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previous: Chapter 8 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 10

 p176  IX
The Creek War
1813‑1814

When in June, 1812, Alexander Neelly received notice that, because of the hostile disposition of the Indians, he was being superseded by James Robertson as Chickasaw agent, he must have experienced a feeling of profound astonishment.⁠1 Since the Virginia treaty of 1782 the Chickasaws had committed against the United States no hostile act graver than baying at the squatters on their lands. The three other agents were probably equally mystified, notwithstanding their long connection with the War Department, when shortly after the official opening of the War of 1812 they were instructed to be vigilant and keep the Indians quiet.⁠2 The most active alarmist could impute to the Choctaws no graver misconduct than the possession of Spanish neighbors, and when Meigs reported that the Cherokees were restless over the approach of a war in which they were not participants, he was probably attributing to them a state of mind peculiar to himself.⁠3

Among the Creeks, to be sure, there had been in the spring of 1812 a number of routine murders: a Thomas Meredith had been killed in March by some drunken Autossees (Atasis, Ottosies); William Lott in May by some Tallassies (as a by-product of robbery);  p177 and a family on Duck River massacred in June by the Hillaubees on a false report that the whites had killed an Indian woman. In every case the Creek council, on the demand of Hawkins, hunted down and killed the murderers: by August 24 they had executed six for murder and whipped seven for theft.⁠4 In addition to this obliging conduct, a council of the Lower Creeks in May had announced their determination to take no part in the approaching war, and had accepted quietly, if not cheerfully, the deduction of $900 from their annuity in payment for various damages inflicted.⁠5 Notwithstanding Hawkins' insistence that Creek affairs were normal, Governor Holmes of Mississippi Territory and Governor Willie Blount of Tennessee professed to the War Department their conviction that the Creeks were restless and hostile and that only an invading army could restore them to their proper serenity; the Governor of Georgia, also, as was the gubernatorial custom in that state, took a very gloomy view of Creek conduct.⁠6 The unanimous declaration of the Creek national council on October 30 for peace with the United States only confirmed the governors in their opinion of Creek duplicity.⁠7

The Creek war was, in its beginning at least, a civil war, having its cause neither in Tecumseh's visit in 1811 nor in British seductions in 1812 but in a long-gathering dissatisfaction with the civilization program instituted by Hawkins and officially countenanced by the tribal government. Although the tension between the two Creek factions had been measurably increased by the death penalties of 1812, all of which had been inflicted on members of the opposition, war between them became inevitable only after February, 1813. At that time a band of Creeks led by Little Warrior, returning from a visit to the Shawnees, were informed by some guileful or mistaken Chickasaws that a Creek-American war had begun, and promptly made their contribution to it by  p178 murdering seven families settled near the mouth of the Ohio.⁠8 Acting on garbled report from Robertson, Hawkins demanded that the murderers be punished, and the complaisant council voted the death penalty. In April, 1812, eight of the condemned men were killed by the warriors sent after them; all resisted arrest and all died fighting and defiant.⁠9

The opposition faction was in no mood to accept calmly these further executions of its members as a normal operation of the due process of law. While the example of the Northern Indians encouraged them to resist their subservient, and certainly unrepresentative, tribal government, the frenzied exhortations of the "prophets" among them incited them continuously to a war of revenge. Limiting their program to vengeance, they set themselves to the task of killing everyone concerned in the recent executions (including Big Warrior, McIntosh, and Hawkins), of destroying Tuckabatchee and Coweta, and of eliminating from the tribe all traces of the hated civilization which Hawkins had been fostering. By July, 1813, they had success­fully inaugurated their program by the killing of nine of the executioners, the burning of several villages friendly to Hawkins, and the slaughter of all cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, goats, and other evidences of civilization they could find.⁠10

