Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw: The Differences That Actually Mattered

Two of these three nations were once one people. The third speaks a language whose closest living relatives are spoken eight hundred miles north, by the Mohawk and the Seneca. The Cherokee, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw get treated as three versions of one story — three southeastern nations, three removals, one Trail of Tears. They were not. This is the full history of how they actually differed, and why it decided everything that happened to them. Cherokee is an Iroquoian language, the only one in the South, and its family tree runs north into New York and Ontario. Choctaw and Chickasaw are Western Muskogean, so close that some linguists treat them as dialects of one language and say the split is political rather than linguistic. Both nations preserve the same origin tradition — the brothers Chahta and Chiksa', the sacred pole, and the mound at Nanih Waiya where one group stopped and the other carried on north. What pulled them apart was not a quarrel between brothers. It was Carolina and Louisiana. English traders armed the Chickasaw as a slave-raiding nation, and the people they raided hardest were the Choctaw. When France founded Louisiana in 1699, the Choctaw found someone willing to arm them back, and two halves of one people spent the next century fighting as proxies for two empires. This video covers the Chickasaw Wars and the 1736 campaign — d'Artaguiette's column destroyed at Ogoula Tchetoka, the failed French assault on the fortified town of Ackia on 26 May 1736, and Bienville's 1739 invasion that collapsed before reaching the Chickasaw towns. A nation of perhaps five thousand people beat the French empire in North America twice. It also covers what that victory cost the Choctaw: Red Shoes, his assassination in 1747, and the Choctaw Civil War that followed. The Cherokee fought a different century — the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758 to 1761, the envoys killed at Fort Prince George, and eighteen years of frontier war under Dragging Canoe until 1794. Then the "civilization" period, where they diverged again. Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary, finished in 1821 and adopted in 1825. The Cherokee Phoenix newspaper at New Echota in 1828. The Cherokee constitution of 1827 that Georgia treated as a declaration of war. The Choctaw keeping three districts and three chiefs. The Chickasaw keeping power with the principal chief and planter families like the Colberts. And slavery in all three nations by 1860. Removal happened three different ways, and this video separates them. The Choctaw went first under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, with an Article 14 clause that was meant to let families stay in Mississippi and was sabotaged by the agent responsible. The Chickasaw negotiated the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in 1832, sold their land, banked the money and paid for their own removal — and bought a district inside the Choctaw Nation for $530,000. The Cherokee were driven west at gunpoint under the Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835 by Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, rejected by Principal Chief John Ross and the National Council, and ratified by the Senate by one vote. The Trail of Tears killed at least 4,000 Cherokee, and the demographer Russell Thornton argued the real figure may be closer to 8,000. It ends on the differences that are still live. The Civil War and Stand Watie. The Chickasaw surrender of 14 July 1865, the last Confederate government to give up the war. The 1866 Reconstruction treaties, and why the Cherokee Nation admits Freedmen descendants as citizens today while the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations do not. Why the Cherokee Nation has around 470,000 citizens and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw around 11,000 — a fact about enrollment law and blood quantum, not ancestry. And why more Americans claim Cherokee descent than any other Native ancestry. Every figure here is sourced. Where numbers are contested or the history is oral tradition, the video says so. CHAPTERS 0:00 Why These Three Nations Get Confused 1:45 Three Homelands — Where They Actually Were 3:41 Chahta and Chiksa': One People, Two Nations 7:21 The Slave Trade That Split Them 9:15 How the Chickasaw Beat the French Empire 12:20 Red Shoes and the Choctaw Civil War 14:11 The Cherokee War With Britain 16:12 Sequoyah, the Constitution and the Plantations 19:12 Choctaw Removal and the Article 14 Betrayal 21:00 The Chickasaw Who Paid for Their Own Removal 22:30 New Echota and the Trail of Tears 24:07 The Last Confederate Government to Surrender 25:37 The Freedmen Question Nobody Has Closed 28:29 Why Everyone Claims Cherokee Ancestry #Cherokee #Choctaw #Chickasaw #NativeAmericanHistory #AmericanHistory #TrailOfTears #Sequoyah #FiveTribes #NativeAmerican #IndianRemoval #History #Documentary #Oklahoma #Mississippi #Appalachia