retired westward before the advance of the whites from the Atlantic coast.  The Cherokee nation, who once had a broad belt of country extending from the Tennessee Valley through South Carolina to the ocean,[166] first retracted their frontier to the Appalachian Mountains; in 1816 they were confined to an ever shrinking territory on the middle Tennessee and the southern end of the highlands; in 1818 they began to retire beyond the Mississippi, and in 1828 beyond the western boundary of Arkansas.[167] The story of the Shawnees and Delawares is a replica of this.[168] In the same way Hottentots and Kaffirs in South Africa are withdrawing northward and westward into the desert before the protruding frontier of white settlement, as the Boers before the English treked farther into the veldt. [See map page 105.]

Where the people attacked or displaced is small or a broken remnant, it often takes refuge among a neighboring or kindred tribe.  The small Siouan tribes of the Carolinas, reduced to fragments by repeated Iroquois raids, combined with their Siouan kinsmen the Catawbas, who consequently in 1743 included twenty dialects among their little band.[169] The Iroquoian Tuscaroras of North Carolina, defeated and weakened by the whites in 1711, fled north to the Iroquois of New York, where they formed the Sixth Nation of the Confederation.  The Yamese Indians, who shifted back and forth between the borders of Florida and South Carolina, defeated first by the whites and then by the Creeks, found a refuge for the remnant of their tribe among the Seminoles, in whom they merged and disappeared as a distinct tribe[170]—­the fate of most of these fragmentary peoples. [See map page 54.]

[Sidenote:  Dispersal in flight.]

When the fugitive body is large, it is forced to split up in order to escape.  Hence every fugitive movement tends to assume the character of a dispersal, all the more as organization and leadership vanish in the catastrophe.  The fissile character of primitive societies especially contributes to this end, so that almost every story of Indian and native African warfare tells of shattered remnants fleeing in several directions.  Among civilized peoples, the dispersal is that of individuals and has far-reaching historical effects.  After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered over the earth, the debris of a nation.  The religious wars of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Huguenots to flee to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and South Carolina; they even tried to establish a colony on the coast of Brazil.  Everywhere they contributed a valuable element to the economic and social life of the community which they joined.  The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization.  It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighboring provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia.[171]