The leaders in this reform movement were Menauway (Ogillio Heneha), chief of Okfuskee, Hopoie Tustanugga, a warrior of Tuskegee, Peter McQueen, Hossa Yaholo, and the Tame King of Tallassie, now bowed down with age but as virulent as in the time of Bowles; the heart and soul of it were the "prophets," of whom Josiah Francis was the chief. The order of the prophets was perhaps instituted by Seekabo (who had been living with Creeks since Tecumseh's visit), following the example set by  p179 Tecumseh's brother among the Shawnees. They claimed supernatural powers, including a command of lightning and earthquakes. To these handy possessions they added (so they claimed) an ability to convert dry ground into swamps, to divert the course of bullets, and to make magic rings which would bring death to everyone entering them. They practiced the same arts and acquired the same influence over the Creeks as the religious orators among their white neighbors. They prayed, exhorted, prophesied, and when the spirit moved them, danced the impassioned Dance of the Lakes, which the Shawnees had taught them. Such Creeks as could withstand their eloquence, or resist the contagion of their passion, were constrained by terror of their magical powers to accept their direction. The prophetic movement seems to have been inaugurated among the Creeks in December, 1812, and to have been confined, for the most part, to the Alabama towns, which were the most primitive and unprogressive of the Creek confederacy. The tribal councilors at first evaluated the prophets only as a source of amusement or an object of ridicule. In June, 1813, they sent a messenger to them with a derisive invitation to come to Tuckabatchee for a public exhibition of their magical powers. Derision changed to something like consternation when the prophets killed the messenger, swept up the Alabama River burning and murdering, and announced they were on their way to the destruction of Tuckabatchee. The surprised chiefs of Tuckabatchee at once called in all their people, summoned the neighboring towns to help, and, upon their refusal to oppose the prophets, sent Alexander Cornell, the deputy agent, to the Lower Creeks for assistance.⁠11

The revolting Creeks, in fact, having completed their program of private vengeance, were now inclined to carry out their plans for public retribution. But needing more arms and ammunition, the only products of civilization they were willing to retain, in July they sent Peter McQueen and Jim Boy (High Head Jim) with a force — 100 by Indian account, 350 according to Hawkins — to Pensacola to obtain them. While awaiting the return of this party, the revolutionists maintained a loose siege of Tuckabatchee,  p180 which, for lack of ammunition, they were unable to storm. Tuckabatchee itself was in need not only of ammunition but of food, and sent out lusty cries to the Lower Creeks for deliverance. The Lower Creeks showed no great enthusiasm for intervention, but finally the Cusseta Micco started a force of two hundred well-armed men to the relief of the beleaguered town. Apparently these warriors managed to enter Tuckabatchee without a fight, found the people there in great distress, took them away under guard, and by July 16 had them all safe at Cusseta, which now became the official "capital" of the nation. Hawkins had sent with the relieving force a letter of remonstrance to the Alabamas, and on their refusal to accept it tried to send a direct message but desisted from his efforts on the advice of the returning warriors.⁠12

Meanwhile, McQueen's party on its way to Pensacola plundered the house of James Cornell, a half-blood who, like the majority of the half-bloods, was in opposition to the prophets, severely beat a Negro slave and a white man, and carried off Cornell's wife to be sold as a slave at Pensacola. On their return with one hundred horses laden with ammunition, they were met on Burnt Corn Creek by Cornell with a considerable force of half-bloods and white men whom he had collected in the neighborhood. In the ensuing "battle" on July 27, McQueen drove off the half-bloods and white men. The latter admirably combined thrift and prudence by rightly retaining in their headlong flight that portion of the ammunition they had seized in their first attack.⁠13

Since by the time McQueen arrived in the Creek country Tuckabatchee had already fallen by evacuation, the chiefs sent out a call for an attack on Coweta, but while the broken days were running, the families of the warriors slain at Burnt Corn Creek forced a change of the objective to Fort Mims, where the hated half-bloods had congregated. Thirteen of the Upper Creek towns participated in this attack, while three others aided by a feint toward Coweta.⁠14 If the Indians in attacking Fort Mims meant  p181 only to punish the half-bloods, they either forgot their good intentions in the fury of battle or else exercised very poor powers of discrimination. The massacre there of some five hundred men, women, and children changed the character of the conflict from a civil war to a war (perhaps neither desired nor anticipated) against the United States.

