Nairne's Muskhogean Journals

Nairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River , printed from a previously unpublished manuscript in the British Library, is the earliest known account in English of Muskhogean society. It chronicles a remarkable diplomatic episode in Colonial Indian-white relations. In the winter and spring of 1708 Nairne and Thomas Welch, a Carolina trader among the Chickasaws, accompanied by a group of Indians, left Charles Town and traveled west to the Mississippi River and south nearly to the Gulf of Mexico. This expedition was a key to English strategy during Queen Anne's War. Nairne visited the Chickasaws to confirm that tribe's allegiance to the English and then went south among the Choctaws in a futile attempt to draw that powerful tribe away from their loyalty to the French. Although he shared the racial and cultural biases of contemporaneous Englishmen, he knew the importance of the Indians as allies and enemies and so conducted his diplomatic negotiations as