MUSKOGIAN INDIANS. This group constituted one of the larger speech stocks of native North America, and was typical of and dominant in the South-eastern area of aboriginal culture, comprising the region from the Gulf of Mexico to Tennessee, and from the Carolinas to Louisiana. The Muskogian family com prised a series of divisions: I, Apalachee; 2, Hitchiti, Apalachi cola, etc. ; 3, Alabama, Koasati, etc.; 4, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Mobile, Pensacola, etc.; 5, Tuskegee ; 6, Cusabo, Yamasee and other tribes of the Georgia coast; 7, Miskogi proper. The latter formed the bulk of what was later the Creek confederacy, in which the Hitchiti and other groups were included. The Natchez and Taensa of the lower Mississippi seem to be a remote Mus kogian off-shoot ; the Calusa and other south Floridian tribes may be. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the historically important tribes have been the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek, plus a branch of the latter, the Seminole. With the non-Muskogian Cherokee, these make up the "five civilized tribes," which for three quarters of a century, until 1906, maintained quasi-autonomous governments in Indian territory (Oklahoma), where they had re moved under the pressure of American settlement.
Ethnographically the Muskogian or South-eastern culture prov ince included, besides the groups listed, the Chitimacha and Tunica of the lower Mississippi, the Iroquoian Cherokee, the Timucua of central Florida and, in the lower region of Georgia and Carolina, the Yuchi, the Algonkin Shawnee and various eastern Siouan tribes. All these groups were agricultural, planting maize, pump kins, beans, cane-millet, tobacco, sometimes Jerusalem artichokes, and sunflowers. They gathered hickory nuts and wild fruits, hunted deer and, in the west, bison, and stored nut oil and bear fat. The settlements were straggling; the "town" contained a square, on which were public and religious buildings ; "villages" were often outlying. The towns were autonomous and essentially constituted tribes. They united into confederacies, directed by councils; such confederacies might break up and recombine. The most successful, like those of the Creek and Choctaw, grew in population during the colonial period, largely through absorption of smaller or shattered groups. The tribes were divided into matri
lineal, totemic clans ; chieftainship and office were hereditary, probably in the lineage within the clan. The Natchez and some other groups had superimposed a peculiar class or caste system. Chiefs in these cases were carried in litters, enthroned on raised seats or in arbours, and accompanied in death by sacrificial fol lowers. All the tribes were warlike and in chronic but shifting em broilment with others. They took scalps and slowly tortured pris oners to death in a frame or tied to a post in the town square. Often there was a distinction between civil and military chiefs ; the towns entitled to offices of one or the other kind in a confed eracy were known as peace and war, that is, white or red.
Economic life was undeveloped as compared with the fairly well organized socio-political institutions. Houses were of logs or poles, wattled, chinked or plastered with mud, the roof of thatch. Bark or thatch houses were also built. Exposed settlements were palisaded, or log forts erected. Pottery was unpainted, basketry of cane splints; simple weaving was done in bark fibres and bison hair, but the principal clothing besides mantles was breech clouts for men and apron skirts for women. Many tribes deformed their heads. There was little property, almost no treasure, and limited trade before the coming of the whites. Ritual was also simple. The most important ceremony was the busk or green-corn festival, a first-fruits and new-fire rite. Purification by emetics was one of the commonest religious observances. There was little that could be called art. Most tribes had a migration legend.
The Muskogian-South-eastern culture extended with variations north into the Ohio valley to the prehistoric Moundbuilders, and north-east to the tribes of Iroquois lineage; it was represented in pallid form among many of the Algonkin groups as far as New England and the Great lakes. The total Muskogian population was about so 000. At the time of discovery, there may have been 7,000 Creeks (increased to 20,000 by 1832), 3,500 Chickasaw, 15,000 Choctaw, 5,000 Apalachee, perhaps 5,00o Mobile. The first three of these tribes survive in increased numbers, but much mixed with white and negro blood.