A Brutal Reckoning E-Book

Peter Cozzens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 813

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'Cozzens is a master storyteller' The Times 'Extremely well researched' Times Literary Supplement From the devastating invasion by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century to the relentless pressure from white settlers 150 years later, A Brutal Reckoning tells the story of encroachment on the vast Native American territory in the Deep South, which gave rise to the Creek War, the bloodiest in American Indian history, and propelled Andrew Jackson into national prominence, as he led the US Army in a ruthless campaign. It was a war that involved not only white Americans and Native Americans but also the British and the Spanish, and ultimately led to the Trail of Tears, in which the government forcibly removed the entire Creek people, as well as the neighbouring Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee nations, from their homelands, leaving the way open for the conquest of the West. No other single Indian conflict had such a significant impact on the fate of the country. Wonderfully told and brilliantly detailed, A Brutal Reckoning is a sweeping history of a crucial period in the destruction of America's native tribes.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY PETER COZZENS

The Warrior and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation

The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign

The Army and the Indian,vol. 5 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890

The Long War for the Northern Plains,vol. 4 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890

Conquering the Southern Plains,vol. 3 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890

The Wars for the Pacific Northwest,vol. 2 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890

The Struggle for Apacheria,vol. 1 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890

The New Annals of the Civil War (editor, with Robert I. Girardi)

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 6 (editor)

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 5 (editor)

General John Pope: A Life for the Nation

The Military Memoirs of General John Pope (editor, with Robert I. Girardi)

The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka and Corinth

The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga

No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Peter Cozzens, 2023

The moral right of Peter Cozzens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-905-0

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For Antonia

The Indians fought with so great spirit that they many times drove our people back out of the town. The struggle lasted so long that many Christians, weary and very thirsty, went to drink at a pond nearby, tinged with the blood of the killed, and returned to the combat . . . breaking in upon the Indians and beating them down. [The Indians] fled out of the place, the cavalry and infantry driving them back through the gates, . . . when many, dashing headlong into the flaming houses, were smothered, and, heaped one upon another, burned to death.

—GENTLEMAN OF ELVAS, Battle of Mabila, 15401

The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.

—The Christian Remembrancer2

When we got near the town . . . I saw some warriors run into a house, until I counted forty-six of them. . . . We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it. I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house. His arm and thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. In this situation he was still trying to crawl along; but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old.

—DAVID CROCKETT, Battle of Tallushatchee, 18133

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS

THE CREEK CONFEDERACY, 1790–1813

A NOTE TO READERS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

1 From the Ashes of the Entrada

2 A Rope of Sand

3 Between Three Fires

4 The Sweets of Civilization

5 The Hungry Years

PART TWO

6 Rise of the Red Sticks

7 Civil War

8 Stark Mad

9 Terror in the Tensaw

PART THREE

10 The Emergence of Old Hickory

11 Invasion of the Tennesseans

12 The Red Sticks Resilient

13 All We Lack Is Powder and Lead

PART FOUR

14 Tennesseans to the Rear

15 Jackson Courts Disaster

16 A Slow, Laborious Slaughter

17 An Elusive Peace

18 Betrayal at Fort Jackson

PART FIVE

19 A Scalp for a Scalp

20 Shades of Genocide

APPENDIX: Creek and Métis Personages

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PICTURE SECTION

MAPS

1. The Creek Confederacy, 1790–1813

2. The Tensaw and Lower Tombigbee Country, 1813

3. Skirmish at Burnt Corn Creek, July 27, 1813

4. The Battle and Massacre of Fort Mims, August 30, 1813

5. Overview of the Creek War, 1813–1814

6. The Battle of Talladega, November 9, 1813

7. The Battle of the Holy Ground, December 23, 1813

8. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend, March 27, 1814

9. The Creek Confederacy After the Treaty of Fort Jackson, 1814

10. Creek Cessions, 1818–1832

A NOTE TO READERS

The spelling and pronunciation of Creek (Muscogee) Indian place- and personal names during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as recorded by white, métis (mixed-blood), and literate Creek chroniclers, varied considerably. Of course the preferences of the Creek people should be considered definitive, but absent a written language either they were unable to convey to nonindigenous (American, Spanish, and British) contacts the precise spellings of people and places, or the latter were unable to understand the Muscogee words well enough to record them with any degree of consistency. Because this is a work of history, I have tried to use the spellings most commonly employed contemporaneously, particularly by literate Creeks and métis.

When writing of the era, I also faced the question of whether to refer to the Native protagonists as Muscogees, the name by which the confederated peoples referred to themselves, or Creeks, the name bestowed on them by Anglos in their early contacts with the Muscogees, and which the Spanish also adopted. I elected to use the appellation Creek, which not only was the name given to the war that is central to this story but also was the term often employed by literate métis and Muscogees in their talks or writings.

As the Creek War opens, the reader may find the multitude of anglicized names among the Indians daunting, particularly because many of the Red Sticks, as the Creeks who fought the Americans were known, had non-Native names. I recommend the reader consult the appendix, which provides a list of the principal Creek, métis, and Red Stick leaders, to help navigate the sea of names.

Today the great majority of the descendants of the historic Creek confederacy are members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, a selfgoverned tribe located in eastern Oklahoma. With more than eighty-six thousand members, it is the fourth-largest tribe in the United States. The descendants of those few Muscogees fortunate enough to escape removal from their homeland are known today as the Poarch Creek Indians. They reside in Escambia County on the only federally recognized Creek land remaining in Alabama, about 120 miles northeast of Mobile. Despite the best efforts of the U.S. government to eradicate the Creek (Muscogee) presence from east of the Mississippi during the nineteenth century, the Poarch Creeks endure, a self-governing people dedicated to preserving their tribal culture and community.1 I sincerely hope A Brutal Reckoning accurately honors the history of all Muscogees.

When non-Native authors chronicle the history of America’s Native population, the question inevitably arises as to which appellation—Indian, Native American, or American Indian—is most appropriate. In this I relied on not only the historical context to guide me but also usage among indigenous peoples today. To quote from the website of the National Museum of the American Indian, “All of these terms are acceptable. The consensus, however, is that whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favor with . . . many Native people.”2 For these reasons, as well as to obtain a better sense of historical immediacy, I most frequently use the term “Indian.”

