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previous: Chapter 1 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Southern Indians by R. S. Cotterill University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Oklahoma, 1954 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 3

 p16  II
The Colonial Background

The first of the Southern Indians to come into continued contact with the English settlers were those of the Muscogee towns near the falls of the Chattahoochee. To these in 1685 came the traders from Charleston, bringing a wealth of commodities that the Creeks had never known to exchange for things for which the Creeks had hitherto had no use. When the Spanish mission, Santa Cruz at the junction of the Flint and the Chattahoochee, after a vain effort to prevent, by oral exhortation, its prospective spiritual charges from falling under the secular influence of the English, prepared to temper its ineffective spiritual appeal with a seasoning of military argument, the Creeks, preferring the role of English customers to that of Spanish converts, moved their towns to new sites on Ocheese Creek (Ocmulgee River).⁠1 To these new locations, having (for the Creeks) the double charm of proximity to English trade and remoteness from Spanish reproaches, came the Carolina traders bringing their novel wares of hardware and clothing to exchange for peltry. Probably the (Ocheesee) Creek Indians lost no time in carrying to their brethren on the Coosa and Tallapoosa the glad tidings of their new commercial blessedness; whether as a result of these suggestions or the promptings of commercial enterprise, the Indians of Alabama were, by 1696, welcoming the Carolina  p17 traders. Two years later the rustic Chickasaws were receiving them in a spirit of appreciation destined to be permanent. Because of the long transportation and difficult approach to them, the Cherokees received only the crumbs that fell from the Charleston table; for the time being the Choctaws, because of remoteness or the neighborly enmity of Chickasaws and Creeks, remained unvisited and unsupplied.⁠2

No Indian indifference to this trade is indicated by their policy of waiting in their towns for the wares to be brought to them on English initiative. It brought them comforts and conveniences they had never known: guns and ammunition which increased the tempo of both their hunting and hostility; cutting tools such as hatchets, knives, axes, and hoes, which enabled them to build better houses and more easily cultivate their fields; creature comforts such as pipes, scissors, beads, kettles, pots and pans, mirrors, salt, vermilion (for paint), and rum; and clothing in the form of blankets, shirts, coats, and hats, as well as staples like strouds and calico, which they could use as their fancy suggested. The demand for the former elevated, or at least changed, hunting from a supplementary means of subsistence to the dignity of a business and intensified, if, indeed, it did not create, tribal competition for hunting grounds with an accompanying increase of hostilities. Increasing wars resulted also from the demand for slaves (to be sold to the West Indies), which could be, legitimately, met only by the sale of captives. A Chickasaw-Choctaw war, beginning apparently about 1690, by 1702 (according to later French statistics) had augmented the Chickasaw trading facilities by five hundred Choctaw captives and had accumulated a by-product of eighteen hundred Choctaw and eight hundred Chickasaw dead before the  p18 French, lately established at Mobile, were able by triple promises of protection (against Illinois Indians), merchandise, and missionaries to induce them, in March, 1702, to make peace.⁠3

With the opening of Queen Anne's War in 1702, the four great tribes of the South found themselves the apparently enviable recipients of solicitations for support from the English, Spanish, and French. So great was the lure of English trade that both Creeks and Chickasaws aligned themselves with Carolina, their native recognition of self-interest being power­fully reinforced by the arguments of the traders and a timely adjustment of prices. In the summer of 1702 the Creeks furnished the Carolinians a force of five hundred warriors to scuttle a Spanish advance on the Flint River; in January, 1704, they sent an army of one thousand into Florida to the almost total destruction of Apalachee province; and, in the same year, massacred a French diplomatic mission. These scattered manifestations of good will were followed in August, 1705, by a formal alliance with Carolina.⁠4

The Chickasaws, not less ardent than the Creeks in perpetuating their source of supplies, revived in 1714, in order to secure an even flow of captives, the Choctaw war, which two years before had been "forever" closed. In such an emergency the Choctaws could do nothing less than ask for French aid, and the French could do nothing more than promise it. The protective qualities of French assurances were made clear in the autumn of 1705, when the Choctaw country was invaded and laid waste by a force of Chickasaws and Creeks numbering three thousand or three hundred, according as one adopts French or English reports. In 1708 the weary Choctaws thoroughly convinced of the superiority of English guns over Choctaw bows, made peace. But the English traders, finding that a Chickasaw-Choctaw peace only opened a competing supply line from Mobile, renewed their pressure, with the result that the war reopened in May, 1711, with such hearty  p19 good will that before the year ended the Choctaws increased their casualties by 160 dead and 160 prisoners. Completely dissatisfied with such progress, all the Choctaw towns but three allied themselves with the English; the other three removed in loyalty and fear to the vicinity of Mobile.⁠5

Shortly after the close of Queen Anne's War it became evident that the outward co-operation of the Creeks with the English had not been the reflection of a complete spiritual accord. Disharmony between the two had resulted when the traders, unsatisfied by the number of commercial captives created by the normal operations of intertribal war, had supplemented their supply of slaves by kidnapping the Creeks themselves. To this act (which the primitive Creeks suspected was a violation of business ethics), the traders had added the uncommendable practices of cheating in trade, of defrauding their hosts while hampered by intoxication superinduced by the traders themselves, of arrogance toward the men and lewdness toward the women. Creek protests against these imported forms of misconduct had brought no improvement until in 1707 Carolina's extremity forced an attempted reform. The colony at that time took control of the trade, required traders to have licenses, provided for resident agents, and forbade the sale of rum to friendly Indians. When this plan (which was the model for all future, local or central, regulation of Indian trade) broke down because the traders refused to take out licenses, observe the regulations, or discontinue their criticized conduct, the exasperated Creeks proceeded to apply their own remedy.

