mail: Bill Thayer	Help	Up	Home
previous: Chapter 5 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 7

 p123  VI
Bowles

To any reflecting mind the delay of the Spaniards in delivering their fortified posts north of 31 degrees might well appear to be owing to their fear of a British (or American) attack down the Mississippi rather than to a national talent for procrastination or to a local reluctance to abandon territory with such great effort won. Nor is it necessary, or even possible, to consider the Indian opposition to the running of the dividing line a result of Spanish encouragement or Spanish perfidy. The basis of this opposition was not regret for the withdrawal of the Spaniards nor grief over the prospective loss of territorial unity. It arose from an unreasoning fear that, in some way they did not understand, the running of the line would be a prelude to the loss of their lands and of their independence. It was inevitable that this fear should be chiefly a fear of the United States, where the government had thrice since 1795 solicited land cessions, where the land speculators continually threatened, and where the frontiersmen unceasingly encroached. In July, 1798, a council of Chickasaws and Creeks meeting at Tuckabatchee to confirm peace had made recommendations that henceforth no Indian land be alienated unless the head chiefs of all four nations were present and consenting.⁠1 The experience of the Cherokees at Tellico the following September showed that intertribal agreements were as impotent as tribal determination to prevent spoliation.  p124 Among the Chickasaws and Cherokees, because of distance or despair, opposition to the line found no expression; among the Choctaws it was so feeble as to be crushed by correspondence.⁠2 Only among the Creeks did it result in open hostility.

It can hardly be doubted that the dividing line served the Creeks in great measure merely as an occasion for a display of an already well-developed anti-Americanism: what the Americans favored, certain Creeks felt bound to oppose. The leader of the anti-American faction was the Tame King of Tallassie, in whose attitude was reflected a still unassuaged and carefully nurtured resentment over the Shoulderbone incident of ten years before and also a violent and sincere antipathy to the civilizing program Hawkins was attempting to put into effect among the Creeks.

When Hawkins had come among the Creeks in 1797, his conventional English sensibilities were outraged by the Creek working combination of political anarchy and economic communism. With the typical American inability to tolerate nonconformity, he had set to work at once to refashion the Creeks in the American image by promoting a stronger governing authority and by encouraging the hitherto undeveloped idea of private property. He had strengthened the authority of the town chief, systematized the sessions and procedure of the national council, and converted the head chief into a "Speaker" of the council. By his popularity among the Creek women he had induced some of them to take up spinning and weaving. He had succeeded in having some of the land fenced, had introduced the plow into an extremely primitive agriculture, and had encouraged the raising of cattle and hogs. He wished to have the tribal lands placed under town owner­ship, although he opposed individual owner­ship because, Creek nature being what it was, it would make the land too easily alienated. All these things the principal temporary agent considered good, because not only would it recreate the Creeks in the American pattern, but would also, by instilling order, promoting peace, and increasing agriculture, enable the Creeks to maintain themselves on a more restricted domain and thus to have surplus acres for cession to a benign and fostering American government.

 p125  His political reforms appealed to the chiefs, his economic reforms to the women, in whom by Creek custom rested the owner­ship of all products of home and field. The rank and file of the Creek men had no liking for the political new order and were deeply opposed to the economic reforms, which, in addition to violating Creek custom, would tend to excite in the women an even greater degree of insubordination than they ordinarily displayed. To the agent's exhortations to raise cattle and hogs, the Creek masculine mind responded more cheerfully, since both, as species of game, were under control of the men and had the added attractiveness of not requiring any great output of manual exertion. But on the other aspects of the reforms, the Creeks were divided between the old communist-conservatives and the new capitalist-progressives. The rift between the two was destined to increase until it brought the nation to the very verge of destruction.

The commissioners for running the line encountered no Indian opposition as long as they operated in the domain of the poverty-stricken and apathetic Choctaws, but when they reached the Tombigbee, where the Creek territorial claims began, the pressure of accumulated warnings caused Ellicott, the American commissioner, to send for Hawkins. In the ensuing conference, to which the Creek chiefs came, near the confluence of the Escambia and Conecuh rivers, the Creeks hesitantly agreed to furnish the commissioners the escort of two chiefs and twenty warriors that they had promised at Colerain. However, the escort would guard them only to the Chattahoochee; beyond that river was the country of the Seminoles, with whom the commissioners would have to deal as best they could.⁠3 The significance of this act was impaired by absence of the Tame King and his followers, who had boycotted the conference and gone, with or without an invitation, to Pensacola to confer with Governor Folch.

