There's some question about how old my great great grandfather Smith Paul was when he left home to join the Chickasaws. The story that Uncle Haskell told was that shortly after Smith's mother Tamsey died in about 1820, Smith left his home in Beard's Creek, N.C., and went to live with the Chickasaw Indians in Mississippi. The reason Haskell gave for his great grandfather's decision was that his father had remarried and he didn't like his stepmother. Smith would have been eleven years old at the time.
I assume that Haskell got this story from his uncle Buck who was Smith Paul's grandson and might have heard the story from Smith himself, but there's a problem with the story. Uncle Haskell found out through some North Carolina relatives that Rhesa Paul, Smith's father, didn't remarry until 1827, so if Smith left home because of his stepmother, he would have left seven years later, when he was 18. Of course Smith might have left when his mother died for other reasons. Perhaps he didn't want to be a burden on his father, or maybe the woman who caused him to leave wasn't the woman his father eventually married.
I'm not sure there's a way to resolve the issue, but I prefer to believe that Smith Paul was adopted by the Chickasaws at the age of eleven and raised with other Indian boys his age, learning to track game in the forest, to use a bow and arrow, and to play stick ball, the traditional Indian game that inspired the modern game of Lacrosse. I have always imagined him doing these things, and also sitting around the fire in the evenings with the other children, listening to Indian legends.
Whichever story you believe, Smith Paul did spend at least ten years with the Chickasaws in Mississippi before their removal to Indian Territory, and he would have become intimately acquainted with their culture and their traditions.
Smith Paul's journey from Beard's Creek, on the North Carolina Coast, to the Chickasaw homeland near Tupelo, Mississippi, was a long one, about 400 miles as the crow flies. To induce him to travel so far, Smith Paul must have met a party of Chickasaws along the way who allowed him to accompany them home. Uncle Haskell theorized that Smith Paul may have travelled along the "pigeon trial," an old Indian trail that followed the Pigeon River through Mississippi. The Pigeon River got its name from huge flocks of passenger pigeons that followed the river on their migration west in order to feast on nuts from the beech trees that lined the river's banks.
Passenger pigeons were once the most numerous species of bird in North America. One flock was reported to be as large as a mile wide and 300 miles long! My grandmother told of seeing flocks of passenger pigeons when she was a girl. She said they would darken the sky from horizon to horizon. As remarkable as it may seem, the passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction, the last bird dying in 1914.
Whichever route Smith Paul took, he eventually arrived at the Chickasaw homeland, a huge area extending east from the Mississippi River across northern Mississippi and Alabama, and western Tennessee. The Chickasaws he found there were prosperous, civilized farmers, with a well organized local and national government, a written code of laws, a police force and a court system. Many of the Chickasaws were educated, either in missionary schools inside the nation or in white schools in the east. The Chickasaws were sociable and hospitable. Some dressed like their white neighbors, but many still wore their traditional costumes: the men with feathers and silver ornaments in their hair and ears, colorful calico shirts, deerskin leggings and moccasins, the women with colorful dresses and ornaments in their hair.
One of the reasons for the Chickasaws' prosperity and their adoption of some features of white civilization was the Natchez Trace. The Natchez Trace was the most heavily travelled road in the west, and it went right through the middle of the Chickasaw Nation. The Trace extended for over 400 miles between Natchez, Mississippi, on the Mississippi River, and Nashville, Tennessee, on the Cumberland River. In negotiations to grant the rights for passage across their territory, the Chickasaws had shrewdly included a provision that prohibited white men from operating businesses within their domain, so all lodging, supplies, transportation, ferries, entertainment, even postal services along the road were provided by the Indians. This gave the Chickasaws considerable income, but it also introduced a large white influence into the Chickasaw society, not necessarily for the good.
At any rate, Smith Paul came to love and respect his Chickasaw hosts, and he decided to stay with them. He eventually went to work for a Presbyterian missionary named McClure who had lived with the Chickasaws for years. McClure had married a Chickasaw woman, Ela Teecha, and they had two children together, Tecumseh and Catherine.
PS: For more background on Smith Paul see Posts: It all started with John Paul Jones, and Back to North Carolina.
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