swantok] EARLY BISTORY OF THE CREEK INDIANS 415 
for carriers so that he could set out in the morning, but early on 
that very day the Indians suddenly fell upon the camp in four bands, 
got past the sentinels with fire concealed in little pots — after the 
manner of Gideon — set fire to the town, and attacked the Spaniards 
so unexpectedly that only two were aide to mount their horses, most 
of which ran away or were killed. The men on foot were also 
in such confusion that, had the Indians been aware of their advan- 
tage and pressed it, the chroniclers testify that not a soul would have 
survived. As it was, mistaking the horses running wildly about for 
cavalry preparing to charge them, the Indians became frightened 
and fled. Next day the badly shattered European force moved to 
a smaller town a league away, where the Chickasaw chief himself 
usually lived. There they set up a forge with bellows of bear skins 
and began to manufacture new saddles and spears, and to retemper 
their weapons. Fortunately for them the Indians left them in peace 
until the new weapons had been completed, and eight days later, when 
they ventured an assault, they were easily beaten off. 1 The Chickasaw 
thus have the distinction of being the tribe which came nearest to 
putting an end to De Soto and his entire army, and the escape of the 
whites was due rather to a number of fortuitous and unexpected cir- 
cumstances than to their own foresight or bravery. In the interest 
of history and ethnology we may consider ourselves fortunate that 
the disaster was averted. 
Neither the expedition of De Luna nor that of Pardo reached this 
tribe, although the Napochies 2 with whom De Luna fought were 
probably, in part at least, identical with the Napissa, noted by Iber- 
ville in 1699 as having united with the Chickasaw. 3 Spanish docu- 
ments of the seventeenth century again mention them, but they do 
not reemerge into clear light until the settlement of Carolina and 
Louisiana. Woodward, in the account of his Westo discovery, 
dated 1674, mentions Chickasaw in connection with the Kasihta and 
Chiska Indians. 4 English traders had reached the Mississippi by 
1700 and their first settlements among the Chickasaw must have 
been made at the same period (see pi. 6). From then on the 
Chickasaw formed a base for the extension of British trade and 
British power, and they remained firmly attached to their English 
allies until the period of the American Revolution. 
Shortly before 1715 the Chickasaw and Cherokee drove the Shaw- 
nee Indians from their long-established settlements on Cumberland 
River. 5 In 1745 a band of Shawnee returned to this region but were 
' Bourne, Narr. of Do Soto, I, pp. 100-108; n, pp. 22-24, 131-135. 
« See pp. 231 240. 
" Margry, D6c.,iv, pp. 164, 180, 184. 
«S. Car. Hist. Soc. Colls., v, p. 461; and p. 307. 
s Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, i, p. 131. 
