the early years of the contest, it is
more than probable that the Alleghanies would have been made our western
boundary at the peace. We won from them vast stretches of territory
because we had beaten their warriors, and we could not have won it
otherwise; whereas the territory of the Iroquois was lost, not because
of their defeat, but because of the defeat of the British.

There were two great groups of these Indians, the ethnic corresponding
roughly with the geographic division. In the northwest, between the
Ohio and the Lakes, were the Algonquin tribes, generally banded
loosely together; in the southwest, between the Tennessee--then called
the Cherokee--and the Gulf, the so-called Appalachians lived. Between
them lay a vast and beautiful region where no tribe dared dwell, but
into which all ventured now and then for war and hunting.

The southwestern Indians were called Appalachians by the olden writers,
because this was the name then given to the southern Alleghanies. It is
doubtful if the term has any exact racial significance; but it serves
very well to indicate a number of Indian nations whose system of
government, ways of life, customs, and general culture were much alike,
and whose civilization was much higher than was that of most other
American tribes.

The Appalachians were in the barbarous, rather than in the merely
savage state. They were divided into five lax confederacies: the
Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. The latter
were merely a southern offshoot of the Creeks or Muscogees. They were
far more numerous than the northwestern Indians, were less nomadic,
and in consequence had more definite possession of particular
localities; so that their lands were more densely peopled.

In all they amounted to perhaps seventy thousand souls.[1] It is more
difficult to tell the numbers of the different tribes; for the division
lines between them were very ill defined, and were subject to wide
fluctuations. Thus the Creeks, the most formidable of all, were made up
of many bands, differing from each other both in race and speech. The
languages of the Chickasaws and Choctaws did not differ more from the
tongue of the Cherokees, than the two divisions of the latter did from
each other. The Cherokees of the hills, the Otari, spoke a dialect that
could not be understood by the Cherokees of the lowlands, or Erati.
Towns or bands continually broke up and split off from their former
associations, w