PROLOGUE

Andrew Jackson lay on a couch in an elegant room at the stylish Nashville Inn. The bed was a wreck. The cadaverous Tennessean had soaked two mattresses with his blood and stained the carpet beneath the bedstead scarlet. The place stank of dried blood, diarrhea, and the slippery-elm poultice that doctors had slathered on Jackson’s shattered left shoulder and mangled left arm. Had the attending physician prevailed, there would have been no wounds to plaster. He had urged an amputation, to which the young doctor’s nearly delirious patient objected. “No, I’ll keep my arm,” mumbled Jackson. Such was Jackson’s fearsome reputation that no one presumed to dispute him. Neither did the doctor dare remove the lead ball embedded in his arm.

The fiery forty-six-year-old Tennessee militia general had no one but himself to blame for the grievous wounds that had prostrated him for three weeks and showed scant signs of improving. Cracking a horse whip and brandishing a pistol, on September 4, 1813, Jackson had provoked a pointless but violent confrontation with his former friend and militia subordinate Colonel Thomas Hart Benton on the steps of a Nashville hotel a scant hundred yards from where he now lay. Benton had just returned from Washington, D.C., where he had gone to obtain the War Department’s promise to reimburse Jackson for a crippling debt the general had incurred on behalf of his Tennesseans after they were mustered into U.S. service early in the War of 1812 and then almost immediately cast aside, unpaid, ill-used, and far from home.

While Thomas Hart Benton was away, Jackson acted as second to the opponent of Benton’s younger brother Jesse in a seriocomic, nonlethal duel that earned Jesse a bullet in the buttocks. Learning of the affair, a mortified Thomas Hart Benton publicly impugned Jackson’s honor, a character trait the general held dearer than life itself. For that, his former subordinate must pay. “Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you. Defend yourself,” Jackson had declared when they met. Instead, a slug and two balls from Jesse Benton’s pistol punished Jackson.

While Jackson lay helpless just twelve miles from his plantation, the Hermitage, where his wife, Rachel, and their young adopted son awaited his return, events more momentous than the wounding of the West Tennessee militia’s controversial commanding general gripped the citizens of Nashville. The War of 1812 was going badly for the United States. British forces menaced the Eastern Seaboard and had repelled American attempts to seize Canada. Closer to home, four days after Jackson’s senseless fracas, a rider from the Mississippi Territory galloped into town bearing news of a ruthless Creek massacre of the inhabitants of a frontier stockade called Fort Mims in presentday southwestern Alabama. Horrified whites feared the slaughter portended a massive uprising of the powerful Creek confederacy, perhaps abetted by the British. Would the Tennessee frontier next fall prey to Indian depredations? The governor and Nashville luminaries met to consider their response and what if any role their incapacitated military leader might play. What could Jackson himself, feverish, gaunt, and growing thinner, unable to stand without support, wish for at such a moment? He could wish for war, with himself in the forefront.1

A Brutal Reckoning represents the concluding volume in a trilogy that I hope will offer readers a gripping and balanced account of the dispossession of American Indian lands by a relentlessly westering United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also provides a stunning lesson in how the unwavering will of one man—in this case Andrew Jackson—could set the course of a crucial era of American history and almost single-handedly win what was arguably the most consequential Indian war in U.S. history.

The principal events of A Brutal Reckoning largely occur concurrently with those of Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation, the locus shifting from Indian warfare in the presentday Midwest to the horrific combat and colossal betrayals that largely eradicated the Indian presence in the Deep South. Only after the U.S. government cleared the country east of the Mississippi River of its Native population was the way open for the conquest of the West, which is the subject of The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West.

A Brutal Reckoning relates a vital chapter in American history, largely forgotten but of immense consequence for the future of the United States. No other Indian conflict in our nation’s history so changed the complexion of American society as did the Creek War, which lies at the heart of this book. A dispute that began as a Creek civil war became a ruthless struggle against American expansion, erupting in the midst of the War of 1812. Not only was the Creek War the most pitiless clash between American Indians and whites in U.S. history, but the defeat of the Red Sticks—as those opposed to American encroachment were known because of the red war clubs they carried—also cost the entire Creek people as well as the neighboring Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations their homelands. The collapse of Red Stick resistance in 1814 led inexorably to the Indian Trail of Tears two decades later, which opened Alabama, much of Mississippi, and portions of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to white settlement. That in turn gave rise to the Cotton Kingdom, without which there would have been no casus belli for the American Civil War.

The Creek War also thrust Andrew Jackson into national prominence. He began the conflict a general in the Tennessee militia whose political star seemed on the wane. Jackson’s victory over the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the climactic action of the Creek War, won him a major general’s commission in the Regular army and command of the vast military district that embraced New Orleans. Without the Creek War, Jackson would never have had the opportunity to beat the British at the Battle of New Orleans and become the most celebrated general to emerge from the War of 1812. But did Jackson really deserve the accolades and the promotion that came after Horseshoe Bend? Prior to that battle his combat performance against the Red Sticks had been mixed at best. He had suffered more than one battlefield setback and had lost many of his troops to mutiny. As for Horseshoe Bend, it was not Jackson but rather his Cherokee and friendly Creek scouts acting on their own initiative—the very men he would later expel on the Trail of Tears—who won the battle for him.

Jackson commanded but one of seven columns that invaded the Creek nation during the war. To his credit, he alone possessed the will to see the conflict through. While commanders from Georgia, the Mississippi Territory, and eastern Tennessee abbreviated their campaigns because of chronic supply shortages, enlistment problems, Red Stick resilience, and the relative indifference of a U.S. government locked in war with Great Britain, Jackson persevered. Enfeebled by a festering gunshot wound and severe chronic diarrhea, and plagued by inconstant superiors, Jackson demonstrated fortitude and personal courage rarely witnessed in American military annals. He brooked no dissent, treating his own sometimes recalcitrant troops with a harshness that astonished the militiamen and volunteers. A Brutal Reckoning examines Jackson’s unbridled ambition, outsized sense of honor and duty, and periodic cruelty in the context of his times. His command shortcomings and successes are explored, presenting what I hope is a fair and nuanced reevaluation of Jackson the general. Such is the chronology of events, and the need to understand Creek Indian society and the factors that precipitated the Creek War, that Jackson does not stomp onto the stage until part 3 of the narrative. From the moment he plunges into the conflict, however, Jackson dominates the narrative just as he did the conduct of the Creek War. For this inevitable delay in introducing the key nemesis, first of the Red Sticks and subsequently of all southeastern Indian tribes, I beg the reader’s indulgence.

