Lee County

By Dr. Lee W. Formwalt; Albany State University Our earliest documentation of the Chehaw Indians goes back four and half centuries to 1540 when southeastern Amerindians encountered Europeans and Africans for the first time. Hernando de Soto and his band of Spanish adventurers came across the Chehaw or Chiaha Indians on Zimmerman’s Island in the French Broad River in present-day Tennessee. By the early eighteenth century, however, the Chehaw had moved south to the Ocmulgee River where they had greater access to the British traders operating out of Charles Town, Carolina (now Charleston, S.C.). A number of Lower Creek Indians