Coushatta - History

History

The Coushatta were traditionally agriculturalists, growing a variety of maize, beans and squash, and supplementing their diet by hunting game and fish. They were known for their skill at basketry. Nearly all the Spanish expeditions (including the 1539-1543 Hernando de Soto Expedition) into the interior of Spanish Florida recorded encountering the original town of the tribe. They referred to them as Coste, with their nearby neighbors being the Chiaha, Chiska, Yuchi, Tasquiqui, and Tali. Their town was most likely in the Tennessee River Valley. (Click here for a list of towns encountered by the Hernando de Soto Expedition.)

Under pressure from new European settlers in the 17th-18th centuries, the Coushatta made treaties and ceded land, and they migrated west into present-day Alabama. Along the way they established their town at Nickajack (Ani-Kusati-yi, or Koasati-place, in Cherokee) in the current Marion County, Tennessee. Later they founded a major settlement at the north end of Long-Island-on-the-Tennessee, which is bisected by the present-day Tennessee-Alabama stateline. By the time of the American Revolution, they had moved many miles down the Tennessee River where their town is recorded as Coosada. In the 18th centuries, some of the Coushatta (Koasati) joined the emerging Creek Confederacy, where they became known as part of the "Upper Creek". They were closely related to the Alabama Indians. Once part of the Creek Confederacy, the Coushatta tribe split and went to South Louisiana.

Notable chiefs among the Coushatta were the successive Long King and Colita, who led the people settled in present-day Polk County, Texas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Colita's Village preceded the European-American development of Livingston.