As a matter of fact, the Creeks, had they considered themselves at war against the United States, might have justified their course as a response to the act of the United States in July, 1813, authorizing the governors of Georgia and Tennessee to raise fifteen hundred men each and move them against the Creeks "as circumstances may direct, either separately or together."⁠15 The circumstances directing this step were certainly not any advices from Hawkins, who still regarded the Creek conflict as a civil war, nor the appeals of Tuckabatchee in June for white help in exchange for a cession of their opponent's territory.⁠16 The United States acted in acceptance of representations from the governors of Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi Territory, who, with powers of diagnosis apparently sharpened by remoteness, alleged that Hawkins' talk about Creek divisions was a subterfuge and that the entire Creek Nation was united in a war against the United States; they advocated a war that would result in both private and public profits by the confiscation of the entire Creek territory and the subsequent seizure of all Spanish Florida. From intuition unassisted by evidence, they recognized the Creek troubles as originating in British machinations and encouraged by covert Spanish aid.⁠17

While the war, from the Indian (and therefore unhistorical) point of view, still remained a civil war, each of the Creek opponents  p182 had vainly sought assistance from the neighboring tribes, the government from them all, and the revolutionists from the Choctaws and Cherokees.⁠18 Both Choctaws and Cherokees were divided on the same lines as the Creeks, and any intervention in the affairs of their neighbor would possibly result in civil war at home. But when the United States entered the war, it became safe for these Cherokees and Choctaws under the influence of the United States to go boldly to the aid of their Creek brethren enjoying a similar distinction. Early in September the Cherokee national council declared for action following a talk (accompanied by a piece of tobacco decorated with colored beads) sent by Big Warrior from Coweta, where he was exercising in absentia his amputated authority. The Cherokee council was opposed to intervention but yielded to the threats of Ridge, who was acting from motives unknown.⁠19 Meigs, ever since the beginning of the War of 1812, had been urging an unresponsive War Department to recruit the Cherokees, at first against the British and finally against the Creeks, whom he, faithfully adhering to the views of his superiors, considered British partisans.⁠20

Whether because the wooing of Dinsmoor was less ardent or their own minds undetermined, the Choctaws showed even more restraint than did the Cherokees in espousing the cause of the United States. As late as August, 1813, Dinsmoor, evidently yet uninstructed, was inquiring of the War Department, apparently indifferent, if it wished to have Choctaw recruits, while Mushulatubbee was advising Governor Holmes that a faction of the Choctaws was disposed to join the Creek revolutionists.⁠21 The Governor  p183  suspected that Mushulatubbee's information was gained from personal member­ship in the faction itself. In the same month Brigadier General F. L. Claiborne, commanding the Mississippi militia and chafing under Flournoy's inability to detect a connection between the Creek uprising and the British war, sent a Major Ballinger into the Choctaw country to confer with Pushmataha. Until September 29, Pushmataha apparently continued to maintain a rigid control over his inclination to assist the United States, but on that date went to Gaines at St. Stephens and offered his services, explaining that he had just then heard of the Fort Mims massacre.

Since the agent was again absent, the factor accompanied the chief to Mobile (recently come into American possession) to see General Flournoy, commander of the southern district since the transfer of Wilkinson to the Canadian front. Flournoy, still unconvinced that the Creeks, or any part of them, were at war with the United States, followed an oral rejection with a written acceptance of his services and sent him, with Gaines and Colonel McGraw, back to the Choctaws to secure recruits. At the home of John Pitchlynn (on the Tombigbee near the mouth of the Octibbeha) they met the ubiquitous John McKee, whom Andrew Jackson, commanding the embattled Tennesseans, had sent down to promote a combined Choctaw and Chickasaw diversionary attack on a Creek village at the falls of the Black Warrior. Pitchlynn and McKee in the northern district enlisted six hundred Choctaws for the Black Warrior expedition, which on January 7, 1814, reached its objective, found the Creek village deserted, burned it, and returned home without casualties and without glory.⁠22 The doubtful participation of the Chickasaws in this useless enterprise constituted, apparently, their only contribution to the American cause during the war.