The extremely logical plan of the Creeks was to reform the Carolina system by annihilating the Carolinians, to follow the murder of the traders with a destruction of the colony from which the traders came, and to fill the resulting commercial vacuum by trading with the French and Spaniards. This plan had all the earmarks of domestic manufacture, and there is no reason to believe that the prospective French and Spanish beneficiaries had any part on formulating it. The Creeks, having success­fully inaugurated the reform movement by murdering all the traders they  p20 could find, entrusted the next step to the sympathizing Yemassee in southern South Carolina, and for the prosecution of the ensuing "Yemassee War" attempted to enlist the co‑operation of the Choctaws and Cherokees. Bienville, the French governor at Mobile, aided the attempt (with or without Creek suggestion) by securing in 1715 the murder of Conchak Emike, who was violently pro-British and "the most distinguished man of the Choctaws"; by appointing his murderer, Chickacha Oulacta, as head chief, and by permitting, when perhaps he could not prevent, the killing of the Carolina traders who had swarmed in after Queen Anne's War. Among the Cherokees the antagonism to the Creeks was currently so strong that neither their remembrance of trading iniquities nor the opportunity of destroying white men could bring them into the conflict. Instead, in August, 1715, they made an alliance with the Carolinians and promised for use against the Creeks a force which they failed to supply. When shortly after this the Lower Cherokees received simultaneously the visit of a small Creek embassy and the diplomatic mission of three hundred Carolina militia, they resolved their embarrassment by murdering the Creeks and combining with the Carolinians to chase back to the Creek country a force of five hundred warriors who had come to add weight to the Creek suggestions. The Yemassee War, which after a fair beginning had been proceeding more and more falteringly for the Indians, virtually came to an end with this decided Cherokee action. During the course of the war distance had prevented the Choctaws from attacking, and the Chickasaws from aiding, the Carolina settlements.⁠6

The failure of the Creek movement (which, since it failed, is entitled to the label "conspiracy") was followed by a shifting of Creek towns, a change of Creek policy, and a long Creek-Cherokee war. In 1716 the Creeks moved their Ocmulgee towns, now menaced by a Cherokee flanking attack, back to their old position on the Chattahoochee in supporting nearness to the main  p21 Muscogee body in Alabama. Gathering around them there and on the Flint the Hitchitee people of southern Georgia and the Euchee people who had moved down from the Tennessee, they perfected from these discordant elements in combination with the Choctaw Alabamas, and the Upper Muscogees that union thereafter called the Creek Confederation. Its leading town was the Muscogee Coweta under the astute direction of a chief whom the Carolinians called Old Brim.⁠7

The attitude of the confederation toward the French and British reflected, if it did not result from, a division of sentiment. The Alabamas, from proximity and Choctaw influence, favored the French, while the Upper Muscogees, perhaps because of Chickasaw influence, preferred the British: the former in 1717 went to the extreme of permitting, and perhaps of soliciting, the building of a French fort in the heart of their country.⁠8 Under these conditions the Creek policy dictated by Old Brim anticipated the Jeffersonian formula of peace and friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. Between the bickering French and British, Old Brim wished the Creeks to hold the balance of power and so be forever wooed and never won. In November, 1717, he negotiated, on Carolina invitation, a peace which named the Savannah as the Creek-Carolina boundary and provided for a resumption of trade on such favorable terms that even the Alabamas, after being considerably softened with presents, accepted it. Although the Creeks admitted a Carolina factor to permanent residence, they received for several years few British supplies, because in 1715 Carolina had disciplined the private traders by forbidding private trade and had substituted for it a system of  p22 public stores on the Savannah, to which the Indians were invited to bring their peltry for exchange. Accustomed to having their trade brought to them, the Creeks showed, by continued absence, such an antipathy to the new arrangement that after three years of progressive failure it was abolish and private trade restored.⁠9 Thereafter the Creeks traded with both Charleston and Mobile, but no British forts were permitted in the Creek country; a French request for a Lower Creek fort was skillfully evaded; and Spanish appeals for the expulsion of English traders were refused, although in 1717 a Creek delegation is said to have visited the viceroy of New Spain and to have courteously taken the oath of allegiance to Spain.

