Submitted by Everett Carr

Source:  Rowland, Dunbar, ed.  Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form.  Atlanta, GA:  Southern Historical Publishing Association, 1907.  Vol. 2, page 798.

Treaty of Chickasaw Bluffs. 

This treaty was negotiated by Gen. James Wilkinson, Benjamin Hawkins and Andrew Pickens, with the mingo (or “king”) and sixteen head men of the Chickasaws.  Presents of $700 worth were made, and permission gained to build a wagon road on the Natchez trace, northward to the mouth of Bear Creek, on the Tennessee river, and on to Miro district, or Nashville.  The United States had been granted five miles square at the mouth of Bear Creek in 1784, but this had never been occupied, as the Spanish party among the Chickasaws had remonstrated.  Of the Chickasaws the commissioners said: “We with pleasure bear testimony to the amicable and orderly disposition of this nation, whose greatest boast is that they have never spilt the blood of a white man; but, with these dispositions they are not so far advanced in the habits of civilization as their neighbors the Cherokees, though they discover a taste for individual property, have made considerable progress in agriculture, and in stocking their farms, and are desirous to increase their domestic manufacturers.”  After this convention, Col. Butler and eight companies of the Second infantry were ordered up the Tennessee, the route was changed to east of Bear Creek, and Samuel Mitchell, Chickasaw agent, and two Indians were deputed to mark the line.