When Hawkins, unexpectedly appearing, surprised the assembly, the unembarrassed Governor, with consummate courtesy, perhaps not untainted by guile, consigned the Indians, as residents  p126 of the United States, to him to be dealt with and, incidentally, entertained. Hawkins addressed them with his customary vigor, but apparently not with his customary suavity, upbraiding them for their hostile attitude, and declared that the United States was determined to run the line even if it cost the lives of a thousand men. Unimpressed by these statistics, the Tame King, after receiving the few gifts Hawkins had been able to improvise, departed to prepare impediments for the surveyors, but held his warriors in check for twenty days while he sent Methogley, the second chief of Miccosukee, with a protest to Seagrove, in whom the disgruntled Creeks had come to have great confidence since his dismissal by the United States.

Methogley, claiming to be the spokesman not only for the Seminoles, but also for all four nations, told Seagrove of the alleged misconduct of Hawkins among the Creeks, of his threatening speech at Pensacola, and of a warning given him (Methogley) by a Spaniard at St. Marks that the Spaniards and the Americans had agreed to divide the Indian land between them as a preliminary to enslaving the Indians. His closing assertion that the Indians he represented were determined to prevent the running of the line, even if in so doing they had to fight both Spain and the United States, was probably made merely to create an impression of Indian impartiality, since Spain's zeal for running the line had never visibly risen above the level of resignation. In his reply, Seagrove refrained from comment on the indictment against Hawkins (of which he undoubtedly approved), reminded Methogley of the Creek promise at Colerain to protect the surveyors, and ridiculed their fear of the loss of land and liberty.⁠4

The Creeks and Seminoles who dogged the surveyors from the Escambia to the Chattahoochee limited their hostility to stealing, but at the Chattahoochee they were assembled in such large numbers as to leave no doubt that here they meant to halt the line. When Ellicott, who had gone by sea and up the Apalachicola, joined the surveyors on the Chattahoochee, he was met by Timothy  p127 Barnard, whom Hawkins had sent down to parley with the malcontents. In the ensuing conference the Indians took such little pains to conceal the hypocrisy with which they protested their peaceful intentions that Ellicott became alarmed and on the advice of James Burgess, a then friendly half-blood, again sent for Hawkins. The principal temporary agent, either from excessive optimism or inadequate knowledge, judged that the line-running could continue without trouble, and the Creek escort declared itself willing to go on. But when Ellicott dropped down to the mouth of the Flint, the Indians began to advance on his camp, stealing his horses, sabotaging his boat, and firing sporadically at the surveyors. Judging from these manifestations of disapproval that further progress was impossible, Ellicott abandoned the survey, dismissed his escort, and started on his patched-up boat down the Apalachicola to go by sea to the St. Marys, at the headwaters of which the line was to terminate. At the mouth of the Apalachicola on St. George's Island, he found William Augustus Bowles, who had been shipwrecked there as he was coming into Florida on his final intervention in the affairs of the Southern Indians.⁠5

Bowles had come to Florida with the intention of setting up an Indian state which would aid the British by harassing the Spaniards and would be assisted by the British with such supplies as would enable it to maintain itself. Bowles was, however primarily a Creek patriot to whom a war with Spain was merely the necessary price he must pay for British support in establishing his Indian state. Consequently, his first concern after leaving the island of his shipwreck was to call the Creeks and Seminoles to a conference at Wekiwa, where he had established his headquarters on the Apalachicola, and, with their consent and approval to proclaim the state of Muscogee with himself as its director general. He thus on October 26, 1799, reassumed the title which his partisans had given him on October 22, 1791.⁠6 To his supporting Indians he announced that there would be no more Indian lands  p128 ceded and no dividing line run: the latter he would prevent by writing personal letters to the King and President. The favor he gained by this announcement was increased by his promise to bring in British goods by Christmas.⁠7

The Director General and his supreme council did not specify the boundaries of the state of Muscogee, but no one conversant with the previous activities of Bowles can believe that he meant to exclude either the Upper or Lower Creeks. His decree of October 31, 1799, ordering out of Muscogee by November 8 all commissioned agents of Spain and the United States indicates that he meant to include them, and his later statement that only his innate generosity prevented him from having Hawkins assassinated carries the same suggestion.⁠8 For the time being he limited his activities to Florida, since it was only for operations in Spanish territory that he could expect British support. But the decree of October 25, 1799, opening to trade the ports of Apalachicola and Ochlocknee, certainly affected Creeks as well as Seminoles, as did that of November 26 offering land to white settlers in Florida east of the Apalachicola.