The twelve-year Creek-Cherokee war, resulting from the mass murder of the Creek mission at Tugalo in 1715, owed its duration to the absence of peacemaking machinery among the Indians. The Cherokees had leisure for a Creek war, since they had in 1712, in conjunction with Carolina, expelled their inimical Tuscarora kinsmen, and in 1715, with Chickasaw aid, had driven the Shawnees back from the Cumberland to a new location on Red River in Kentucky, from which their occasional raids constituted more a nuisance than a danger.⁠10 In 1721 they increased their content thus created by signing at Congaree with Francis Nicholson, the first royal governor of South Carolina, a treaty providing for certain trading reforms and a common boundary. As a by‑product of this treaty they created, on Nicholson's suggestion, the new office of principal chief, elevating thereto a chief whom the Carolina writers have effectively disguised as Wrosetasatow.⁠11 From this treaty, however, the Cherokees received no aid from the Carolinians, whose ambition was to see both tribes  p23 weakened by a long war to a condition of mutual impotence. As usual, the neutral pleased neither; and when their displeasure became so great as apparently to presage a joint attack on South Carolina, that province in January, 1727, arranged, with some difficulty, an uneasy end to their mutually satisfactory war.⁠12

While the British were clandestinely encouraging the Cherokees and Creeks in a policy of mutual destruction, the French had been openly promoting a revival of the Choctaw-Chickasaw "hereditary" feud. The eagerness of the Choctaws to promote this enterprise grew out of the necessity of delivering to the French a constant supply of slaves and scalps, for which alone they could secure guns and ammunition from that friendly but impecunious colony. The Alabamas, solicited to join their Choctaw kinsmen against the French foe, decided (with an eye to continued English supplies) on a neutrality, the benevolence of which prompted them in August, 1721, to assist the officers at Fort Toulouse in suppressing a mutiny by massacring the garrison. For three years the martial ardor of the Choctaws expended itself more in pledging devotion than in inflicting casualties, until in January, 1723, they responded to French appeals by invading the country of their minuscule adversary, from whom they secured four hundred scalps and one hundred prisoners.⁠13 Although the French account of this affair is subject to the discount usual in evaluating war dispatches, there can be no doubt that the Chickasaws were grievously hurt. One band of them went to live with the Cherokees, another among the Upper Creeks, and a third settled on the Savannah under Carolina protection. But the remainder succeeded so completely in cutting the Mississippi life line between New Orleans and Illinois that in December, 1724, Bienville, on a joint Chickasaw and Choctaw application, reluctantly arranged a peace, which he knew would be followed by an infiltration of Carolina traders into the Choctaw country.

Knowing that Indian affections followed the trade routes, the French exercised themselves to keep the Choctaws supplied and even built a storehouse for their goods at Koweh Chito the residence  p24 of the head chief. Since, however, there were practically no stores to be stored in the storehouse, the destitute Choctaws turned to the British and, in response to Chickasaw promptings, even joined in a conspiracy to destroy the Louisiana colony. The spearhead of this Chickasaw and anti-French conspiracy was the Natchez tribe, as the Yemassee had been of the Creek anti-British movement. A premature Natchez attack on French Fort Rosalie (Natchez) induced the Choctaws to substitute for their projected attack on Mobile a resort to Fort Rosalie to share their spoils. Dissatisfied with the distribution and suspected by the French, they took what seemed to them the logical course of joining the French in punishing the Natchez. When the Chickasaws refused to surrender the Natchez, who, after defeat, fled to them for refuge, the French in January, 1730, declared war, and the Choctaws, inspired by renewed loyalty, went on the warpath.⁠14 For this war both the Chickasaws the Choctaws evolved new techniques of fighting, the former, under British tutelage fortifying their towns, and the latter, by French teaching, substituting siege tactics for their former raids.⁠15 Against the fortified towns the Choctaws could do nothing, but with vastly superior man power they swarmed over the Chickasaw fields, destroying crops, preventing the planting of new ones, and cutting off small Chickasaw parties venturing out to hunt or to defend their fields. In their efforts the Choctaws were aided by Illinois Indians whom the French had incited, but their assistance was counterbalanced by the help the Chickasaws received from the Cherokees, inspired by the Carolinians, by the Natchez, who had taken refuge with them, and by the Cherokees' antipathy to the Illinois Indians.

The Cherokee war party, centering at Tellico, was greatly strengthened by a visit in 1730 from Sir Alexander Cuming, who interrupted a tour of the Cherokee country to assemble the  p25 Cherokees at Nequassee, where with dramatic showman­ship he crowned Moytoy as head chief, secured an acknowledgment of British sovereignty, and took six Cherokees back with him on a visit to England. The net result of this diplomatic whirlwind was to confirm the dazed Cherokees in their war against the French Indians.⁠16 Within their fortified towns, the Chickasaws received such an abundance of supplies from the Carolina traders as to excite a continuous envy in the minds of the conquering but hungry Choctaws. Their consequent negotiations with the enemy convinced Bienville that the Chickasaws must be destroyed and that French soldiers must do it. In 1736 the long-suffering Chickasaws had to defend their towns against a double attack from Mobile and the Illinois. Fortunately for them, the two attacking forces did not arrive at the same time and were consequently beaten one at a time. The disgruntled Choctaws fully realized that Fort Tombecbe, which the departing Bienville had left in their territory, was not so much to discourage Chickasaw raids as to prevent English trade.⁠17 Nevertheless, they continued the war until in 1740 Bienville moved up the Mississippi to their support. Unable to move his artillery inland, he made an inglorious treaty of peace which, however, did not include the Choctaws.⁠18