The Creek confederacy represented the largest Native presence of the South. So long as the Creeks possessed their vast country, white settlement could expand no farther into what became the American South than central Georgia. It is critical to our appreciation of the challenges that Jackson confronted, then, and also a matter of fairness to the Creek people, that their early history and way of life be given its due. Jackson’s successful prosecution of the Creek War cannot be adequately judged without an understanding of what came before. Neither can the richness, diversity, and perseverance of the people he conquered be appreciated without a full rendering of the events predating the conflict. This is the purpose of part 1 of our story.

The Creek War began as a civil war within the Creek community and gave rise to the Red Stick militants who precipitated conflict with the United States. It was the most devastating internecine struggle that any Native people suffered as a consequence of contact with white Americans. It was a bitter struggle pitting brother against brother, violently dividing families to an even greater extent than the American Civil War. It is a tragedy little known today, but one that merits a full rendition not only in its own right but also if one is to grasp the temper of the times and the milieu in which Jackson operated. The rise of the Red Sticks, the Creek Civil War, and its transformation into a fateful clash with the young American republic after the Red Sticks perpetrated the most horrific massacre of American and mixed-race settlers in U.S. history is the subject of part 2.

With A Brutal Reckoning, the Creek confederacy is restored to its rightful place among the great American Indian peoples, and Andrew Jackson joins the ranks of iconic historical figures who come in for a fresh and not always flattering reinterpretation in my trilogy recounting the grand struggle for the Indian domain of North America.

Our story necessarily begins well before U.S. encroachment on American Indian soil. It opens with the destruction of the Creeks’ ancestors by Spanish conquistadors in the mid-sixteenth century and the European pathogens that accompanied them. Andrew Jackson’s hardhanded brand of war, and his victory at Horseshoe Bend, had as their vicious precursor the ruthless seventeenth-century trek through southeastern North America of the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. Although more than two and a half centuries separated the men, the parallels between de Soto and Jackson and the paths of destruction they carved emerge as uncannily similar. Both men conducted their respective campaigns with fierce single-mindedness. They pushed themselves to the limits of human endurance and expected their men to indulge their zealotry no matter how unrealistic their objectives might seem. De Soto and Jackson trod much of the same ground. At the Battle of Mabila in 1540, the Spaniard dealt Creek forebears the harshest defeat ever suffered by Native peoples north of Mexico at the hands of European invaders. Approximately 1,000 warriors perished in the flames and fury. Jackson broke the back of the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, fought a scant hundred miles or so east of the presumptive site of de Soto’s triumph. At least 850 Red Stick warriors died defending their families and way of life against Jackson’s army, a Native death count never exceeded in the two centuries of conflict between American Indians and the expanding American republic. De Soto initiated the decline of the grand American Indian culture that predated the Creeks and their southeastern contemporaries, the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. In shattering Red Stick resistance at Horseshoe Bend, Jackson not only brought an abrupt end to the Creek War but also set in motion the train of events that would lead to the brutal expulsion of all but a handful of Native peoples from the American South.

Andrew Jackson and his fellow expansionists reckoned the cost relatively small. In appropriating the Indian lands of the Southeast, however, the young republic had inadvertently sown the seeds of the American Civil War. Not only did the conquest of the Creek country reinvigorate a faltering slave-based cotton economy by injecting it with highly fertile soil on which to prosper under white plantation owners (the few score human chattels of dispossessed wealthy Creeks and métis had produced comparatively little in times past), but by 1860 one of the two highest concentrations of cotton production in the antebellum South was on former Creek land. Brutality in the Deep South did not end with the Creek War and Trail of Tears. It was simply replaced by the horrors of what white Southerners euphemistically called the “peculiar institution.”

· PART ONE ·

CHAPTER ONE

From the Ashes of the Entrada

HERNANDO DE SOTO craved gold, glory, and gore in quantities that made even his fellow conquistadors quake. When only twenty, he quit the impoverished confines of western Spain to find his fortune in the New World. In the succeeding sixteen years, the hawknosed young Spaniard enjoyed dizzying success slaughtering and pillaging indigenous peoples, first in Central America and later in Peru. De Soto returned to Spain wealthy and celebrated. He won the favor of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who appointed him governor of Cuba, with the expectation he would also colonize and plunder La Florida, as the Spanish then called North America.

Before de Soto could rightfully claim La Florida, he had to raise an army and conquer the strange country from its Native inhabitants. A less ambitious man might have been content to retire with his wealth as master of a settled island domain. But not de Soto. Vague rumors of vast gold deposits resting in the shadow of a dazzling mountain of diamond somewhere in modern South Carolina propelled de Soto onward.

De Soto had no difficulty finding Spanish adventurers to join him. In May 1539 he sailed from Havana for the west coast of what is today Florida, in seven ships with an army of six hundred men and a contingent of a hundred wives, female camp followers, black slaves, craftsmen, and priests. Crammed aboard the rocking galleons, caravels, and brigantines were 220 cavalry horses calculated to overawe the foot-bound natives; several packs of fierce hounds to track down and mangle those who fled; an ample supply of handcuffs, chains, and neck collars with which to enslave the natives; and a huge herd of hogs to supplement provisions pilfered from them.1

Well-disciplined but also ruggedly individualistic, de Soto’s conquistadors were a colorful lot, uniformed as befitted their tastes and means. Their basic outfit consisted of a long-sleeved shirt; a short, close-fitting padded jacket (doublet); and pants, breeches, or hose. The cavalry found boots and leather gloves essential, but infantrymen made do with simple sandals. Few could afford full body armor; most wore quilted cotton or leather jackets strong enough to withstand arrows fired from short bows. Affluent conquistadors also sported sleeveless chain-mail vests. Nearly all wore helmets.2

De Soto made landfall near present-day Tampa Bay. European diseases—principally smallpox—preceded him. Twelve years earlier, the first Spaniards to explore La Florida had landed nearby and then passed along the Gulf Coast. In their wake the intruders and their pathogens left agony and desolation. With little remaining to despoil, de Soto plodded north toward the fabled land of riches.