Among the Creeks, the Tame King promptly declared himself an adherent of Bowles, judging correctly that from his past record and present program he would be a power­ful ally in solidifying Indian sentiment against Hawkins and the United States. Many of the Lower Creeks who in 1791 had supported Bowles, even against McGillivray, now welcomed him back. Against this increasing tide of discontent, the sorely tried agent acted promptly, although perhaps wisely nor too well. In a meeting of the Creek national council at Tuckabatchee in November, 1799, he denounced Bowles and demanded that the council go on record as opposing him. This the complaisant council did the next day in a formal address by Mad Dog, asserting that Bowles had never been a Creek chief and that the Creeks would have killed him in 1792 if he had not left the country. Mad Dog condemned the selling of tribal land by Bowles to white settlers and rejected his  p129 promise of trade, saying that the Creeks wanted trade only from Panton.⁠9

On the advice of Hawkins the council somewhat pointedly implemented its anti-Bowles declaration by organizing the Upper Creek towns into nine military groups, each under the direction of a warrior in sympathy with Hawkins and the council.⁠10 The Lower Creek towns were so strongly in favor of Bowles that the council made no effort to organize or control sentiment among them. Hawkins also insisted that the Tame King should be publicly whipped by the Creek authorities as a punishment for his action on the Flint in coercing the surveyors to abandon the line after the nation had consented to have it run. The council, submissive as it was, was much opposed to an action so unprecedented in Creek history and so in violation of Creek custom. It was only on Hawkins' angry insistence that they finally agreed to it, and then only on his assumption of all responsibility for the results. Mad Dog himself led the seventy-two warriors who seized the old king and three of his associates, bound, and publicly flogged them.⁠11 The humiliation, however pleasant to Hawkins, only increased the recalcitrance of the Tame King and added to the number of his adherents. It is evident, too, that some of the chiefs, including Mad Dog, in shame for their action in mishandling a Creek (a thing McGillivray himself never presumed to do), began to compare their present subservience with their former status when they stood with McGillivray.

The Creek followers of the Tame King, although they had no cause for hostility toward Spain, continued their support of Bowles when on April 5, 1800, he declared a state of war existing between Spain and Muscogee, being induced thereto apparently not by his commitments to Great Britain, but by the action of Spain in capturing and burning his headquarters at Wekiwa (February 3). Unwilling to limit his military activities to proclamations,  p130 Bowles on April 9 invested the Spanish fort at St. Marks with a force of Seminoles and Creeks and on May 19 forced, or at least received, its surrender. In his accompanying seizure of Panton's store up the Wakulla, he acted perhaps more from economic than from military necessity, for although Panton was not a belligerent, Bowles' line of supply from the Bahamas was too precarious to be dependable. From this time on, the Spanish officials in Florida bombarded the Creek council with exhortations to restrain the warring Indians, while Panton began to threaten the suspension of trade unless reparation were made for his pecuniary losses.⁠12

Governor Folch put a price of $4,500 on Bowles' head, but as Hawkins, in pride or chagrin, observed, no Indian attempted to win the reward. Whether Bowles' immunity to assassination was due to the primitive state of the Indian culture, his own popularity, or the alertness of his sixty-man bodyguard it is impossible to say. After the capture of Wekiwa, he had removed his headquarters to Miccosukee, and here he continued to reside after the Spaniards recaptured St. Marks (June 23, 1800), sending his talks to the Creek towns by Perryman and Kinhijay. So exasperated was Hawkins by these tactics that in October, 1800, he goaded the chiefs of Cusseta and Coweta to send a talk (written by Hawkins) to Mad Dog demanding that he lead a Creek force to Miccosukee and take Bowles by force from the Seminoles. This demand Mad Dog refused, knowing that all the Lower Creek towns below Uchee had gone over to Bowles, and that the Upper Creek warriors would refuse to follow him into a sanguinary civil war.⁠13