While the Choctaw-Chickasaw war went wearily on, the stage of Indian drama shifted to the East, where Creeks and Cherokees were playing the principal parts. In 1733 the Creeks had found themselves compelled to shift the focus of their diplomatic and commercial attention from South Carolina to the newly founded Georgia. In May, 1733, they met Oglethorpe in their own Coweta, agreed on rates of exchange, and gave him title to a restricted tract of land on the lower Savannah. The increased British trade resulting from the competition of Carolinians and Georgians enabled the Alabamas to exact from the French a lowering of prices and encouraged the Upper Creeks to promote an anti-French public opinion which resulted in a two-year Creek-Choctaw war,  p26 1739‑41. Neither the interests nor the sentiments of the distant Cherokees were affected by the founding of Georgia, but the arrival among them of Christian Gottlieb Priber in 1736 intensified the bewilderment engendered by Sir Alexander Cuming six years before.

Priber was a Saxon communist, who, after his neighbors had turned resent­ful ears to his teaching, had come through South Carolina to the Cherokee country, where he hoped to evoke a more favorable response from the primitive and unpolluted Indians. He settled down in Tellico, adopted what there was of Cherokee dress, learned the Cherokee language, and began to instruct these Indians in the theory of communism, which they had hitherto known only through the imperfect medium of practice. His reorganization of their government by the crowning of their head chief and his self-appointment as "His Cherokee Majesty's Secretary of State" appealed to their innate love of pageantry, and his doctrine of communal marriage seems not to have aroused antagonism in either sex, although the Cherokee mind was perhaps too untutored to accept the logical corollary of state care for children. All these teachings were considered by the British traders among the Cherokees as the harmless outpourings of an amiable lunatic; but when he began to insist on honest yardsticks, they began to suspect that he was a French agent; and when he went so far as to urge the Cherokees to make peace with the Northern Indians and to trade with both French and British, they became convinced that he was a Jesuit. In 1743, Priber set out on a visit to Fort Toulouse; and as he was passing through the Upper Creek country, he was seized by the traders there and taken to Frederica, where he soon died in what was euphemistically termed confinement.⁠19 The arguments of Priber against intertribal warfare were power­fully supplemented by a smallpox epidemic that struck the Cherokees in 1738 and is said to have killed half the population before the tribe could be rescued from the local physicians.⁠20

In 1738, when Great Britain and Spain drifted into a display of mutual impotence that history has dignified as the War of  p27 Jenkins' Ear, the Cherokees and Creeks became the objects of affectionate attention from both South Carolina and Georgia. In return for a small cession of land (1739), which they had probably never owned and certainly did not then possess, the Creeks received from Oglethorpe a new and lower schedule of prices. The Cherokees, perhaps feeling that reports of Priber's teachings made desirable some further affirmation of loyalty, came down to Augusta, where the General, on the eve of conflict, "received them with all tenderness" as well as with presents of a more tangible nature. As a result of these interchanges, both tribes in the ensuing war gave Georgia an unlimited moral support adulterated by a slight tincture of military assistance. As the War of Jenkins' Ear widened into King George's War, the spotlight shifted to the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The latter, although grievously hurt by the Choctaw siege tactics and wasted by smallpox (doubtless a Cherokee importation), resisted the pleas of the British and disappointed French hopes that they remove eastward. Fortunately for the Chickasaws, the eastern and western divisions of the Choctaws chose, with rare acumen, at this precise moment to engage in a civil war stirred up by John Adair, the talented Chickasaw agent of South Carolina.⁠21

While the Choctaws were directing their energies to self-immolation, the Chickasaws had an opportunity to dispose of a new threat from the north. A band of the Pennsylvania Shawnees, led by the French half-blood, Peter Chartier, and undoubtedly instigated by the French, moved down to the Eskippakithiki town in Kentucky, from which as a base they proceeded by way of the Tennessee and Bear Creek to an attack on the Chickasaws. This was a part of a pincers movement designed to eliminate the Chickasaws, but that tribe, which invariably reacted unfavorably to plans for its elimination, beat off the initial Shawnee attack, and then with the assistance, and perhaps at the suggestion, of Adair and other British traders, attacked Chartier in his Bear Creek camp, with the result that the Shawnees dispersed among the Cherokees and the Upper Creeks, where their activities  p28 gravely disturbed the precarious balance of interracial and intertribal relations.⁠22 They persuaded the Cherokees to make peace with the French Indians in the Northwest and to approve, if not actively to assist, their own raids on the British-allied Catawbas, which occasionally extended to attacks on South Carolina settlements receiving the refugee Catawbas. They also, by the murder of some Creek-dwelling Chickasaws, provoked a Cherokee-Creek war, which, in the absence of intertribal peacemaking machinery, might have gone on indefinitely had not Governor Glenn of South Carolina — disturbed, it was charged, by the dwindling dividends from his private trading ventures — intervened in 1753 to make peace. The close of the Creek war left the Cherokees free to take aid to the beleaguered Chickasaws, who were being subjected to a final attack by a combined French and Chickasaw force up the Tombigbee. The relieving Cherokees, although having lost their guns in running the Muscle Shoals ("they came into this nation in a manner naked"), so heartened the Chickasaws that they easily beat off Vaudreuil's uninspired attack on their fortified towns.

