Though they were never a big tribe, the Chickasaw Indians loomed large in the history of the early frontier. The Natchez Trace ran through the heart of Chickasaw territory, a fact which plays a major role in To the Ends of the Earth as Meriwether Lewis travels that path. In our current work-in-progress, The Fairest Portion of the Globe, Chickasaws play an even larger role.

On his last journey, Lewis traveled from Chickasaw Bluffs (present-day Memphis) in the company of Major James Neelly, a somewhat shadowy figure who was the federal agent to the Chickasaw nation. To get to the agency, Lewis and Neelly would have had to follow no easy pathway, but a rough, briar-choked trail through central Mississippi called Pigeon Roost Road. Neelly’s agency lay along the Natchez Trace about 100 miles south of the Tennessee line, adjacent to the principal Chickasaw village, a place called Chuckalissa or Big Town (present-day Tupelo, Mississippi).

If you visit the Natchez Trace today, you’ll find several stops along the parkway where you can learn about the agency, Big Town, and the Chickasaw lifestyle. Big Town was situated in a large open valley. It consisted of about three hundred log cabins and huts, extensive corn and tobacco fields, and orchards of apples and peaches. These extensive agricultural enterprises were tended by the Chickasaws themselves and their African-American slaves.

As the Chickasaw agent under Thomas Jefferson, Major Neelly would have had many duties. As you might expect, he enforced federal law in the territory with regard to intruders, traders, contraband, and treaty provisions. He watched out for any foreign intrigue from the British and the Spanish, still a strong possibility in those years. Neelly would also have been expected to bring “civilization” to the Chickasaws—not that they needed it—and encourage the Indians to believe that they should sell off their excess land to whites in order to concentrate on their own farms.

Apparently, Neelly wasn’t any too comfortable as the Chickasaw agent. In August 1809, he wrote to Secretary of War William Eustis asking for a loan, saying that he’d found the “old agency house untenable” and needed money for a new one “to put my family in.” Did his financial straits make Neelly vulnerable to the very intrigue he was charged with preventing? What role did he play in the death of Meriwether Lewis, whom he was supposed to be looking after?

These are questions that history has no answers for, but as historical novelists we loved exploring.