It may be uncertain whether Bowles considered the Cherokees a part of his state of Muscogee, but undoubtedly his program was known to them, and, with the example of Creek success in  p131 halting the line, may have heartened them when in September, 1801, they were again asked for a land cession. The imperfect unity of the tribe, wrought by the murder of Old Tassel and the subsequent death of Dragging Canoe, was breaking on the issue of civilization versus the ancient ways, with the Upper Cherokees submissively, and even cheerfully, accepting the American program, while the Lower Cherokees rejected it all except the raising of livestock. Since the ideological differences among the Cherokees coincided with geographical divisions, they were even more virulent than among the Creeks. In 1801 the Lower Cherokees were making tentative moves toward the formal division of the tribe into two parts on the line of the Chilhowie Mountains, and some of them were advocating the removal of the Lower towns west of the Mississippi, where they would be beyond the bounds of the United States and out of reach of its dreaded civilization.⁠14

However divided otherwise, the Cherokees had a community of dissatisfactions. In addition to their common feeling of shame over the land cession of 1798, they all entertained a common antipathy to their agents and a common antagonism to the factory at Tellico. Dinsmoor, who was well liked by even the most sullen of the Cherokees, had been dismissed in March, 1799 by President Adams, who was out of sympathy with the program of civilizing the Indians and gravely doubted if it could be done. Dinsmoor's successor, Major Lewis, confined his activities among the Cherokees so exclusively to the women and his energies at Tellico so continually to the bottle that no Cherokees mourned when he was replaced in March, 1801, by Return Jonathan Meigs.⁠15 The Cherokees were inclined to be distrustful of Meigs because of his age and because he had other duties in addition to those of his agency. The Cherokee complaint against the factory was that it sold inferior goods at exorbitant prices. The replacement of Byers by J. W. Hooker, as factor, in March, 1801, however much of an improvement politically, did not remedy matters, for Hooker felt obliged to raise prices even above the 33⅓ per cent advance  p132 practiced by his predecessor. The high prices, resulting from the long haulage of goods from Philadelphia, enabled the South Carolina traders to undersell the factory. By 1801 the factory had debts to the amount of $6,515 owing to it, and it was Meigs' opinion that it could never operate except at a loss.⁠16

On June 4, 1801, President Jefferson appointed General Wilkinson, W. R. Davie, and Benjamin Hawkins commissioners to hold treaties with the four Southern tribes, beginning with the Cherokees, from whom they were instructed to secure a land cession and permission for roads through their territory to Georgia and Natchez.⁠17 The Cherokee chief, Glass, coming to Washington with a Cherokee delegation about a week later, heard of this project and laid down such an intense verbal barrage against it that the astonished President assured him it would not be pressed. The Secretary of War Dearborn at once wrote to the commissioners that in view of Glass's tirade they should "treat the subject [of land cessions] with great tenderness."⁠18

With a skepticism born of experience, Glass, upon his return, summoned a Cherokee council at Oostanaula in order to forewarn his people of possible tribulations in store. To this council, deliberating both Glass's report and the commissioners' summons to a conference, the Lower Cherokee chiefs, by accident or design, failed to receive an invitation, whereupon suspecting that the Upper Cherokees were secretly planning again to betray the nation as they had allegedly done in 1798, they secured an invitation from Hawkins to attend the treaty making. As a matter of fact, the Oostanaula council, driven by indignation to an unwanted display of independence, resolved not to attend the conference and wrote the commissioners a letter so bellicose that it frightened the authors themselves. Upon reflection, they substituted one which accepted a conference but insisted that it be held at Oostanaula  p133 instead of at Southwest Point, as the commissioners had proposed. After much altercation, the commissioners fixed the conference by ultimatum, at Southwest Point, but apparently in winning this contest of wills they exhausted their resolution and quietly acquiesced when Doublehead, speaking for the nation, refused, with pointed references to speculators in high places, both land and roads. Little Turkey, fearing the aftermath of this tribal non-co‑operation, did not attend the conference but remained at Oostanaula, from which place he summoned the delegates of the four tribes to meet on September 20 (the beginning of the Cherokee fall festival) at Willstown in order to concert measures for preserving their land.⁠19

