Red Shoes (Choctaw chief)

Red Shoes was a Choctaw chief who dared to travel through Creek territory, despite the Creeks warning to the Choctaw Nation pinned down in Louisiana when a meeting of Indian chiefs was announced in South Carolina in the 1740s. Thus ensuring the survival of the Choctaw Nation by obtaining British supply lines. As the Choctaw were under siege from Creeks and unable to get defensive supplies from the famished French settlements. The French countered by arranging the assassination of Red Shoes. He was known in French as le Soulier Rouge. He is also known as Red Moccasin.

The Choctaw Indians once laid claim to millions of acres of land and established some 50 towns in present-day Mississippi and western Alabama. Their population was about 20,000 people scattered in these towns or villages.

The peoples who became known as the Choctaws (Chahtas) originally lived as separate societies throughout east-central Mississippi and west-central Alabama and all spoke dialects of the Muskogean language. The nation, in fact, was a league of independent principalities in which the weaker towns were often attached as dependencies to the stronger.

With European contact the world of the Mississippian culture turned upside down and nothing was the same. One leader, Red Shoes, moved to seize the opportunities offered by contact with the Europeans. The French of necessity had intimate dealings with the Choctaw from the time when Louisiana was first colonized, and the relations between the two peoples were usually friendly. But corruption, mismanagement and lack of supply eventually crippled the Indian trade of French Louisiana.The hunters came away from the trading table with little to show, sometimes even empty handed, after months of hard work to obtain the deer hides and furs. They were angry and disappointed. They naturally looked elsewhere and found better recompense in the Creek and Chickasaw camps of their former enemies. This meant they were actually trading with the English who had sent the Chickasaw and Creek against them. Their leader, Mingo Tchito, turned a blind eye, but he was infuriated when the French could not supply the customary chief's gifts. These developments led to an English party being formed among the Choctaw, partly because the prices charged by the Carolina traders were lower than those placed upon French goods. This effort was led by noted chief, Red Shoes, and lasted for a considerable time, culminating in his assassination and one of the principal Choctaw towns being burned to the ground before it came to an end with the defeat of the British Party in 1750.

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