Moving inland, the conquistadors met greater American Indian resistance, a natural consequence of de Soto’s brutality. He burned villages that refused him slave laborers and female chattels and tossed natives who displeased him to his man-mauling hounds. In South Carolina, de Soto found neither gold nor the expected mountain of diamond, but he did meet a lovely young Indian queen who beguiled the Spaniard for a season.

Beauty, however, proved no substitute for riches, and in early 1540 de Soto marched into modern North Carolina. There he met large palisaded villages, from which he demanded food, supply porters, and women. With every mile the avaricious Spaniards traversed, their relations with the inhabitants deteriorated.3

No mere savages, the natives of what was to become the American South possessed the richest culture of any indigenous peoples north of Mexico. Owing their immediate allegiance to culturally similar but politically diverse and sometimes warring chiefdoms, the inhabitants belonged to the Mississippian tradition, so named because the culture—if not the people themselves—apparently originated on the banks of the Mississippi River between AD 700 and 900. These residents of what is today Alabama and Georgia spoke predominantly the Muscogean family of languages.4 The most salient characteristic of the Mississippian tradition was flat-topped, pyramidal mounds that served as foundations for temples, mortuaries, the homes of chiefs, and other important public edifices. The villages erected around the mounds were formidable, surrounded by deep, water-filled ditches and wooden palisades with defensive towers placed at regular intervals. Larger villages sometimes had interior walls for a second line of defense.5

Native weapons gave thoughtful conquistadors pause. Strung with deer sinew, Indian bows were long, elastic, and exceptionally strong. The arrows, fashioned from young cane hardened in flames, had dagger-sharp flint heads. In close combat, warriors wielded short war clubs.6

As they entered what would become the Lower Creek country (central and western Georgia), the conquistadors met with markedly improved clay dwellings, similar to, and probably more hygienic than, the abodes of poor rural Spaniards. Native men and women wore shawls “after the manner of the Gypsies,” fashioned from tree bark or grass treated to the consistency of flax. The Indians made moccasins for both sexes and loin coverings (breechclouts) for men from deerskin dressed to “such perfection” that it equaled the finest European broadcloth.7

De Soto, however, had come in search of wealth and glory, not to admire the Native culture. In July 1540, his expedition entered the territory of Coosa, the paramount chiefdom of the region, centered on the upper Coosa River in what is today northwest Georgia. Borne on a litter to great fanfare and accompanied by several hundred painted and plumed warriors, at the gates of its northernmost town the principal chief of Coosa greeted de Soto and his men as guests. Ancestors of the Upper Creeks, the people of Coosa were brutal slaveholders, their Native chattel laboring with severed Achilles tendons to prevent their escape. The Spaniards saw vast cultivated fields but no evidence of gold or other mineral riches. Impatient to press on, de Soto repaid the pliant Coosa chief’s hospitality by putting him and several of his headmen in iron collars and chains and forcing them to serve as porters.8

De Soto continued south along the Coosa River into present-day Alabama. At each village, he demanded more porters and women and pillaged the few communities that dared to defy him. All went deceptively well for de Soto.

In early October, he bade a ravaged Coosa farewell and entered the central Alabama domain of Chief Tascalusa, an esteemed Native leader. At the town of Atahachi the Spaniards met him, seated regally on cushions atop a mound in the plaza, a lavish feather cape extending to his feet. Towering a foot above the tallest conquistador, Tascalusa impressed a Portuguese officer as “full of dignity; tall of person, muscular, lean, and symmetrical, the suzerain of many territories, and of numerous people, being equally feared by his vassals and the neighboring nations.”9

De Soto and Tascalusa paid not the slightest deference to each other. As de Soto climbed the ceremonial mound to confront Tascalusa, the chief sat fixed and unimpressed. De Soto surrounded him with lance-wielding cavalrymen, placed him under arrest, and demanded four hundred male porters and one hundred women. Tascalusa took his detention in stride. He gave de Soto the porters—fine Atahachi warriors all—but told the Spaniard he would have to wait until they reached the town of Mabila, the Atahachi capital, located somewhere between the lower Alabama and the Tombigbee Rivers, before de Soto could have the women. Tascalusa tantalized de Soto with a promise of the loveliest females of Mabila. Perhaps de Soto saw in the haughty chief a kindred spirit because he acceded to Tascalusa’s condition, and the entourage headed west along the bank of the Alabama River toward Mabila.10

De Soto expected an easy march across a compliant country. Tascalusa, however, was scarcely the passive prisoner he seemed. Unknown to de Soto, he dispatched a messenger to Mabila summoning all the warriors of his chiefdom to assemble there. De Soto’s scouts cautioned their commander that the people ahead “were evilly disposed.” Perhaps the expedition had best camp in the open outside the gates of Mabila rather than alongside the house that Tascalusa offered de Soto? Recklessly certain of his own invincibility, de Soto dismissed their warnings. Accompanied by a small escort of cavalry, he spurred ahead to Mabila with Tascalusa while the remainder of his command followed at a leisurely pace.

When de Soto neared the town’s fifteen-foot-high beam-and-muddaub outer walls on the cool and clear morning of October 18, 1540, the local cacique and four hundred cheering Indians festooned with ceremonial feathers and body paint sallied forth, ostensibly to welcome him. Once inside the town of eighty large houses, de Soto and his attendants settled in to enjoy an exotic and stimulating welcome in the town plaza. Fermented drinks circulated freely, and scantily clad, “marvelously beautiful women” danced for the Spaniards. While the bare-breasted dancers swirled and dipped before the mesmerized conquistadors, Tascalusa slipped away into a nearby house. Refusing de Soto’s order to return to the plaza, he instead issued the Spaniards an ultimatum. They must leave immediately or suffer the consequences. Drawing his sword in response, a Spanish officer cleaved off the arm of an Indian headman. In an instant, three thousand warriors poured into the streets shouting war cries and brandishing clubs and bows and arrows. Somehow de Soto and most of his escort slashed their way out of town just as the first soldiers of the Spanish main body appeared on the open plain outside Mabila. Still in the saddle and hacking wildly with his sword, de Soto bristled with nearly two dozen arrows, none of which had penetrated his quilted armor.

