Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/360

 paltry and radically dismembered fragments, as there were names employed to designate them.

It is not a little singular, that to all inquiries of ultimate residence which have ever been made among the American natives, they should so uniformly refer back apparently almost to the same period and the same country. The occasion of this simultaneous migration, however urgent and important, is now perpetually locked in mystery. It was, undoubtedly, instigated by some important human revolution, which appears to have set in motion a vast hive of the human race in search of some more commodious state of subsistence. They were too barbarous to have adventured in quest of pecuniary wealth, and could have had naturally no other object for separation greater than that which slowly dispersed the first patriarchs of the world. Their migrations, as described by the Mexicans, probably took up a period of ages, and the vicissitudes of fortune which attended their progress, unrecorded by the circumstantial pen of history, and limited by chronology, may, probably, contribute to that extraordinary appearance of simultaneous and uninterrupted movement, which was rather carried on through an extended cycle of time, than in the short space requisite to the completion of an expedition. There is one thing, however, certain in regard to the Chicasaws and their collateral bands, that they have for at least the three last centuries occupied the countries in which we still find them. For it was here that they were discovered by De Soto, and where they had not then apparently by any means recently established themselves. On what footing they had resided as near {285} neighbours to the Natchez, I am unable to ascertain; they appear from the first to have been a jealous and hostile nation, and became the bold, cunning, and successful enemies of the whites from their first interview with