Gaines and Pushmataha held a conference in the southern district, where they harangued the assembled five thousand Choctaws (not including Mushulatubbee), and returned to St. Stephens  p184 with a declaration of war and a few recruits. Subsequently, Mushulatubbee hesitatingly brought in some warriors, and finally Chief Puskshenubbee with a few men came out of the West. All were, for the time being, immobilized at Mobile for lack of arms.⁠23

In the winter of 1812 the Creek revolutionists, generally called the Red Sticks, were menaced be forays from Georgia and Mississippi and an invasion from Tennessee. While the Georgia militia slowly mobilized and moved to the Chattahoochee, the Lower Creek towns remained for the most part inactive, constrained by courtesy as well as prudence from anticipating by any self-assertion the American aid they had solicited. Since their larder was sagging seriously under the accumulated gastronomic attacks of the refugees, they probably welcomed the defection of Yuchee which gave them an excuse for confiscating their crops. They kept their patrols out toward the Tallapoosa and prevented a Miccosukee force from joining the prophets, but otherwise stood on the defensive, reluctant to begin a struggle that, however resulting, would certainly leave the nation weak and helpless.⁠24 The Red Sticks in their headquarters at Autossee seemed content to await, rather than to launch, an attack. They were without ammunition, having practically exhausted what they had salvaged at Burnt Corn Creek and being unable to utilize the imaginary supplies which they were hypothetically receiving from supposed British and Spanish sources. The thoroughgoing destruction of such hated symbols of civilization as cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, and chickens, while doubtless contributing to their spiritual uplift, had seriously diminished their food supply. Lacking both food and arms, they retained only their fanaticism upon which to feed and fight.

The Georgia military under General Floyd reached the Flint  p185 agency on October 18, 1813, and after considerable delay marched on over the Federal Road into the Upper Creek country. The force was ill-disciplined, disinclined to accept from the Lower Creeks help that would have to be remembered in dictating terms of peace, and contemptuous of Hawkins, whose offer of maps, guides, and interpreters they disdain­fully rejected. Under such circumstances the 450 refugees and Lower Creeks who accompanied the expedition did so more as spectators than as combatants. Floyd halted on the Chattahoochee to build Fort Mitchell and then struggled on to Autossee, where the Red Sticks attacked him and inflicted such losses on him that, although he succeeded in burning the flimsy houses of Autossee and Tallassie and killing 100 warriors he was compelled to retreat to Fort Mitchell. When he again advanced in January, 1813, he was defeated on Caleebe Creek by Red Sticks, armed chiefly with bows and arrows, and again forced back to Fort Mitchell.⁠25

Between the first and second coming of Floyd from Georgia, the Red Sticks had received a visitation by General Claiborne from Mississippi Territory. Claiborne came up the Alabama River in December, commanding an army of 1,000 white men with an auxiliary of Choctaws under Lieutenant Colonel Pushmataha. The volunteering of only 135 men from a nation with a population of perhaps 20,000 indicates that the Choctaws were more ardent in declaring war than in waging it.⁠26 The objective of Claiborne's expedition was Ecunchate, which the Americans called the Holy Ground, a camp-meeting site which the prophets, after the massacre at Fort Mims, had established on the left bank of the Alabama River, near the present Benton in Lowndes county. Here they were accustomed to hold high revel, perform their magical rites, and send out objurgatory defiance to their enemies. Drawn by these attractions, a considerable number of the Red Sticks could generally be found camping here with their women and children and attending the religious services at such times as the business of fighting had grown slack. To this objective, ideal for  p186 attack since it was unfortified and encumbered with women and children, Claiborne was guided by the half-blood, Sam Monroe, reaching it on December 23. The warriors and prophets stood their ground until the women and children had crossed the Alabama to safety, when with the loss of a few bowmen they scattered in the neighboring swamps. Claiborne assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Pushmataha the essential task of destroying the service sheds and religious relics and then, having celebrated Christmas with a banquet of parched corn and boiled acorns, returned home with his troops, whom he described as lacking shoes, blankets, shirts, and pay, but "still devoted to their country and properly impressed with the justice and the necessity of the war."⁠27