The Spaniards faltered and fell back. Tascalusa’s warriors helped the Atahachi porters break their chains and join the fray with weapons seized from de Soto’s baggage train. The unequal battle raged into the afternoon. Spanish cavalry arrived to help balance the odds. When the infantry came up, de Soto signaled a counterattack with the blast of a harquebus. The first rush failed, but de Soto continued to throw his men against the town walls. They hacked at the plaster and cane palisades, creating a breach large enough for a few men to dart inside and set the nearest houses ablaze. The cane-and-thatch roofs ignited in a flash, and a wall of fire rolled across the town. Doomed defenders perished in the flames engulfing Mabila or at the tips of Spanish cavalry lances on the corpse-strewn plain.11

The wives of warriors grabbed weapons and fought “with no less skill and ferocity than their husbands,” but Mabila, and with it the Atahachi culture, expired in the flames and frenzy. As twilight settled over the carnage, dazed and wounded conquistadors glanced at the smoldering ramparts. A lone warrior stood upon them. Despairing of escape, he yanked off his bowstring, tossed it over the branch of a nearby tree, wrapped it around his neck, and hanged himself.12

No one knows how many Indians perished in the Battle of Mabila. To disguise de Soto’s folly, Spanish chroniclers inflated the Native body count and understated their own losses. Indian dead likely numbered a thousand, including Tascalusa, his headmen, and the entire priestly class. Centuries of collective civic and cultural knowledge also perished in the conflagration that foreshadowed the demise of the Mississippian tradition.

Approximately fifty conquistadors were killed or mortally wounded at Mabila, and nearly half of the Spaniards were wounded. The expedition also lost most of its baggage and half of its horses, both devastating blows. His comrades, said one conquistador, “began to think that it was impossible to dominate such bellicose people or to subjugate men who were so free.”

Bloodied and disillusioned, de Soto’s men grew mutinous. De Soto pushed on, however. He crossed the Mississippi and staggered aimlessly about with his dwindling band until May 1542, when he fell ill from fever and died. A little over a year later, the remnants of the entrada boarded rescue ships on the Gulf Coast and sailed from the scenes of their quixotic misadventures.13

The Spaniards might have departed, but they left behind smallpox, a pathogen far more lethal than the carnage they had inflicted with their swords and lances. A scourge for which the Indians had no defenses, nor likely any explanation except divine displeasure, smallpox circulated in droplets or dust particles, infecting nearly everyone. High fevers, vomiting, and painful rashes or blisters tormented the bewildered natives. On those fortunate enough to live, the scabs healed after a week or ten days, leaving behind disfiguring pockmarks. The disease also blinded many who survived. No one knows how many Indians inhabited the South at the time of de Soto’s rapacious odyssey—some have estimated the number at nearly two million—but in three decades following the entrada, upward of 90 percent died from smallpox and other European viruses.14

The mighty chiefdom of Coosa teetered, and that of Atahachi crumbled. The people scattered simply to survive in a land bereft of unifying leadership or the once elevated culture of the Mississippian tradition. When Spaniards next visited what is today southern Alabama in 1560, Mabila lay in ruins. The few Indians who lingered amid the debris practiced a primitive agriculture, and the former chiefdom proved so barren that the Spaniards had to press on to avoid starvation. Six years later, a final Spanish expedition toppled what remained of Coosa with viruses. Afterward the Spaniards contented themselves with colonies along the Florida coast, and the curtain of recorded history closed over the region. The Indians separated, then coalesced in new and smaller groupings, scratched out small plots, and toiled at subsistence farming. Saplings and underbrush invaded the spacious clearings once tended by Atahachi and Coosa farmers. Gradually, the great forests of the South reclaimed the land.15

In 1670 the historical record resumed in the South when the English settled Charles Towne on the Carolina coast. From their coastal enclave, British traders edged their way inland to turn a profit at the Indians’ expense. Three years later, French explorers penetrated the Mississippi valley, looking both to counter British influence and to expand their own commerce with the Indians. Spain, meanwhile, clung to the Florida settlements as buffers between its rich Caribbean holdings and the growing British presence on the Atlantic coast of North America.

The European interlopers danced about the periphery of four southeastern American Indian peoples who emerged from the remnants of the great Mississippian tradition chiefdoms. These were the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks. While vibrant and relatively sophisticated, theirs were simpler societies than those of their ancestors. Given the toll that European pathogens had taken, it is remarkable that cohesive cultures of any sort reemerged.16

Not only did they reemerge—precisely how, the natives themselves did not know—but within a century the four new Indian societies of the Deep South also prospered. Each had a well-defined domain that it zealously defended against periodic incursions by Indian neighbors. Scattered about the rolling hill country of what is today northwestern Alabama and northern Mississippi were the Chickasaws, a tough, warlike, but comparatively small tribe of perhaps six thousand members.

To their immediate south lived the Choctaws, who numbered at least twenty thousand. The Choctaws claimed most of the Mississippi piedmont and coastal plain, as well as a sliver of western Alabama. The Chickasaw and Choctaw country lay west of the Tombigbee River, and both tribes belonged to the Muscogean language family.

The Cherokees, an Iroquoian-speaking people, controlled the Appalachian highland and piedmont areas encompassing modern southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, and bits of western South Carolina, northern Georgia, and northeastern Alabama. They counted approximately twenty thousand members.

Ironically, the dominant Indian polity in the region was not a tribe at all, but rather a loose conglomeration of small tribes of diverse backgrounds most commonly known as the Creek, or Muscogee, confederacy. The name Muscogee (or Muskogee) comes from the Algonquian word muskeg, which signifies swamp or land that is prone to flooding and might have been bestowed on these Indians by their Shawnee allies. Early English settlers from the Province of Carolina called the first Muscogees with whom they came into contact Creeks because the natives resided on the upper Ocmulgee River and Ochese Creek, near modern Macon, Georgia. As Carolinians became more familiar with western members of the confederacy, they extended the appellation Creek to all of them. Having no name for their affiliated towns, the Indians took to referring to themselves as Creeks when dealing with whites.