The Chickasaws were more united and even more resolute than the Cherokees against a land cession. The schism that had so long paralyzed them was now ended, and the tribe was living placidly under the nominal rule of Tinebe (who the Americans called Chinnimbi or Chamby). The civilization program, which had so divided the Creeks and Cherokees, had not yet reached the Chickasaws, nor were there among them any discernible symptoms of unrest that could be traced to the influence of Bowles. The prevalent movement away from their fortified villages resulted rather from the ending of the Creek war than, as Hawkins thought, from a desire for farming. Their dislike for their new agent, Samuel Mitchell, who had moved up to them from the Choctaws early in 1801, led them rather to a disregard of his advice than to opposition to his measures. Co‑operation with the United States was now a tribal policy endorsed by the king, Ugula Yacabe, the three Colberts, and the other leading chiefs, but it stopped short of a land cession. Instead, they demanded that the commissioners, when they arrived at Chickasaw Bluffs, October 15, confirm the boundaries guaranteed them by Washington in 1794. These boundaries the commissioners, having already abandoned any idea they may have had of a land cession, were quite  p134 willing to confirm since the Chickasaw lands thus defined extended so far to the east as to cover the route of the proposed Nashville-Natchez road and thus rendered it unnecessary to go through Cherokee territory at all. The request for the road was granted after only the minimum delay required by tribal etiquette, but the request for houses of entertainment along the road was warily refused. The signatures of seventeen chiefs, including the king and two Colberts, attested both the friendliness and the unity of the tribe. Their complaisance in signing the treaty was rewarded by a gift of merchandise valued at $1,695, in addition to two hundred gallons of whiskey and one thousand pounds of tobacco.⁠20

Although the hunting season had begun and the Six Towns absented themselves, the Choctaw conference which began at Fort Adams, December 12, 1801, was largely attended by the Choctaws in the expectation of securing for the duration of the meeting a respite from the famine now continually besetting them. The Choctaws had a new agent in the person of John McKee, who had replaced Samuel Mitchell in 1799.⁠21 But no agent could do much toward alleviating the Choctaw distress which stemmed from the imminent exhaustion of their inadequate hunting grounds. Unable to secure peltry sufficient to exchange for needed, or at least customary, supplies, the tribe was existing precariously on goods furnished on credit by Panton, who was beginning to display more interest in collecting old debts than in contracting new. Such central government as the tribe had possessed had virtually disappeared, and each of the three divisions was going its own independent way. Hungry and submissive, the Choctaws readily agreed to the commissioners' request for the Natchez road through their territory and a delimitation of their Natchez cession to the British, to which, of course, first the Spaniards and now the Americans had fallen heir. After six days of  p135  conferring at United States' expense, they received a parting gift of merchandise to the value of $2,038 and a supply of tobacco; to Hawkins' astonishment they refused a gift of whiskey.⁠22

For the Creek conference the commissioners had been instructed not only to ask for a land cession but also to insist on getting it. The reason for the insistence was Jefferson's desire to placate Georgia into a cession of her western lands as the only practicable method of delivering a state-rights President from the embarrassment of administering the Mississippi Territory erected within the Georgia limits by his Federalist predecessor. The lands demanded of the Creeks were these: a tract between the Apalachee and the Tugalo, a tract between the Oconee and Ocmulgee, and the lands between the Altamaha and the St. Marys. In order to legitimize the position of some sixty families who had settled on the first of these contrary to law, the United States had contemplated its purchase from the Cherokees the preceding year, but had abandoned the plan in the face of Glass's tirade. Apparently considering the Cherokee refusal to sell as an evidence of Creek owner­ship, the United States now solicited it from the Creeks. The land south of the Altamaha — the Tallassie country — was the land allegedly ceded to Georgia at Galphinton but left in Creek hands by the treaties of New York and Colerain.

