous than the Creeks.[6] Though accounted brave they were
treacherous and thievish, and were not as well armed as the others. They
rarely made war or peace as a unit, parties frequently acting in
conjunction with some of the rival European powers, or else joining in
the plundering inroads made by the other Indians upon the white
settlements. Beyond thus furnishing auxiliaries to our other Indian
foes, they had little to do with our history.

The Muscogees or Creeks were the strongest of all. Their southern bands,
living in Florida, were generally considered as a separate confederacy,
under the name of Seminoles. They numbered between twenty-five and
thirty thousand souls,[7] three fourths of them being the Muscogees
proper, and the