Their realm, however, was neither the mere cluster of creeks the English name implied nor the morass the Algonquian moniker of Muscogee suggested. Numbering more than twenty thousand, and with a growing population, the Creeks claimed a vast region. When the first British colonists landed in North America, the Creek domain stretched west from coastal Georgia’s Savannah River to the Tombigbee River of eastern Mississippi and south from the Tennessee River to northern Florida—an area comprising half of the presentday Deep South lying east of the Mississippi River. The Creek country rested squarely between Spanish Florida, Great Britain’s Atlantic Seaboard colonies, and the southward-stretching tendrils of French Canada. All three empires would come to court the Creeks. So long as the three great European powers needed them, the Creeks prospered. The natives’ fate, however, was no longer wholly their own.

The twin hearts of the Creek confederacy, if indeed the loosely affiliated towns of the late seventeenth century could be called a confederacy, were the fertile river bottoms where the rapid Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers join to form the broad and meandering Alabama River and the central Chattahoochee River valley of today’s western Georgia.

According to Creek tradition, their core towns, sometimes known as the “foundation towns,” were Muscogean-speaking communities. Scholars differ as to what groupings constituted the original towns, but all agree that the Abeikas (Abihkas) and Cowetas played prominent roles. In addition to a common language and likely descent from the great Mississippian chiefdoms of Coosa and Atahachi, the affiliated towns shared a willingness to welcome non-Muscogean Indians into their fold so long as they paid ceremonial deference to the core towns and incorporated key Creek traditions. The latter condition was not particularly onerous, because southeastern tribes had much in common culturally.

The first and most potent tribe to avail themselves of Muscogee openhandedness were the Alabamas, whom the Choctaws had pushed eastward from the Tombigbee River to the western reaches of the Alabama River. Other prominent accretions included the Natchez, originally from southwestern Mississippi, several bands of the Shawnees from the Ohio valley, and the Uchees from the Savannah River country, whose languages were incomprehensible to their Muscogee allies.17

As the seventeenth century closed, the dominant Indian power in the Deep South, then, was a loose assemblage of largely inwardlooking towns with about as much sense of common purpose as the querulous Italian city-states of Renaissance Europe had possessed. In the coming decades, it would require a threatening convergence of European powers on the edges of the Creek country to bring about a semblance of unity.

CHAPTER TWO

A Rope of Sand

THE CREEKS cherished the freedoms that accompanied their lack of a strong central authority. They also prized the security that came from belonging to one of fifty matrilineal clans—that is to say, groups of close-knit families scattered throughout the confederacy whose members believed they shared a remote female ancestor. Clans were exogamous—one must marry an outsider—and clan law reigned supreme in Creek society. Its complex set of social rules and etiquette regulated behavior and promoted a sense of fraternity with other Creek communities. Through clan membership, observed a literate Creek métis (mixed blood), the Creeks “are so united that there is no part of the [Creek] nation detached from the other, but are all linked, harmonized, and consolidated as one large, connected family, [and] there is no part of the nation but a man can find his clansmen or their connection.” Wander where he may in the vast Creek country, a Creek truly was never far from home.1

The Creeks dated the clan system to the very origin of life on earth, and they spoke of its numinous beginnings with awe. One tale told of the emergence of the Creeks from a great fog that, as it dissipated, divided the people into clans. All Creek stories of the clan system agreed on the preeminence of the Wind Clan, particularly as peacemakers. In the coming era of European contact and conflict, the Wind Clan would prove both a wedge for and a barrier against white encroachment.

Although the Creeks claimed a huge country, they congregated along rivers or their tributaries and reserved most of the land for seasonal hunting. Creek towns, which generally ranged between fifty and five hundred inhabitants, formed the basic political units and contained members of multiple clans. Called talwas, the towns enjoyed great autonomy. So tenaciously did talwas cling to their prerogatives that Theodore Roosevelt, in his monumental The Winning of the West, likened the Creek confederacy to a “rope of sand.” In view of a talwa’s near-absolute independence, it is equally accurate to translate the word as “tribe.”

Beneath the talwas were the talofas, or villages. Lacking the public squares and ceremonial grounds unique to talwas, talofas were dependent on and often offshoots of the nearest talwa. Talofas proliferated when good farming land around the talwas grew scarce or simply because the highly individualistic Creeks wanted to put some distance between themselves and their mother community. A Creek talwa comprised both the town itself and its satellite talofas, scattered through the forest or along streams and connected by a network of trails.2

The Creeks believed life was an eternal struggle between peace and war, a dualism reflected in the division of talwas. There were the Hathagalgi, or white talwas, so styled because white was the color of peace and purity, and the Tcilokogalgi, or red talwas, red being the color of war. White talwas hosted peace councils and were sanctuaries for fugitives from Creek justice. Red talwas took the initiative in declaring war and planning military expeditions. Creeks proudly painted their public buildings, ceremonial articles, and even their bodies white or red according to their talwa’s affiliation. Residents of similarly colored talwas considered themselves “people of one fire” and felt a bitter rivalry, bordering on hostility, toward talwas of the other color (division). So strong was the ill feeling between white and red talwas, at least in the formative years of the confederacy, that friendships, marriages, and even casual encounters rarely crossed the color line.3

As the confederacy matured and the European colonial presence on its periphery grew, many of the traditional distinctions between red and white talwas blurred. The mutual aversion of their inhabitants persisted, however. It found an outlet in the Creeks’ favorite activity, the inter-town ball game, or holliicosi, which was the Indian forerunner of modern lacrosse. Far more than mere sport, holliicosi functioned as a rowdy and often bone-cracking surrogate for war that not only channeled the bellicose passions of young men but also could make or break family fortunes and alter the allegiance of talwas. Preparations for a match were exacting, and the stakes were high; three or four consecutive losses to the same talwa compelled the defeated talwa to change divisions. Fortunately for talwas with mediocre teams, intertown games occurred only once annually.4

In contrast to the yearly holliicosi brawls, daily talwa life was harmonious, the ruling hand light. In peace, the civil leader, known as the micco, administered public affairs with the advice and consent of the talwa council. The Creeks strove for consensus. Public ridicule generally sufficed to maintain order.

An exceptional micco might exert sway beyond his own talwa. Few incentives, however, existed for the accrual of influence. Unlike their overbearing ancestral chiefs, a Creek micco must till his own fields, hunt his own game, and share his personal surplus with his people. Miccos also managed the public granary, to which all Creek families of the talwa contributed a share of their crops. In times of want, the micco distributed the communal produce according to need.

