The Creeks
The Cherokees were not the only tribe pressured into moving to the Southwest. To their west and south lay over twenty thousand members of the Muscogee Confederation of tribes. The powerful Creeks comprised the vast majority of this people, along with smaller numbers of Natchez, Alabamas, Koasatis, and Euchees. Historian Gaston Little recounted the fearsome reputation of the Creeks:
“The Creek men were tall and slender and their women were well-formed and beautiful. Bravery was a characteristic among the Creeks, whose warriors defeated in battle all the surrounding tribes. The Creeks were considered during colonial times to be the most powerful of the southern tribes”.
The Creeks and their related tribes lived across wide expanses of Alabama and southern Georgia. In addition to their martial vigor, they were accomplished farmers and possessed a sophisticated system of governance. On local matters the latter consisted of leaders who each governed a town. A two-house legislative body, meanwhile, governed the nation.
Big trouble loomed, however, both from within and without for the Creeks. Two major factions—the Upper Creeks and Lower Creeks, first so referenced by the English-comprised the Creek Confederation. These names evolved from the brutal Yamasee War of 1715 to 1717 in which the Creeks, Choctaws, and other Southeastern tribes fought a war of extermination with colonial South Carolina, seeking to expel the English from the region. Many of these Indians had earlier conspired with the English in an unholy slave trade involving Indians from weaker tribes. The tainted parties fell out with one another as the colonists grew stronger and wealthier and their Indian collaborators grew increasingly indebted to them. As described by anthropologist Jack M. Schultz, war ensued after English traders also began to enslave their Indian allies and families as payment for their debts.
During the Yamasee War, the Upper Creeks lived mainly to the west of the Chattahoochee River in present-day Alabama and refrained from fighting the Carolinians. The Lower Creeks lived along and to the east of the Chattahoochee and, along with the Yamasees, spearheaded the Indian effort. (Though appearing on maps west and east, respectively, the colonial perspective of the era, with communities narrowly strung along the Atlantic Coast, looked outward to the west from the east. Thus, the more remote western environs then appeared higher, or upper, on maps and the nearer regions lower.)
Creeks in a pre-removal Georgia village. Extended families or clans lived in clusters of cabins or teepees
Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special. |