XLI

Cotaco is the region of the Nickajack bound to the south of the Tennessee River and the shoulders of Brindlee Mountain where the town of Somerville was settled before statehood. It is also where the Valhermoso Springs drains into Cotaco Creek and thence into the great river near the place known as Talucah. The origin of the name of Cotaco is debatable. Perhaps the most intriguing theory is that it is not a Muskogean, Algonquin or Iroquoian word, which are all native languages spoken alternately in the Nickajack. Rather it is but a portmanteau of the French name "Cote de Coeur," or Coast of the Heart. For in all names is their curious genesis.

And so the Nickajack had not seen another white man for a hundred years since the Conquistadors Jimenez Maldonado and Alonso de le Cabra had assumed their mantle as the Lords of Koasati. From the Great Gorge to the Great Shoals, the Nickajack was wasteland of abandoned villages and fallow fields between forests crowded with brambles. A new power was on the rise among the survivors of the Great Plague. These were the Chicaza, who were the Chickasaw. They had become the new masters of the Nickajack who fought across the shifting landscape against Algonquin speakers like the Shawnee, and Iroquoian speakers like the Cherokee. Yuchi, the language isolate of the Koasati, was made extinct in the Nickajack.

After this long interlude of internecine warfare the first non-natives began to arrive again in the Nickajack. They were probably not white at all, but mixed descent traders called Metis by the French, and Mestee by the English. They began to arrive in the late 17th century, trapping furs and taking buckskins and exchanging practical goods with the Chickasaw and Cherokee and Shawnee. That is how the natives came to acquire firearms, which they embraced and used effectively. These traders and trappers came by way of the Province of Carolina, which was English, and by way of Louisiana, which was French. The blood of the Old World was now coursing through the veins of the New World, and a steady intercourse of new commerce bound up all these great nations, both native and European, in a Great Game.

And in this Great Game, which was played from the courts of kings down to the chiefs of the natives, lies the curious origins of this name Cotaco, Coast of the Heart, about which more shall be told.