Although few ascended to the office of micco without a distinguished war record, in times of conflict talwa affairs passed to the tustunnugee thlucco, or great warrior, and his war council. Once peace was restored, the tustunnugee thlucco returned the reins of government to civil authorities. So long as he enjoyed the loyalty of the talwa’s warriors, however, a tustunnugee thlucco’s role in Creek politics remained considerable.5

Situated on large, crystal clear creeks or rivers, talwas were agreeable places in which to live. Numbering about sixty by the end of the eighteenth century, they had several features in common. Custom and considerations of utility dictated their layout. In the center of a talwa, on the highest available ground, stood the public square, where, in warm weather, councils and other public affairs were conducted. Four inward-facing wattle-and-daub structures painted white or red according to the talwa’s divisional affiliation delineated the square. Open in front, each building consisted of three rooms with terraced rows of benches on which men sat segregated by clan. Immediately outside the square rested the bark-roofed winter council house, known as the chokofa. Also adjacent to the public square lay a two-hundredyard-long rectangular ball field known as the chunky yard. Its name derived from the chunky game, in which contestants hurled poles at swiftly rolling stone disks. The chunky yard also served a macabre function. At either end of the yard stood twelve-foot-high wooden posts decorated with the scalps of slain enemies. The Creeks sometimes tortured prisoners to death, and it was to these “blood poles” that they secured the condemned.6

Radiating from the public grounds were residential yards that comprised households grouped by clan. A prosperous household might own four buildings laid out in an inward-facing square, with an openair pavilion that served as the family’s summer abode on one side; an enclosed cooking area perpendicular to it; a storage shed across from the cooking area in which Creek men kept their saddles (for horses descended from Spanish mustangs, bought from British traders, or stolen from white settlers), deerskins, weapons, and personal gear, and in which the family also stored corn and other produce. A rectangular wattle-and-daub, bark-roofed winter lodging house completed the square. Compared with northern Indians, for whom a single wigwam typically served all of a family’s needs, and most white frontiersmen, who made do with one-room cabins, the Creeks enjoyed commodious quarters.7

The Creeks and their neighboring tribes differed from the northern Indian peoples in another, more profound respect: the status of women. In the patrilineal cultures of the North, women derived their property and place in society from their husbands. In the matrilineal southeastern tribes, however, women owned the homes, family property, and probably the agricultural plots, giving them far greater security and economic independence than northern women. Divorce was permissible but hardly desirable for Creek men after the birth of children because a divorced man not only was expelled from his wife’s talwa but also had to maintain her and their offspring until she remarried. Creek fathers possessed another disadvantage in domestic circles. In Creek society a boy respected his maternal uncle more than his father and looked to his uncle for comfort and for guidance as he grew to young manhood.

This is not to say that Creek women had it easy. In the cosmic pecking order, men came first. Gender roles not only were clearly defined but also stood in both real and mystical opposition to each other. Women reared children; cultivated, preserved, and prepared food; dressed deerskins; and hauled firewood. Men tilled and prepared the fields, but their principal duties were hunting and war making. Fearing contamination from female “power,” they obliged menstruating women, or those about to give birth, to sequester themselves in huts on the village periphery.8

Young women aspired to a good marriage and faithful service to their lineage. Ambitious young men found fulfillment in warfare. Preparations for its rigors began in boyhood, and advancement in male society and the wooing of a desirable mate depended on one’s prowess as a warrior. Until he took a scalp, a young man lived in a kind of disgrace, obliged to serve warriors as a menial. Creek custom compelled no one to go to war, which was normally confined to sporadic, small war parties in search of a few scalps and prisoners. The entire Creek confederacy never took concerted action against a common enemy; warfare involved individual talwas, or a group of allied talwas, conducting raids on traditional foes like the Choctaws and Cherokees, against whom it was nearly always legitimate to wage war. Because opportunities to take scalps—valued as demonstrable proof of a kill—or prisoners were at a premium, aspiring Creek warriors sometimes surreptitiously murdered their own people on the margins of raids to obtain hair. The scalps of enemy women and children were always fair game, and while Creek warriors never raped women, which they feared would diminish their war powers, killing noncombatants was acceptable practice in all southeastern tribes.9

Creek warriors had no wish to die for their people; rather, they aspired to return home with scalps and glory, and nothing brought greater glory than a live male prisoner. Captive women and children were enslaved by clans that had lost members in battle. In bondage they did the same work as their owners. Most eventually were adopted into their owners’ clan. Male captives, however, were dragged directly to the blood poles on the chunky ground. The entire talwa turned out to witness their torture and slow, hideous death by fire. Not only did Creek women mete out torture, but they alone had the right to spare a man’s life, a prerogative seldom exercised.10

Before a talwa went to war, the tustunnugee thlucco raised his war club in a solemn public ceremony. Painted red, the Creek war club, also known as a red stick (atássa), was “shaped like a small gun about two feet long,” said a Creek métis. “At the curve near where the lock would be is a three-square piece of iron or steel with a sharp edge driven in, to leave a projection of about two inches.” If more than one talwa was to participate in a foray, the tustunnugee thlucco would send a red war club and bundle of sticks, also painted red, to each participating community. One stick in the bundle was broken each day until, on the final day, the various expeditions converged at a designated spot. Thus, the red sticks served to synchronize actions, and time was reckoned in terms of “broken days.”

A war club, or red stick, was both a symbol and an essential weapon in a Creek warrior’s arsenal, which by the early eighteenth century also included a musket, a tomahawk, bows and arrows, and a scalping knife. When the appointed day to depart on a raid arrived, participants gathered in the public square in breechcloth and moccasins, their bodies boldly painted. The tustunnugee thlucco emitted a sacred war whoop, and then everyone sang, danced, and fired their muskets. After ingesting a concoction of consecrated herbs, the warriors marched single file from the talwa, their thoughts fixed on killing. Once war was declared, a Creek warrior explained, “you speak to the enemy only by beating him on the head. There is no communication with him, either direct or indirect, for any reason whatsoever. Anyone who disregards this is considered a traitor and is treated accordingly.” The end of hostilities, on the other hand, was absolute, at least theoretically.11

Much of supposed Creek bellicosity represented pure rodomontade. Open, sustained warfare between the southeastern tribes was infrequent, and even small raids were strictly a seasonal endeavor. English colonists said the Indians sought blood when the snakes were out; in other words, they waged war in the late spring, the summer, and the early fall. Late autumn, winter, and early spring they devoted to hunting. Actual loss of life was minimal; no talwa could afford heavy casualties. Although they enjoyed the ritualistic color and clamor preceding combat, few Creeks were enamored of war. Some Creek men found the whole notion of war making so repellent that they became transvestites and did women’s work.12

Nearly all Creeks considered rituals essential not only to the smooth functioning of society but also to the averting of calamities. Central to Creek belief was the notion of separation: that things belonging to radically opposed categories had to be kept apart, either intermittently or always. Thus, women must be separated from men during menses, during childbirth, and before war making; birds and four-footed animals, as well as fire and water, must always be kept apart. The Creeks also strove to keep clean, spiritually and physically.