The expeditions of Floyd and Claiborne had been mere forays, which, because of their speedy withdrawals, rather encouraged than damaged the Red Sticks; the penetration of Creek territory by Andrew Jackson from Tennessee, on the other hand, aimed not merely at invasion but conquest. Jackson's army included some six hundred Cherokees organized in nineteen companies, thirteen of which were commanded by half-bloods.⁠28 It is probable that the proportion of half-bloods among the men was about the same as among the officers. There are many indications that the full-blood Cherokees were as apathetic to the war as were the full-blood Choctaws. The Cherokees serving in the first campaign were almost all in the East Tennessee force of General White, which co‑operated but did not merge with Jackson's army.

No amount of rhetoric can disguise the fact that Jackson, although leading in overwhelming force a well-armed and equipped army against a foe reduced to a dependence on bows and arrows, was twice beaten back by his fanatical adversaries. On his first campaign in the fall of 1813, Jackson struck for the Coosa, which  p187 was as inevitable a highway into the Creek country from the north as the Alabama was from the south or the Federal Road from the east. The first exploit of the army was the slaughter of the entire force of two hundred Creek bowmen at Tallassiehatchee, at which place they had rallied after being driven by White from the beleaguerment of Pathkiller in Turkeytown; three hundred more victims were added at Talladega, after which the martial career of the army culminated on November 18 in the butchery by White of sixty unarmed and unresisting warriors at Hillaubee after the town had surrendered to Jackson. The Creeks were so impressed by this unique reward of submission that they did not again propose surrender during the course of the war.

After the Hillaubee episode Jackson was forced by desertion, mutiny, service expirals, and a balky commissary to retire up the Coosa to Fort Strother, from which place, garrisoned by the Cherokees, he sent out lusty and success­ful calls for reinforcements. His second campaign, beginning in January, 1814, carried him down the Coosa almost to its junction with the Tallapoosa before the gathering Creeks on January 14 checked him on Emuckfaw Creek and by another attack at Hillaubee drove him, in something resembling a rout, back to Fort Strother. Only the supposition that they had completely exhausted their scanty supply of ammunition explains the uncharacteristic decision of the Red Sticks to stay on the defensive against the third attack in the spring of 1814. Tohopeka was a death trap, but even so it fell, not to Jackson's inept and storming frontal attack, but to the infiltration of the Cherokee half-bloods from the rear. The loss of one thousand warriors here on March 27 did not break the spirit of the hostile Creeks, for the towns on the Alabama, uninvolved in the recent defeat, were still defiant and wanting to continue the war.⁠29

The Lower Creek chiefs wanted to continue the punishment of their brethren, but Hawkins, remarking that enough blood had been shed, exerted himself to bring to the broken Upper towns an invitation, extended by General Pinckney, to surrender and consequent peace. To Pinckney, the nominal superior of Jackson  p188 and Floyd, the War Department had entrusted the mission of making peace on terms including a land cession sufficient only to indemnify the United States for the cost of the war.⁠30 But pressure from Tennessee, fearful of losing the full fruits of victory, compelled the Department to replace him with Jackson, who promptly declared that he would not limit himself to the peace terms of his predecessor.⁠31 Jackson wanted not an indemnifying but a political cession that would separate both Upper and Lower Creeks from Florida, unite the settlements of Georgia with those of Mississippi, and establish a corridor from Tennessee to the Spanish boundary; unmindful of Cherokee help and Chickasaw friendship, he urged that the United States should, while it had its troops in the field, force a cession of all the Cherokee and Chickasaw territory in Tennessee.⁠32