From the close of King George's War in 1748 until the ending of the French and Indian War in 1763, the Cherokees held the center of the Indian stage, while the French-English rivalry shifted to the upper Ohio Valley. Most of the towns were pro-British, with French interests centering at Tellico, where Priber had resided and where his influence was still strong. Amascossite, the head chief, was apparently a fairly complete nonentity, the real authority resting in the chief of the Upper division, whose Indian name was Connecorte and whom the British in subtle allusion to his lameness called Old Hop. The chief warrior was Oconostota, while Attakullaculla had been a power in the tribe ever since his trip to England with Sir Alexander Cuming in 1730.

Hard beset by disease at home and enemies abroad, the Cherokees were planning to follow the Chickasaw example of concentration by removing the Lower towns to a new Overhill location. South Carolina, reluctant to have the Lower Cherokees out of reach, prevented this move by building for their protection Fort  p29 Prince George on the Keowee, where its protective capacity was hampered by its distance from the Overhills, who needed it. The envious Overhills carried their request for a fort with such persistency to Virginia and North Carolina that the former in August, 1756, in return for the promised Cherokee aid, built a fort on the north bank of the Little Tennessee near Echota, the Cherokee capital. Never named and never garrisoned during its brief existence, it was called the Virginia Fort.⁠23 From South Carolina, which had no need of Indian assistance, the Upper Cherokees could obtain a fort only by a land cession (1755), which, since it was necessarily taken exclusively from the Lower Cherokee country, probably did not promote intertribal harmony. The South Carolina fort finished in March, 1767, at the junction of the Little Tennessee and Tellico rivers was named Fort Loudon in honor of the British commander in chief.⁠24

Despite, or because of, these forts, Cherokee-English relations steadily grew worse, owing to the misconduct of the traders, mistreatment of Cherokee auxiliaries, and French intrigue. The Cherokees, from long contact with the Carolina traders, were well versed in such commercial rudiments as unbalanced steelyards and variable yardsticks but were entirely unfamiliar with the higher forms of chicanery practiced by the Virginians. The consequent criticism of their professional ethics aroused the wrath of the Virginians, who proceeded to assert their integrity by the simple and direct method of chastising the critics, including the "Emperor." Such time as they had free from commerce and brawling, the traders seem to have devoted liberally to drunkenness, arson, grand larceny, and the ravishing of Indian women on a scale hitherto unknown to Cherokee society. The embarrassment of the Cherokees caused by the manifestations of the high spirits of the traders was increased by the proneness of the Virginia frontiersmen to massacre Cherokee auxiliaries returning from assisting them on expeditions against the French. Such treatment the Cherokees always resented, generally reciprocated, and occasionally avenged before it occurred.

 p30  In this atmosphere French propaganda found ideal working conditions. Lantagnac, who had once lived among the Cherokees in the guise of a Carolina trader, directed from Fort Toulouse an intrigue for the execution of which he depended on Outacite of Tellico and Great Mortar chief of the Upper Creek Oxchai town.⁠25 In March, 1757, Lantagnac sent to Outacite two hundred pack-horse loads of presents, presumably designed to inculcate in the Cherokees a spirit of hospitality toward a proposed French fort on the Hiwassee for the protection of the Cherokees against their British oppressors. Since their oppressor anticipated this provision for Cherokee comfort by building the Virginia Fort and Fort Loudon, Lantagnac could only spread reports, readily believed by the exasperated Cherokees, that the British forts were placed not for the security but for the enslavement of the tribe. As a result of a personally conducted evangelical campaign by Great Mortar among the Cherokees in 1759, Moytoy, chief of Tellico, defying both the tribal chief warrior and his division chief, went on the warpath, from which he presently returned with twenty-two scalps that he had detached from the heads of certain Carolinians on the Yadkin River. To Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina this accomplishment seemed to be so considerably in excess of routine Cherokee mayhem as to threaten their peaceful relations with the British and to necessitate an invasion from South Carolina in order to renew the ancient ties. A placating Cherokee delegation, including Oconostota, was refused a hearing by the irate governor, ordered home, and, presumably in order to facilitate its return, imprisoned at Fort Prince George. This fortress became the terminal of Lyttleton's punitive expedition because smallpox invaded his camp, whereupon his army rapidly and informally disintegrated. Before returning to Charleston to receive the plaudits of his people, Lyttleton demanded from Attakullaculla, as a compensation for his good will in abandoning the campaign, that the Cherokees surrender twenty-four of their number to be executed. Until this was done, the imprisoned delegates were to stay in prison, although they were to enjoy the more elevated social status of hostages.

