When the trade in native slaves had slowed during the 1720s, the Chickasaw and other southeastern tribes turned to supplying the British with deerskin.
The deer populations in their homelands quickly disappeared forcing native hunters to range far afield – first the Cumberland Plateau and southern Illinois, and then west of the Mississippi as far as eastern Oklahoma.
The Quapaw who lived there were old Chickasaw enemies, but by the 1760s they had lost so many of their people to epidemic they were no longer able to oppose intrusions by Chickasaw hunters.
Francis River during 1802, and its warriors were routinely reinforced by their relatives from east of the Mississippi who came and stayed for about six months each year
They were also having problems with the Osage who, because of wars with the Sauk and Fox, had been forced south and were compensating themselves with Quapaw territory.
By the time the Spanish took over Louisiana in 1763, there were 200 Chickasaw living more or less permanently west of the Mississippi along the lower Red and Arkansas Rivers.
A small band of pro-French Cherokee arrived shortly afterwards to escape British rule and were joined – ironically enough – twenty years later by a group of pro-British Cherokee trying to escape the Americans.
A severe drought during the summer of 1792 caused massive crop failures throughout the south, and to survive, many Choctaw were forced to hunt west of the Mississippi.
At the same time, the Spanish after 1763 added to the volatile mix by inviting several large groups of Shawnee and Delaware to settle near Cape Girardeau in southeast Missouri.
In 1794 Osage chiefs returning from a Spanish peace conference in New Orleans were ambushed on the Mississippi by the Chickasaw.
It took considerable effort for the Spanish to sneak the Osage back to their villages in southern Missouri with their hair.
The last cession of ten million acres had resulted in the assassination of Doublehead, a Chickamericans for years to protect the Cherokee homeland before giving up
After the Americans took over in 1803, the chronic warfare in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri delayed the settlement of the area for many years.
William Blount’s assurances to the Chickasaw and other southern tribes at the Nashville council in 1792 that the Americans “do not want the land of any red people” had been a deliberate lie.
The Americans had fought the British, French, and Spanish for the right to take Native American land, and with the departure of the European powers, no one stood in their way.
In 1800 William Henry Harrison was appointed governor of the Indiana lovoo Territory (Indiana and Illinois) with specific instructions from Congress to extinguish native title to the land through treaty.
Only six years later, native reaction to Harrison’s success in obtaining millions of acres in southern Indiana and Illinois from the compliant “peace chiefs” of the old Western Alliance had given rise to the movement of Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet to unite all tribes against any further cessions.
Georgia, meanwhile, had not relinquished her claims west of the Chattahoochee River, and in what has been called the Yazoo Land Frauds, had sold the rights to 15 million acres along the Yazoo River in Mississippi to three land companies in 1794.
With statehood in 1796, he became the first senator from Tennessee, but only a year later his speculation in western lands had brought him to near-bankruptcy.
At this point, Blount formulated a plot for a frontier army to help the British conquer Spanish Florida and Louisiana.