Men purified themselves with a highly caffeinated beverage made from roasted leaves and holly twigs called assee, meaning “white drink,” because white symbolized purity, happiness, and social harmony. Creeks considered the beverage a gift from God, the “Master of Breath.” Europeans called the strong brew the black drink because of its color. Creek men gathered in their public square weekly, or in some talwas daily, to drink from gourds a quantity equivalent in its caffeine content to two dozen cups of coffee, which they periodically disgorged. Most Europeans agreed that the black drink—which was served to male visitors along with tobacco before any council—had a pleasant taste similar to black tea. After drinking and vomiting, the men dispersed—purified from sin, brimming over with benevolence, or, in time of war, fortified for battle with a terrific caffeine high.13

The central Creek ritual was the annual Green Corn Ceremony, also known as the busk or the poskitá (literally, “to fast or purify”). Celebrated in August at the ripening of the new corn, and lasting from four to eight days, the busk represented a reaffirmation—or restoration, when necessary—of harmony between the clans of a talwa, and between a talwa and the Master of Breath. The Creeks forgave all transgressions short of murder, and life began anew.14

The métis George Stiggins, a chronicler of his mother’s people and a participant in the Creek War, asserted unfairly that the Creeks acknowledged their creator only during the busk. In truth, most Creeks believed the Master of Breath ever present, together with otherworldly spirits benign and dreadful. And how had the Creeks come into being? A prominent eighteenth-century micco said that the first Creeks emerged from the “mouth of the ground” and hastened toward the setting sun because their appearance had angered the earth, which threatened to eat their children. The enraged earth was a huge, circular flat island resting precariously on the surface of great waters, suspended from the vault of the sky by four invisible cords attached at each of the cardinal directions. During their sojourn over its surface, the fabled Creeks discovered a thundering hill, atop which a magical stick sang and shivered. They subdued the stick and thenceforth carried replicas of it—the atássas, or red sticks—with them in war.15

Most Creeks believed in an afterlife but differed as to both where the soul went after death and what rewards or punishments awaited it. Some thought that the souls of the good spent eternity in an Upper World of “pleasure uninterrupted” above the sky vault; those of evildoers wallowed in an Under World beneath the earth and waters. Others spoke of a “distant, known region, where game is plenty, where corn grows all the year round, and the springs of pure water are never dried up,” juxtaposed with a “distant swamp, which is full of galling briars,” devoid of women and game, in which the condemned (apparently only men) existed perpetually half-starved.16

Creeks assumed that evil stalked the earth. They considered tragedy that struck those who violated societal norms to be well-merited divine retribution. When bad things happened to good men, however, or when evil men prospered, there could be only one cause—witchcraft. Its practitioners appeared as fellow Creeks, but their inherent evil placed them outside the human realm. Instances of actual witch burnings were few, but the fear and loathing they evoked ran deep. Not all who touched the supernatural did so with wicked intent, however. Creeks accepted the reality of beneficent visions, dreams, and divinely induced trances—a belief on which Red Stick prophets would later capitalize.17

Although Creek notions of virtue and morality—particularly sexual mores—frequently offended European sensibilities, most white visitors praised Creek warmth and hospitality. The eighteenth-century French captain Jean-Bernard Bossu was such a man, and he found himself smothered with Creek kindness. When he arrived in a talwa, the micco and other leading men shook his hand vigorously and led him to the public square. There they offered him tobacco and the black drink and, on learning he was single, a lovely young woman to share his bed.

The girl was not necessarily a harlot. Creeks encouraged premarital sexual relations except between members of the same clan. Unmarried Creek women were free to use their bodies as they saw fit. When a single warrior from another talwa visited, he habitually hired a girl for a night or two.18

Louis Milfort, a Frenchman who lived among the Creeks in the late eighteenth century, benefited both from the promiscuity of single Creek women and from their curiosity about the sexual attributes of Caucasian males. Milfort claimed to have resisted the charms of Creek women for two years until, one evening at a festival, a particularly lovely girl flirted with him. Succumbing to her charms, Milfort snuck off with the girl to her mother’s house and then climbed a rickety ladder to the girl’s garret. No sooner had Milfort made the ascent than four other women appeared in the dark, seized him, yanked off his trousers, and playfully demanded he make love to all of them because they had “never yet seen a capon-warrior,” meaning a Frenchman’s penis. Milfort rose to the occasion. “I had to prove to these women that a French warrior is well worth a Creek warrior. I came out of the combat with honor, and my adventure was soon generally known.”19

Had any of his paramours been married, Milfort would have been fortunate to have escaped the encounter unscathed. Creeks considered a marriage conditional until a couple celebrated a busk together, and they permitted polygamy. Unlike some tribes, which permitted extramarital affairs, they condemned adultery. The aggrieved spouse, with the help of his or her clan, punished the adulterous couple harshly, lashing their bodies and often cropping their ears. Afterward, the Creeks considered the disfigured transgressors man and wife, whether they liked it or not.20

Milfort undoubtedly enjoyed his nocturnal ambush. Young Creek women tended to be petite and beautiful, their languid, dark-eyed sensuality accentuated by their custom of going topless in warm weather. Creek women wore their jet-black hair plaited and then turned up and fastened on the crown of their head with a silver broach. From the wreathed topknot of hair, there flowed “an incredible quantity of silk ribbands of various colors, which stream down on every side almost to the ground.” Only prostitutes used face or body paint. Creek women