 p31  Any chance peace-loving Attakullaculla may have had of influencing the Cherokees to accept these unpalatable terms was negatived by the death in January, 1760, of the imperious Old Hop, whose passing removed the one Cherokee force inclined and able to restrain them. His successor, Standing Turkey, was unable to dominate the tribe; and Oconostota, released from prison but burning with resentment, on February 15 invested Fort Prince George, ambushing some of the garrison and indirectly contributing to the massacre of the hostages, who had, during the firing, committed the error of shouting encouragement to the assaulting Cherokees. Solidarity restored by the fate of the hostages, the three Cherokee divisions, audibly aided by a Creek contingent under Great Mortar, invested Fort Loudon.

Officially the Creeks maintain a neutrality owing, in some measure at least, to the recently appointed superintendent of Southern Indians, Edmund Atkins, who in the spring of 1759 had come among them accompanied, from pride or precaution, by an imposing force. From the Creeks, with an additional guard, he had gone on to the Choctaws, where on July 18 he made a treaty of trade and friendship with those whose loyalty to the French had not survived the war-caused dearth of supplies. In a conference at Cusseta on his return, the Creeks in October reaffirmed their devotion to peace. One result of Atkins' tour among the Creeks was the hasty departure of Chartier's Shawnees, who set out northward in evident anticipation of chastisement long overdue. Reoccupying their old village sites at French Lick, they were promptly discovered, attacked, and driven into Kentucky by the watchful Chickasaws.⁠26

Neither Prince George nor Loudon was endangered by the bucolic siege tactics of the Cherokees. But Loudon, unable to be reached by a relieving force, as Prince George had been, in August, 1760, preferred surrender to starvation. The subsequent massacre of the retiring garrison developed, perhaps, from a resisted attempt to take hostages and certainly was neither designed nor approved by Oconostota or Standing Turkey. These two chiefs were now thinking only of peace, realizing that the French  p32 could not and the Creeks would not aid them, that Iroquois and Chickasaws were at their throats, that their Middle and Lower towns had been destroyed, and that they were helpless without British supplies. One would like to think that the readiness with which South Carolina met their peace overtures sprang from an uneasy conscience; the war ended in a peace without reprisals.⁠27

Of the Southern Indians only the devoted Chickasaws could rejoice over the outcome of the French and Indian War. The Cherokees had lost five thousand of their people, including half their warriors, and faced the continuing resentment of Iroquois and Chickasaws even after their British peace. The Upper Creeks had gone so far in aiding the Cherokees that they had good reason to expect British reprisals; the Alabamas, in fact, in 1763 removed their towns to the Tombigbee valley.⁠28 The Choctaw allies of the fallen French could have presentiments only of evil. Neither the Creeks nor the Cherokees could draw comfort from the royal proclamation of 1763 that left much of their land within the line, nor the Choctaws, from the shifting of the western Florida line northward to 32 degrees, 30 minutes the following year. The substitution of imperial for colonial control of Indian affairs promised a greater supply of trade goods, a better regulation of trade, and perhaps a cessation of tribal wars. The Indians perhaps did not yet realize that they could not have British commerce without British control and that they could gain security only by surrendering sovereignty.

In November, 1763, the Southern tribes liquidated the war in a peace conference at Augusta with the governors of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and the new superintendent, John Stuart. At this conference the Creeks, mostly from the Lower Towns, ceded to the British their lands east of a line beginning on the lower Savannah and running obliquely across the Ogeechee  p33 to the Altamaha.⁠29 Following this conference the Lower Creeks preserved an appearance of friendliness that was not wholly pretense. But the Great Mortar among the Upper Creeks and the Choctaw head chief, the aged Alibamo Mingo, were openly encouraging their people to murder Englishmen, in which endeavor they were meeting with a fair measure of success. Even if these chiefs were not in communication with Pontiac, Superintendent Stuart had the astuteness to realize the danger of the situation and the prudence to mollify the Indians. Isolating the malcontents by confirming the ancient Chickasaw alliance and forging a new alliance with the Cherokees, he summoned the Creeks and Choctaws and, as a precautionary measure, invited the Chickasaws to meet him in the spring of 1765. In a March conference at Mobile, he greeted the Chickasaws as allies and received the Choctaws as erring, penitent, and forgiven children.⁠30 Peace was confirmed, trade restored, and, after some plain hints from Stuart, the Choctaws made a cession of their West Florida lands for twelve leagues back from the coast as well as a small tract north and west of Mobile Bay. Both tribes agreed to furnish escorts for Farmer's expedition up the Mississippi to the Illinois country. In May at Pensacola, Stuart conferred with the Creeks led by the Great Mortar and Emistesigo, who had resolved their rivalry in a compromise by which the latter attained his policy and the former secured his position. The Great Mortar, styling himself "king of the Creeks," made peace, accepted a British medal, and ceded a small tract around the Bay.⁠31 The Choctaws and Creeks compensated themselves for their British peace by starting a war with each other in 1766.

