ABSTRACT
Those of us who study American Indian history have long worked with a different set of chronological parameters and periodicities than conventional historians of American history. Transitions in Native life, although sometimes structured by transitions in American history, did not always conform to those typically utilized by American historians. For the Native South, our chronological units of post-Columbian analysis are typically: early European contact (ca. 1540–1650), the Indian slave trade era (ca. 1650–1715), the deerskin trade and playoff era (ca. 1715–1780), the Removal era (ca. 1780–1860), and so on. The long nineteenth century, then, encompasses an important period for the Native South – the era of Indian Removal. Removal for Indians of the American South did not actually occur until the late 1820s and 1830s. However, the rumblings of removal began in the late eighteenth century and the direct consequences of it stretched well into the late nineteenth century and beyond.