On August 9, 1814, Jackson exacted from a motley array of Creek chiefs at his newly erected Fort Jackson the cession upon which he had determined. No reputable chief was present from an Upper Creek town, for eight of the Tallapoosa and Alabama towns, led by Peter McQueen, Hossa Yohola, Savannah Jack, the Prophet Josiah Francis, the Durants, and the youthful Osceola, had escaped to the Seminoles, Menauway was in hiding, and most of the others were dead.⁠33 Big Warrior signed the treaty as "Speaker of the Lower Creeks"; half-bloods Timpoocha Barnard of Yuchee, William McIntosh of Cusseta, Noble Kinnaird of Hitchitee, John O'Kelly of Coosa, John Carr of Tuskegee, and Alexander Grayson of Hillaubee signed for their respective towns. The territory ceded comprised over twenty million acres of land west of the Coosa and north to the undefined Cherokee boundary, and a wide strip of both Upper and Lower Creek land along the Florida border  p189 from the Tombigbee almost to the St. Marys in Georgia. Big Warrior, protesting against the taking of Lower Creek land for political purposes, signed the treaty, Hawkins and Meigs witnessed it, and then Andrew Jackson, having despoiled both his friends and his enemies, departed for Mobile.⁠34 To Hawkins the treaty of Fort Jackson must have brought great bitterness of spirit. The war had demonstrated that his long efforts to civilize the Creeks had failed, and he found himself now a mere spectator while others took the direction of the Creeks out of his hands, where it had rested for twenty years. On April 25, 1814, he had asked to be relieved of his agency and had been informed on June 30 that he might retire as soon as his successor could be selected; on December 17 he was instructed to turn over his agency to his assistant, Christian Limbaugh.⁠35

After the happy conclusion of the Creek war, Jackson, wishing to have Indian help in his further campaign against the British and Spaniards, directed all agents to enroll the warriors and place them on the payroll.⁠36 The Cherokees, apparently satiated by the slaughter at Tohopeka, evaded the call by deferring the matter until the payment of their annuities.⁠37 Among the Lower Creeks, who had not received any annuities for three years, McIntosh raised four or five hundred men and started down with them to Mobile on September 23.⁠38 The prospects for further help from the Choctaws was dimmed by tribal resentment aroused by Flournoy's refusal to permit a pursuit of the Creeks into Florida, and by tribal confusion incident to a change of agents. Dinsmoor had been dismissed  p190  as a result of forged letters of complaint allegedly written by Pushmataha and Mushulatubbee, and John McKee had taken over the agency as his successor on June 28, 1814.⁠39 The vigorous efforts of Jackson and McKee to remove the Choctaw disaffection were power­fully aided by Dinsmoor on his return to the Choctaws.

Persuasive as these men undoubtedly were, there can be little doubt that the 750 Choctaws, who by November 1 had enlisted for further service with Jackson, had been induced to do so not by white exhortations, but by the more domestic influence of Pushmataha, for 600 of the number came from the Six Towns, which made up the most belligerent, as well as the most subservient, portion of his district.⁠40 The Chickasaws seemed as little disposed to fight the British and the Spanish as they had been to face the Creeks. None had enlisted by November 1, but Jackson was hopeful that Coffee's march through Mississippi would stimulate their martial ardor. When this attraction proved inadequate Jackson felt constrained to appeal directly to Levi Colbert.⁠41 Chickasaw apathy was due partly to the fact that Agent James Robertson was dead and the tribe was apprehensive about his successor. Their appeal to the War Department for an agent from the Northern states had been blandly ignored when, on September 28, the appointment had been given to William Cocke.⁠42

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The Author's Notes:

1 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, 134, Secretary of War to Neelly, June 14, 1812.