 p34  After the Choctaws and Creeks had been success­fully induced to the pax Britannica, the Cherokees, owing to their current indulgence in the sport of murdering trespassers on their unceded land east of the line, demanded the attention of the busy superintendent. Stuart's suggestion that if they would cede the land, the trespassers would no longer be trespassing impressed the Cherokees as being so reasonable that in October they made the cession and restored the broken peace.⁠32 Cherokee sensibilities were not appreciably damaged either by this cession or by the arrangement with North Carolina the following year for a new line running from the northern boundary of South Carolina to Chiswell's mine in Virginia. But they were so irked by the illogical continuance of Iroquois raids that in March, 1768, they sent Oconostota and Attakullaculla to New York, where, with the reluctant assistance of Superintendent Johnson, they finally ended what was probably the most prolonged family quarrel in Indian history.⁠33

From 1768 to 1775 the history of the Southern Indians except that of the Chickasaws is little more than a record of misfortune. In 1768 the control of trade was returned to the colonies and the royal commissaries were withdrawn temporarily from the tribes.⁠34 North Carolina and Virginia were trespassing on Cherokee land and northeastern Tennessee and even building a fort on the Watauga, the Creek-Choctaw war widened with the intervention, perhaps at British suggestion, of the Chickasaws in favor of the Choctaws; and the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix celebrated the recent family reconciliation by ceding to Superintendent Johnson all the Cherokee land north of the Tennessee. The Cherokees, sufficiently acquainted with frontier psychology and British irresolution to realize that the land was, although illegally, lost, disregarded Shawnee importunities to re-establish joint owner­ship by war and proceeded to salvage what they could by selling it themselves. Fortunately their claim to the land had been confirmed by Stuart at Hard Labor in 1768, upon the completion of the Cherokee boundary from Chiswell's mine to the mouth of the Kanawha.  p35 At Lochaber in 1770, they ceded to Superintendent Stuart the part of the land ceded by the Iroquois to Superintendent Johnson that lay east of a line from the mouth of the Kanawha to the vicinity of Long Island in the Holston. This grant was enormously enlarged the next year when the Virginia surveyor, John Donelson, at Cherokee suggestion (so he reported), ran its western boundary not to the mouth of the Kanawha but to the mouth of the "Louisa," which Virginia later identified as the Kentucky.⁠35 Not only did the Cherokees acquiesce in this action, but they followed it most amazingly in 1775 with a cession at Sycamore Shoals on the Holston to Richard Henderson and his partners of the Transylvania Company of all their remaining land between the Ohio and the Cumberland-Tennessee divide.⁠36 Neither of these cessions, by which the Cherokees alienated the greater part of their domain, was made under British pressure, although it is legitimate to suspect local bribery: the Donelson extension was made without Stuart's knowledge and the Sycamore Shoals cession denounced by him as contrary to the proclamation of 1763 and to previous treaties.

Had the swift approach of the American Revolution not prevented, Stuart might have been able the nullify the Sycamore Shoals cession as he had previously nullified certain private cessions of the Cherokees and Creeks. Partly as a result of high-pressure salesman­ship by the traders, more numerous and more competitive after the abolition in 1768 of the trade regulations, and partly because the Creek-Choctaw war and other restrictions made it impossible for the Indians to gather exports sufficient to balance imports, both the Cherokees and the Creeks had fallen deeply in debt to the traders among them. In 1771, at the suggestion of the traders, the Cherokees liquidated their debt by ceding to them a tract of land on the upper Savannah, including in it a considerable territory claimed by the Creeks; the latter promptly retaliated by paying their own debts with a cession of Cherokee  p36 territory. When Stuart refused to recognize either of these private cessions, he was directed to take a joint cession from the two tribes and himself to compensate the traders. This he did at Augusta in May, 1773, with a "new purchase" of land between the Savannah and Ogeechee extending from Little Creek on the south to beyond the Broad on the north.⁠37

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Verner W. Crane, "The Origin of the Name of the Creek Indians," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. V, 339‑42.

2 The rapid advance of the Carolina traders through the Creek and Chickasaw country is described by Verner W. Crane in The Southern Frontier, 1670‑1732. The Cherokees had been visited by the Virginians, Arthur and Needham, in 1673, and after the obstructing Occaneechee had been removed by Nathaniel Bacon in 1676, Virginia traders had been reaching the Cherokee towns over the Occaneechee Path; this trading path was long and hazardous, and the trade, therefore, intermittent. Both trade and road are well described by Neil Franklin, "Virginia and the Cherokee Indian Trade, 1673‑1752," East Tennessee Historical Society Publications, Vol. IV, 3‑21.