After the Choctaw meeting the commissioners went overland to the Creek country, where Hawkins found that in his absence Creek affairs had gone from bad to much worse. In May, 1802, Bowles had summoned the Tame King of Tallassie and Little Prince of Broken Arrow to join him in an attack on St. Marks, assuring them that he had two thousand troops and was expecting more from Providence. Excited by these fair prospects, the two set out for Florida with several hundred followers.⁠23 Attendance at the conference, therefore, which began at Fort Wilkinson on the Oconee, May 24, was limited practically to the Upper Creeks. Not only did most of the Lower towns boycott the conference in order to follow Bowles, but from Florida the "legal and constitutional  p136 head of Muscogee" on June 4 sent the commissioners a protest against the treaty making, denouncing it as illegal and fraudulent and declaring they would be bound by no treaty except one made at a place previously selected by the Creeks and agreed to by the four nations.⁠24

Before this protest was received or even written, Wilkinson had opened the conference in language which perhaps reflected his irritation over the theft of his baggage among the Creeks. By this time the Georgia Compact had been signed, but the commissioners apparently said nothing about it, perhaps judging that the feeble prospects for Creek co‑operation would not be strengthened by any publication of the pledge by the United States to extinguish all Indian land titles in Georgia. The commissioners made no demand for a cession of the Apalachee-Tugalo tract, the Creeks having forestalled it by the novel device of disclaiming owner­ship and having implemented their disclaimer by a boundary agreement with a Cherokee delegation on the treaty grounds. The other two tracts the commissioners asked to buy, so that the Creeks might have sufficient means to pay their debts and provide for the aged and infirm after the manner of the Americans. Unimpressed by this opportunity to balance their budget and at the same time to initiate a social welfare program, the Creeks refused both demands. The Tallassie country, they said, belonged to the Lower Creeks and could not be sold without the consent which they were not present to give. The readiness with which the Creeks gave this answer suggests that the Florida exodus of the Lower Creeks, while publicly denounced, was not wholly unapproved and had, perhaps, not been entirely unencouraged. They refused the land between the Oconee and Ocmulgee on the sentimental grounds that it was their ancestral home and for the material reason that it was their best hunting ground. After this interchange the Creek chiefs were eager to return home, where, as they slyly informed Hawkins, their assistance was needed in the agricultural operations he had sponsored. The commissioners, on the other hand, sought to procrastinate on the grounds that they were expecting Georgia delegates to put in their appearance.

 p137  The stalemate continued until June 12, when Hawkins addressed the Indians, detailing their outrages against Georgia, denouncing the Lower Creeks for their support of Bowles, and reminding them of the blessings brought to them by the United States. The agent's zeal had apparently not been diminished by the news he had just received that he had been demoted from virtual superintendent of all Southern Indians to merely agent of the Creeks.⁠25 Following this speech, the Creeks held a council, as a result of which they announced they would make a cession. In their official report the commissioners referred to this change of heart as a miracle, thereby relieving themselves of any necessity to explain how it was brought about. The "miracle," however, did not extend so far as to bring a cession of all the land requested, but only a narrow strip of the Tallassie land along the old border and less than one-half of the territory between the Oconee and Ocmulgee. For these two tracts the Creeks received a perpetual annuity of $300 for the tribe as a whole, a ten-year annuity of $1,000 for the governing chiefs, $10,000 worth of merchandise to be distributed, and $15,000 with which to pay their factory debts and the Georgian claims for damages done them since the treaty of Colerain.⁠26

At the close of the negotiations Mad Dog dictated to Hawkins a talk to be sent to the Seminoles demanding, in the name of thirty-two Creek towns, some Cherokee and Chickasaw, that they abandon Bowles and their war against Spain. This demand he proposed to send down by James Burgess, but on the insistence of a chief who distrusted Burgess, he named the chiefs of Tuskegee  p138 and Autossee to accompany him.⁠27 With this letter Mad Dog closed his career as leader of the Creeks, announcing to them that in the future Creek councils would be held at Acheaubofau, where the Foosehatchee Micco lived. According to Creek forms this was an abdication in favor of the Foosehatchee Micco, commonly called Opoie Micco. Mad Dog gave age as his reason for abdicating, but it can hardly be doubted that he was forced out by Hawkins, of whose program he was becoming increasingly doubtful and whose demands at Fort Wilkinson he had opposed. Mad Dog had been co‑operative, but, wearing the mantle of McGillivray, he had not quickly enough learned how to serve.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 490. This meeting was presided over by Mad Dog.

2 Andrew Ellicott, The Journal of Andrew Ellicott, 98.

3 Ibid., 206; Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," loc. cit., Vol. XXV, 162, Panton to Gayoso, May 12, 1799.

