Chisca Erotic

The Chisca were a Native people of the southern Appalachians. Spanish expeditions recorded them in the sixteenth century in the mountains of what is now southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee. Later they were known as raiders and migrants across Spanish Florida, and their name faded from the record in the decades around 1700. They are widely, though not universally, identified with the ancestors of the Yuchi.

Nearly everything known about them comes from people who wanted something from them or feared them. In 1540 Hernando de Soto, camped at Chiaha in what is now eastern Tennessee, heard that the Chisca to the north worked a yellow metal, probably copper. He sent two men to look. They came back reporting mountains too rough for an army, and the expedition moved on. In 1567 Hernando Moyano, a sergeant of the Juan Pardo expedition, marched out of the Spanish fort at Joara with Native allies and attacked Chisca towns in the high country, claiming a body count that historians treat as inflated. Archaeologists have proposed that one of those towns stood near the salt springs at present-day Saltville, Virginia, which would place the Chisca at a crossroads of the regional trade in salt and copper.

Within a few decades they had left the mountains. By the 1620s Spanish officials in Florida were writing about Chisca bands moving through the mission provinces of the Timucua and Apalachee, sometimes as traders and occasional allies, more often as raiders who took captives and unsettled the mission towns. They were blamed in part for stirring the Apalachee revolt of 1647. In 1677 a force of Christian Apalachee marched west and stormed a palisaded Chisca town near the Choctawhatchee River, an expedition known in unusual detail because the Apalachee leaders dictated their own account of it. After that the Chisca name thins out. Survivors scattered toward the Creek towns and the Gulf coast, and Yuchi settlements later appear in some of the same country.

Their language went unrecorded apart from a few names, so the Yuchi connection rests on geography and timing rather than on words. If it holds, the Chisca legacy lives on in the Yuchi, or Euchee, of Oklahoma, most of whom are enrolled today in the Muscogee Nation and who are working to keep alive a language unrelated to any other known tongue. If it does not, the Chisca stand as one of many southeastern peoples whose independence ended in the upheaval that followed European contact: displaced, absorbed, and remembered mostly through their enemies' paperwork.