2 Ibid., War Department Letter Book C, 137, Secretary of War to all agents, June 19, 1812.

3 Ibid., Retired Classified Files, Meigs to Secretary of War, May 8, 1812.

4 The details of these murders and their punishment are given in Indian Affairs, I, 809ff.

5 Ibid., I, 809, Hawkins to Secretary of War, May 11, 1812.

6 Carter, op. cit., VI, 297, Holmes to Secretary of War, June 29, 1812; Indian Affairs, I, 813, Blount to idem, June 25, 1812.

7 Indian Affairs, I, 813, Hawkins to Secretary of War, November 2, 1812. At this meeting the Creeks finally came to terms with John Forbes and Company and agreed to pay the remainder of their debt.

8 Ibid., I, 839, Hawkins to Cornell, March 25, 1813, and to Big Warrior March 29, 1813; Woodward, op. cit., 36. On his return to the Creeks, Little Warrior presented to the council a Shawnee exhortation for war but was reprimanded and excluded from the council.

9 Ibid., I, 843, Report of Nimrod Doyell; Woodward, in op. cit., 37, implies that Little Warrior and his party were convicted on the testimony of Captain Isaacs (son-in‑law of McGillivray), who had taken part in the murder but secured his safety by turning state's evidence.

10 Ibid., I, 847, Talosee Fixico to Hawkins, July 15, 1813.

11 Ibid., I, 845, Cornell to Hawkins, June 22, 1813.

12 Ibid., I, 84, Cusseta Micco to Hawkins, July 10, 1813, and Hawkins to Secretary of War, July 26, 1813; ibid., I, 849‑50, Hawkins to Secretary of War, July 28, 1813.

13 Woodward, op. cit., 97‑98; Indian Affairs, I, 851, Big Warrior to Hawkins, August 4, 1813.

14 Indian Affairs, I, 855. Hawkins to Floyd, September 30, 1813. The participating towns were Hoithlewaula, Fooschatchge, Coolooma, Ecanhutke, Sawanogee, Mooklausa, Alabama, Hookchoioochee, Ocheubofa, Wewocau, Purceuntallahassee, Woccocau, and Pochusehatche. The towns making the Coweta diversion were Okfuskee, Tallassie, and Autossee. Three towns — Kialije, Eufaula, and Tjlotlogulgau —- took no part in either operation.

15 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, Secretary of War to Hawkins, July 22, 1813.

16 See n. 10 above.

17 The views of Blount are repeated at length in a letter to Flournoy, October 18, 1813 (Indian Affairs, I, 855).

18 Hulbert and Ball, op. cit., 120‑21; Indian Affairs, I, 847, Talosse Fixico to Hawkins, July 15, 1813. Halbert and Ball represent the Creek-Cherokee conference as being held in July at Pushmataha's residence at Causeyville, about ten miles southeast of Meridian, with Pushmataha, Mushulatubbee, and Huanna Mingo negotiating for the Choctaws. Who the Creeks were is not known, not at approximately the same time Weatherford and Ochillie Haujo are represented as conferring with Mushulatubbee.

19 McKenney and Hall, op. cit., II, 96‑97. At the time of the attack on Fort Mims, McIntosh of Coweta was visiting the Cherokees apparently to urge intervention. Ridge and some others, by order of the chiefs, escorted him home, where they found the Creek national council in session. Ridge took Big Warrior's talk to the Cherokees.

20 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Meigs to Secretary of War, August 6, 1813.

21 Carter, op. cit., VI, 391‑92, Dinsmoor to Secretary of War, August 4, 1813; ibid., 390‑91, Holmes to idem, August 3, 1813.

22 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, McKee to Secretary of War, July 1, 1816. (This letter is also in Indian Affairs, II, 118‑19).