3 Peter J. Hamilton, Colonial Mobile, 43.

4 Verner W. Crane, "The Southern Frontier in Queen Anne's War," American Historical Review, Vol. XXIV, 379‑95, Swanton, Early Creek Indians, 121‑23. Dunbar Rowland and Albert G. Sanders, eds., Mississippi Provincial Archives, French Dominion, III, 19‑22 (hereafter cited as Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion).

5 Crane, "The Southern Frontier in Queen Anne's War," loc. cit.; Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion, I, 156‑57; III, 34, 183.

6 Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion, I, 157‑58; III, 187; Crane, The Southern Frontier, 179‑81; Milling, op. cit., 148‑50. When Bienville learned that the Creeks were killing the traders, he sent a French mission to them "to get out of their hands the Englishmen whom they had not yet killed." Chichacha Oulacta was apparently the first head chief the Choctaws ever had.

7 Crane, in The Southern Frontier, 254, says that the Yemassee War promoted a further amalgamation into Creek confederation; Swanton in Early Creek Indians, 257, gives reasons for believing that the confederation existed in the time of DeSoto. The Hitchitees and Euchees spoke languages unintelligible to the Muscogees. The Alabamas took practically no part in the confederation councils.

8 The fort, officially christened Fort Toulouse but commonly called the Alabama Fort, was on the Tallapoosa near its junction with the Coosa. It became the center of French influence and French trade but it is not apparent from the records that it served to influence Creek policy. Too far from Mobile to be effectively supported, its garrison was, in effect, hostages held by the Alabama division of the Creeks.

9 The Carolina experiment with the factory system is described in Crane, The Southern Frontier, 193‑99.

10 Samuel Cole Williams, Dawn of Tennessee Valley and Tennessee History, 75‑78. The Shawnees seem to have fortified at least one of their Cumberland towns. From a French trading post there the location was generally known as French Lick. The final blow in the expulsion of the Shawnees was given apparently by the Chickasaws alone.

11 Milling, op. cit., 273‑74. It has been conjectured that this name is a form of Outacite, "man killer." At this time Chorite Haygi was chief of the Lower towns, and Caesar of the Middle towns.

12 Crane, The Southern Frontier, 269‑70.

13 Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion, III, 343.

14 John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, B. A. E. Bulletin No. 43, 217‑47, gives a detailed description of this war with copious quotations from the sources. The official French accounts make up the bulk of the first 136 pages of the Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion, I.

15 For the Chickasaw fortifications see Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion, I, 307‑308.

16 The Journal of Sir Alexander Cuming is given in S. C. Williams, ed., Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 1540‑1800, 128ff.

17 The official French reports of this campaign are in Miss. Prov. Ar., French Dominion, III, 297‑332.

18 Ibid., III, 419‑69.

19 Williams, Dawn of Tennessee Valley and Tennessee History, 101‑13.

20 Williams, Adair's History, 231‑34.

21 Ibid., 345ff. The Choctaw eastern division wanted peace and English trade; the backwoods western division was thoroughly under French influence.

22 Ibid., 4, note.

23 Williams, Dawn of Tennessee Valley and Tennessee History, 171‑83.

24 Ibid., 184‑95.

25 Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 177ff.

26 Swanton, Early Creek Indians, 416.

27 Thirty men and women were killed in the massacre at Fort Loudon, and many wounded died later. In the first fury there seems to have been considerable mistreatment of prisoners but later they were treated kindly and many of them continued to live among the Cherokees after peace was made.

28 Williams, Adair's History, 267. Homesickness overcame these refugee Alabamas and after the Upper Creeks made peace with the British, they moved back to their old homes.

29 J. R. Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier, 176‑91.

30 Stuart's address to the Chickasaws has the ring of deep sincerity: "You generous friends of the Chickasaw nation, who have so long adhered to the interests of the English, whom neither dangers could startle nor promises seduce from our interest. I hope there is little more necessary with you than to renew our ancient alliance, which as it has continued for many ages to the mutual advantage of both nations, so I hope it will continue until this earth is dissolved and the great day of Judgment shall come when God will pronounce on the actions of men."

31 The official records of these two conferences are in Mississippi Provincial Archives, English Dominion, edited by Dunbar Rowland, I, 188‑255. At the March meeting the Choctaws were led by Alibamo Mingo, and the Chickasaws by Opoia Mataha, later known as Piomingo, their war chief.

32 Alden, op. cit., 215‑19.

33 Ibid., 222‑24.

34 Helen Louise Shaw, British Administration of the Southern Indians, 1756‑1783, 175‑76; Alden, op. cit., 260‑61.

35 The most militant, if not the most convincing, argument for the Kentucky is by Alden in op. cit., 283ff. and 344‑50. Dr. Thomas Walker on his exploration of 1750 had given the name Louisa to a branch of the Big Sandy.

36 The Sycamore Shoals sale is discussed most fully by W. S. Lester, The Transylvania Company, 28‑47.

37 Alden, op. cit., 294‑305.

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