SwANTON] INDIANS OF THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES 143 



KASIHTA 



One of the two great tribes which constituted the greater part of 

 the pure Muskogee element among the Lower Creeks. It has been 

 supposed that these are the Cofitachequi of the De Soto narratives 

 who were living a few miles below the site of Augusta, Ga., in 1540, 

 but it is possible that they were Coweta and that the Kasihta are 

 represented by a tribe which the Spaniards met on the Alabama and 

 which appears as Casiste in the De Soto chronicles and Caxiti in the 

 De Luna narratives. On the other hand, all of the Creek migration 

 legends affirm that the Kasihta moved eastward in advance of the 

 other tribes. Cofitachequi was visited by Juan Pardo in 1566 and 

 1567, and was perhaps the Chiquola of Laudonniere (1562). In 1628 

 it was visited by Pedro de Torres. In 1670 Henry Woodward visited 

 a tribe living northwest of the South Carolina colony at Charleston 

 which he identified with the Cofitachequi of De Soto, and there is no 

 doubt that this at least included the Kasihta Indians. They seem to 

 have been somewhat farther toward the north and west than the 

 Cofitachequi of De Soto. Before 1686 we know that they were living 

 upon Chattahoochee River because their village was burned that year 

 by a Spanish expedition in that quarter. This and the attraction of 

 the Charleston settlement evidently drew them to the Ocmulgee with 

 most of the other Creek towns, where they remained until the Yamasee 

 War, and it was on the Ocmulgee that James Moore outfitted his 

 expedition against the Apalachee. In consequence of the Yamasee 

 War, they returned to the^ Chattahoochee, where they seem to have 

 occupied two sites successively. The second of these, on the east side 

 of the river a little below the falls, is described at some length by 

 Benjamin Hawkins, who mentions two settlements belonging to it in 

 his Sketch of the Creek Country and still another in his notes taken 

 2 years before. In the census rolls of 1832-33 seven Kasihta settle- 

 ments appear and Gatschet has recorded still another. 



Kasihta population. — The number of warriors in this town is given 

 as 111 in 1738, more than 80 in 1750, 150 in 1760, 100 in 1761 and 

 1772, and 375 in 1792, counting in the villages. In 1799 Hawkins 

 says that the Indians themselves believed they had 300 gunmen, but 

 his own estimate was 180. The census of 1832-33 returned, in all the 

 Kasihta settlements, 1918 souls. 



KASKINAMPO 



A tribe which appears first in history in 1541 in the De Soto 

 narratives under the name Casqui or Casquin. They were found 

 near the present Helena, Ark. Before the end of the seventeenth 

 century, they had moved to the Cumberland, from which they shifted 

 to the Tennessee and in 1701 were on the lower end of an island in 



