Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-236) and index.

Littlefield's account of the freed blacks' social and economic life is a valuable discussion. Students of the West and race relations will welcome this book.

"Between 1837 and the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Chickasaw Indians experienced the social discontinuity of removal from their traditional homelands in Mississippi to the Indian Territory, built a new life for themselves on the new lands, and established the Chickasaw Nation. During this period were to be found the roots of some of the most complex social problems that the tribe had to face between 1866 and 1906, when the tribal government was dissolved. One of the most difficult and perhaps the most perplexing problem of all--the posture assumed by the Chickasaw people and their government toward the persons of African descent who lived among them--grew out of the institution of slavery, which flourished in the Chickasaw Nation in the prewar years. The history of the Chickasaw freedmen from the end of the Civil War until 1906 has been eclipsed by the story of the former slaves and their descendants among other tribes, such as the Creeks and Cherokees. Their history has also been more obscure than that of the other freedman groups in the Indian Territory, for during the time that they lived in the Chickasaw Nation they had no citizenship; they were literally a people without a country"--Preface (page xi)

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