The history of Memphis, Tennessee and its area began many thousands of years ago with succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples. In the first millennium, it was settled by the Mississippian culture. T
Historic aerial view of Memphis (1870)
Court Square in Memphis (c. 1917)
The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American culture that flourished in the United States in the first millennium before the arrival of Europeans
The original plan for Memphis, as surveyed in 1819.
Chickasaw
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The Chickasaw are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, United States. Their traditional territory was in northern Mississippi, northwestern and northern Alabama, western Tennessee and s
History of Memphis, Tennessee
…many thousands of years ago with succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples. In the first millennium, it was settled by the Mississippian culture. The Chickasaw Indian tribe emerged about the 17th century, or migrated into the area. The earliest European exploration may have encountered remnants of the Mississippian…
Sculpture of a stylized 18th-century Chickasaw warrior by Enoch Kelly Haney, at the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma
A sketch of a Chickasaw by Bernard Romans, 1775
Historic Marker in Marion, Arkansas for the Trail of Tears
In the 1850s Holmes Colbert (Chickasaw) helped write the constitution of the nation in Indian Territory.