The Chickasaw people originated when the Choctaw and the Chickasaw people divided from one nation into two distinctly different nations. It is estimated this happened sometime around the 17th century. The oral history of the Chickasaw says they migrated along with the Choctaw to present-day Mississippi from west of the Mississippi River. When the Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in Northeastern Mississippi. In the 15th century, proto-Chickasaw people left the Tombigbee Valley, their current place of residence, after the collapse of the Moundville chiefdom. They settled into the northern Yazoo and Pearl River valleys in Mississippi. According to historians Arrell Gibson and John R. Swanton, the Chickasaw
