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The Tuskegee were separating into two separate bands

Source: Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors #121

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THE TUSKEGEE

We now come to a people whose language has not been preserved to the present day, but they are known from statements made by Taitt and Hawkins to have spoken a dialect distinct from Muskogee. [Note: Today some Indians repeat a tradition to the effect that the Tuskegee are a branch of the Tulsa, but this is evidently a late fabrication based on the friendship which in later years has subsisted between these two towns.] These were the Tuskegee, [Note: This name perhaps contains the Alabama and Choctaw word for warrior, uiska.] called by Taitt northern Indians. On inquiring of some of the old Tuskegee Indians in Oklahoma regarding their ancient speech I found that they claimed to know of it, and I obtained the following words, said to have been among those employed by the ancient people. Some of these are used at the present day, and the others may be nothing more than archaic Muskogee, but they perhaps have some value for future students.
lutcu'a, a mug.
ki'las, to break.
aialito, I will be going; modern form, aibastce'.
tcibuksattce', come on and go with us! (where one person comes to a crowd of people and asks them to go with him),
ili-hu'ko-lutci, hen (-utci, little),
talu'sutci, chicken.
ilisai'dja, pot; modern form, lihai'a la'ko.
a pa 'la. on the other side; modern form, tapa'Ia.
wilika'pka, I am going on a visit; modern form, tcukupileidja-lani.

The town Tasqui encountered by De Soto between Tali and Coosa was perhaps occupied by Tuskegee. Ranjel is the only chronicler who mentions it, and it can not have impressed the Spaniards as a place of great importance.3 In 1567 Vandera was informed by some Indians and a soldier that beyond Satapo, the farthest point reached by the Pardo expedition, two days' journey on the way to Coosa, was a place called Tasqui, and a little beyond another known as Tasquiqui.4 The second of these was certainly, the other probably, a Tuskegee town. It is possible that a fission was just taking place in this tribe. Later in the 17th century, when English and French began to penetrate into the region, we find the Tuskegee divided into two or more bands, the northernmost on the Tennessee River. Coxe, who gives their name under the distorted form Kakigue, places these latter upon an island in the river.5 While they are noticed in documents and on maps at rare intervals (I find the forms Cacougai, Cattougui, Caskighi), the clearest light upon their later history and ultimate fate is thrown by Mr. Mooney in his "Myths of the Cherokee." He says:

"Another refugee tribe incorporated partly with the Cherokee and partly with the Creeks was that of the Taskigi, who at an early period had a large town of the same name on the south side of the Little Tennessee, just above the mouth of Tellico, in Monroe County, Tennessee. Sequoya, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, lived here in his boyhood, about the time of the Revolution. The land was sold in 1819. There was another settlement of the name, and perhaps once occupied by the same people, on the north bank of Tennessee River, in abend just below Chattanooga, Tennessee, on land sold also in 1819. Still another may have existed at one time on Tuskegee Creek, on the south bank of Little Tennessee River, north of Robbinsville, in Graham County, North Carolina, on land which was occupied until the removal in 1838. It is not a Cherokee word, and Cherokee informants state positively that the Taskigi were a foreign people, with distinct language and customs. They were not Creeks, Natchez, Uchee, or Shawano, with all of whom the Cherokee were well acquainted under other names. In the town house of their settlement at the mouth of Tellico they had an upright pole, from the top of which hung their protecting "medicine," the image of a human figure cut from a cedar log. For this reason the Cherokee in derision sometimes called the place Atslnak taun ("Hanging-cedar place"). Before the sale of the land in 1819 they were so nearly extinct that the Cherokee had moved in and occupied the ground."
(Swanton)