III. PHYSICAL SETTING

C. Human Figures

2. The Quapaw

A good representation of the appearance and attire of the Quapaw warriors is the print found on page 229 of The American Heritage Book of Indians (New York, 1961).

The four Quapaws participating in the sortie would be armed with rifles, knives, and hatchets (tomahawks). They would be wearing powder horns.

The Quapaws would have painted themselves with vermilion.[62]

3. Colbert’s Partisans

a) Numbers and Composition

According to Malcom Clark, a participant, the attacking force numbered “eleven Indians, sons and nephews of Colbert, five Negroes, one Frenchman, and enough English and Americans to make the number eighty-two.”[63]

Commandant Dubreuil reported that the attacking force included “a hundred white and fourteen Chickasaws.”[64]

b) Dress Worn and Arms Carried by the Chickasaws and Mixed-Bloods

(1) Breechclouts

The one article of dress worn by all males, except infants and young children, was the breechclout. Until introduction of European cloths, the breechclout was of skin. In the l700s English strouds, French Limbourgs, and other European materials replaced the skins.

William Bartram in 1782 reported the breechclout “usually consists of a piece of blue cloth, about eighteen inches wide; this may pass between their thighs, and both ends may be taken up and drawn through a belt round their waist, the ends fall down one before, and the other behind, not quite to the knee.” It “is usually plaited and indented at the ends, and ornamented with beads, tinsel lace, etc.”

Adair, writing in 1775, reported that the dimensions of a breechclout were “a quarter of an ell wide and an ell and a half long,” about 5 1/2 feet long by 1 foot wide.[65]

(2) Shirts or Blankets

According to Swanton, “two garments were worn on the upper part of the body, a shirt and a blanket, but either they merged into each other or our descriptions lack clarity, so that it is often difficult to tell with which we have to deal.”

Bartram in 1782 reported the Creeks “have a large mantle of the finest cloth they are able to purchase, always either of a scarlet, or blue colour; this mantle is fancifully decorated with rich lace or fringe round the border, and often with little round silver, or brass bells.”

The Indians who accompanied Oglethorpe on his 1743 Florida campaign wore “a Skin or Blanket tied, or loosely cast, over their Shoulders; a Shirt which they never wash, and which is consequently greasy and black to the last degree.”[66]

Adair reported that the Chickasaws “formerly wore shirts, made of dresd deer-skins, for their summer visiting dress; but their winter-hunting clothes were long and shaggy, made of the skins of panthers, bucks, bears, beavers, and otters; the fleshy sides outward, sometimes doubled, and always softened like velvet-cloth, through they retained their fur and hair.”

Yet, he continued, the young Indians were wont to “wrap a piece of cloth round them, that has a near resemblence to the old Roman toga or praetexta. ‘Tis about a fathom square, bordered seven or eight quarters deep, to make a shining cavalier of the beau monde and to keep out both heat and cold.”[67]