23 G. S. Gaines, "Reminiscences of Early Times" (MS); Halbert and Ball, op. cit., II, 290‑92; J. S. Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, I, 380‑81, Jackson to Pinckney, December 10, 1815. Mushulatubbee early in December sent out a war party which took some scalps and provoked a Creek retaliatory raid at Christmas. Then Mushulatubbee summoned his district to meet January 11, 1814, to go to war (Carter, op. cit., VI, 440‑44, McKee to Secretary of War James Monroe, June 29, 1814).

24 Indian Affairs, I, 849, 852, Hawkins to Secretary of War John Armstrong, July 28 and August 23, 1813.

25 Woodward, op. cit., 101‑102; Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, pp92, 93; Indian Affairs, I, 858, Hawkins to Secretary of War, June 7, 1814.

26 The 135 Choctaws under Pushmataha were divided into four companies of 51, 22, 40, and 12 men respectively (Halbert and Ball, op. cit., 215).

27 It is impossible to reconcile the description of the Holy Ground and the account of the battle as given in Woodward, op. cit., 100‑101, with that given in Mrs. Dunbar Rowland, Andrew Jackson's Campaign against the British, or the Mississippi Territory in the War of 1812, 171‑81.

28 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, estimate of pay due to Cherokee warriors, October 7, 1813, to April 11, 1814. Only nine of these companies were with the army on its 1813 campaign. Ridge was a major in the Cherokee force, Gideon Morgan, and John Lowry, colonels.

29 Indian Affairs, I, 858, Hawkins to Pinckney, April 25, 1814.

30 Ibid., I, 836, Secretary of War to Pinckney, March 17, 1814; Bassett, op. cit., I, 508, Jackson to Secretary of War, April 25, 1814.

31 Indian Affairs, I, 857, Pinckney to Hawkins, April 23, 1814.

32 Bassett, op. cit., I, 497, n. 11, Jackson to Pinckney, May 18, 1814. Jackson wrote Pinckney that a cession was justified from the Chickasaws because that tribe had failed to protect white travelers on its roads and had let the enemies of the United States pass through its territory to plunder and make war.

33 Woodward, op. cit., 42‑43; Indian Affairs, I, 860, Hawkins to Secretary of War, July 19, 1814.

34 The scanty preliminary negotiations of this treaty are given in Indian Affairs, I, 837ff.; the text of the treaty with an interesting list of signers is in Kappler, op. cit., II, 108‑109; maps of the cession are in Royce, Indian Land Cessions, plates CVIII and CXXII.

35 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, 173, 187, 188. Hawkins' opinion of the Fort Jackson treaty is given in Indian Affairs, II, 493, Hawkins to Graham, August 1, 1815. Hawkins had been much criticized during the war because he had failed to detect the alleged hostility of the Upper Creeks to the United States.

36 Bassett, op. cit., II, 30‑31, Jackson to the Secretary of War, August 5, 1814.

37 Ibid., II, 31‑33, 41‑42, Jackson to Butler, August 17 and September 4, 1814; I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Butler to Meigs, September 10, 1814, and Pathkiller et al. to idem, September 14, 1814.

38 Indian Affairs, I, 861, Hawkins to Acting Secretary of War Monroe, October 5, 1814.

39 Carter, op. cit., VI, 440‑41, McKee to Secretary of War, June 29, 1814; I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, 167, Secretary of War to McKee, April 30, 1814. McKee detected the forgery when he took over the agency and at once informed the War Department. Dinsmoor attributed his dismissal entirely to the forged letters. An entirely different story attributing his dismissal to the enmity of Jackson is given in James Parton's Life of Andrew Jackson, I, 349‑56, 576‑81.

40 Bassett, op. cit., II, 73‑74, 85, Jackson to Secretary of War, October 14 and October 31, 1814.

41 Ibid., II, 82‑83, Jackson to Secretary of War, October 26, 1814; I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, idem to Colbert, February 7, 1815.

42 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Colbert et al. to Secretary of War, September 9, 1814; I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, 180, Secretary of War to Cocke, September 28, 1814. The Chickasaws declared they would not receive King (the forger of the Dinsmoor letters).

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