4 Methogley's talk, June 14, 1799, and Seagrove's reply the following day are given in No. 927 of the Ayer Collection; Methogley said that Hawkins had summoned him, Thomas Perryman, and Kinhijah, the first chief of Miccosukee, to escort the surveyors, but they had not gone.

5 Panton, Leslie and Company MSS, Greenslade Papers, Ferguson's Declaration, June 16, 1800.

6 Ayer Collection, No. 100, Bowles to –––––, October 31, 1799.

7 Georgia Department of Archives and History, Creek Indian Letters, pt. II, 584, Report of Emoutla Haujo, from Coweta Tallahassee, December 16, 1799.

8 Ibid., pt. II, 590, Bowles to Jackson, June 6, 1800; Corbitt and Lanning, "A Letter of Marque and Reprisal," loc. cit.

9 Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. XI, 33‑36, Talk by Efau Haujo at Tuckabatchee, November 25, 1799. Efau Haujo (Mad Dog) mentioned that Bowles had illegally secured a cession of land from the Seminole Potato King.

10 Hawkins, The Creek Country, 49.

11 Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 417‑19, Hawkins to the Secretary of War, May 8, 1802.

12 Spanish Transcripts, Library of Congress, Legajos 2372, p90, Burgess to Bowles, July 3, 1801; ibid., p100, Spanish Governor at New Orleans to Creeks, December 1, 1801, I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Hawkins to Dearborn, July 18, 1801.

In the conference at Willstown twelve nations were represented either by delegations or official messages — all of which were friendly to the United States (I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Meigs to Dearborn, October 4, 1801).

13 Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. XI, 36‑39, Daniel McGillivray to Panton, October 13, 1800.

14 Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 361‑63, 384‑86, Hawkins to Dearborn, August 10 and September 6, 1801.

15 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book A, 29, 37.

16 Indian Affairs, I, 654; I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Meigs to Dearborn, December 25, 1801. By the end of 1800, Tellico had received $55,066 worth of merchandise and had sold it all but $10,171 worth. It had taken in from the Indians $47,000 worth of fur and peltry. The debt of $6,575 was probably due mostly from the military and agency personnel.

17 Davie subsequently resigned and Andrew Pickens was named in his place.

18 Indian Affairs, I, 650, Dearborn to commissioners, July 3, 1801.

19 The details of this abortive conference are given in the Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 359‑86. For an account of Glass's conference with the Secretary of War, see I. O. R., War Department Letter Book A, 72‑83.

20 Indian Affairs, I, 652, Commissioners to Dearborn, October 27, 1801; Kappler, op. cit., II, 55‑56.

21 Rowland, Mississippi Territorial Archives, 289. Mitchell had incurred the animosity of Winthrop Sargent, governor of Mississippi Territory, who had stigmatized him "as either a knave or fool — and I believe the latter."

22 Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 410‑12, commissioners to Dearborn, December 18, 1801; Indian Affairs, I, 659‑63; Kappler, op. cit., II, 56‑57.

23 Spanish Transcripts, Legajos 2372, pp178, 183, Dureauzeaux to Folch, May 2 and May 8 1802.

24 Ibid., Legajos 2372, p415.

25 Although the Congressional act creating Mississippi Territory in 1798 had specified that the territorial governor should be ex-officio superintendent of Southern Indians, Hawkins had continued to exercise the authority of superintendent. The first governor, Sargent, had protested voluminously against this anomaly but without success. But Jefferson listened to the protests of Claiborne, and on February 23, 1802, Dearborn ordered him to exercise the authority to which his position entitled him. Henceforth the Choctaw and Chickasaw agents reported to Claiborne, the Cherokee and Creek agents directly to the Secretary of War (Rowland, Mississippi Territorial Archives, 13, 21, 32, 47, 108, 155, 289, 293; I. O. R., War Department Letter Book A, 166‑68).

26 The official report of the commissioners is given in Indian Affairs, I, 668‑81. The text of the treaty is in Kappler, op. cit., II, 58‑59. For a map of the land ceded see Royce, Indian Land Cessions, pt. II, plate CXXII.

27 Burgess living on the lower Flint had been a go‑between for the Creeks and Bowles (Spanish Transcripts, Legajos 2372, pp82‑90.

◂ previous						next ▸
Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		The Southern Indians	Native American History	History of the Americas	Home
			American & Military History
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility