From the Original Drawing
IN THE
WAR DEPARTMENT.
Published by John Melish,
1815.
The Southern Indians were more docile and less warlike than the Indians of the Lakes. The Chickasaws and Choctaws, who occupied the whole extent of country on the east bank of the Mississippi River from the Ohio to the Gulf, gave little trouble or anxiety; and even the great confederacy of Muskogees, or Creeks, who occupied the territory afterward called the State of Alabama and part of Georgia, fell in some degree into a mode of life which seemed likely to make them tillers of the soil. In 1800 the Creeks held, or claimed, about three hundred miles square from the Tennessee River to the Gulf, and from the middle of Georgia nearly to the line which afterward marked the State of Mississippi. The Seminoles, or wild men, of Florida were a branch of the Muskogees, and the Creek warriors themselves were in the habit of visiting Pensacola and Mobile, where they expected to receive presents from the Spanish governor.
Two thirds of the Creek towns were on the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers in the heart of Alabama. Their inhabitants were called Upper Creeks. The Lower Creeks lived in towns on the Chattahooche River, the modern boundary between Alabama and Georgia. The United States government, following a different policy in 1799 from that of Jefferson toward the Northwestern Indians, induced the Creeks to adopt a national organization for police purposes; it also helped them to introduce ploughs, to learn cotton-spinning, and to raise crops. The success of these experiments was not at first great, for the larger number of Indians saw no advantage in becoming laborers, and preferred sitting in the squares of the towns, or hunting; but here and there chiefs or half-breeds had farms, slaves, stock, orchards, and spinning-wheels.
Large as the Creek country was, and wild as it had ever been, it did not abound in game. A good hunter, passing in any direction through the three hundred miles of Alabama and Georgia, found difficulty in obtaining game enough for his support.[314] For that reason the Seminoles left their old towns and became wild people, as their name implied, making irregular settlements in Florida, where game and food were more plenty. The mass of the Creek nation, fixed in the villages in the interior, clung to their habits of hunting even when obliged to cultivate the soil, and their semi-civilization rendered them a more perplexing obstacle to the whites than though they had obstinately resisted white influence.
Had the Indian problem been left to the people of Georgia and Tennessee, the Indians would soon have disappeared; but the national government established under President Washington in 1789 put a sharp curb on Georgia, and interposed decisively between the Georgians and the Creeks.[315] President Washington in 1796 appointed Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina as Indian agent among the Creeks, and Hawkins protected and governed them with devotion; but the result of his friendliness was the same as that of others’ greed. The Indians slowly lost ground.
The Creeks complained of grievances similar to those of the Northwestern Indians, and their position was even more helpless. They had no other outlet than Pensacola and Mobile. Except from the Spaniards they could expect no aid in case of trouble, and the Spanish governors of Florida, after the abdication of Carlos IV. in 1807, could scarcely maintain their own position, much less supply the Creeks with arms or gunpowder. While the Northwestern Indians could buy at Malden all the weapons and ammunition they wanted, the Creeks possessed few firearms, and these in bad condition; nor were they skilful in using guns.
The United States government prevented the Georgians from compelling the Indians to sell their lands, but nothing could prevent them from trespass; and the Indian woods along the frontier were filled with cattle, horses, and hogs belonging to the whites, while white men destroyed the game, hunting the deer by firelight, and scaring the Indian hunters from their hunting-grounds. “Every cane-swamp where they go to look for a bear—which is part of their support—is near eat out by the stocks put over by the citizens of Georgia.”[316] This complaint was made in 1796, and as time went on the Indian hunting-grounds were more rapidly narrowed. Not only from Georgia but also from Fort Stoddert, along the course of the Tombigbee River, above Mobile, intruders pressed into the Creek country. The Indians had no choice but to sell their lands for annuities, and under this pressure the Creeks, in 1802 and 1803, were induced to part with the district between the Oconee and Ocmulgee in the centre of Georgia. They retained their towns on the Chattahoochee, where Hawkins’s agency was established in the town of Coweta, on the edge of the Creek country.
Hawkins was satisfied with their behavior, and believed the chiefs to be well disposed. They showed none of the restlessness which characterized the Northwestern Indians, until Tecumthe conceived the idea of bringing them into his general league to check the encroachments of the whites. After Tecumthe’s interview with Governor Harrison at Vincennes, in July, 1811, he made a long journey through the Chickasaw and Choctaw country, and arrived among the Creeks in October, bringing with him a score of Indian warriors. The annual council of the Creeks was held in that month at the village of Tuckaubatchee,—an ancient town of the Upper Creeks on the Tallapoosa. The rumor that Tecumthe would be present brought great numbers of Indians, even Cherokees and Choctaws, to the place, while Hawkins attended the council in his character as agent.
Tecumthe and his warriors marched into the centre of the square and took their places in silence. That night “they danced the dance of the Indians of the Lakes,” which became thenceforward a political symbol of their party among the Creeks. Some nights afterward Tecumthe addressed the council. Versions more or less untrustworthy have been given of the speech;[317] but the only official allusion to it by a person entitled to credit seemed to show that it was in substance the address made by Tecumthe at Vincennes. Hawkins, recalling to the Creek chiefs in 1814 the course of events which had caused their troubles, reminded them how “Tecumseh, in the square of Tuckaubatchee, ... told the Creeks not to do any injury to the Americans; to be in peace and friendship with them; not to steal even a bell from any one of any color. Let the white people on this continent manage their affairs their own way. Let the red people manage their affairs their own way.”[318] Hawkins and the old chiefs would have certainly interfered had Tecumthe incited the Creeks to war or violence; but according to Hawkins the speech was a pacific “talk,” delivered by Tecumthe in the name of the British. Indian tradition preserved another form of Tecumthe’s rhetoric, which seemed to complete the identity with the Vincennes address. Unable to express himself in the Muskogee language, Tecumthe used pantomime familiar to Indians. Holding his war-club with outstretched arm, he opened first the little finger, then the next and the next, till the club fell from his hand.
Indian union was unquestionably the chief theme of all Tecumthe’s public addresses. Whether in private he taught other doctrines must be matter of surmise; but he certainly brought into the Creek nation a religious fanaticism of a peculiar and dangerous kind. Prophets soon appeared, chiefly among the Alabamas, a remnant of an ancient race, not of Creek blood, but members of the Creek confederacy.[319] The prophets, with the usual phenomena of hysteria, claimed powers of magic, and promised to bring earthquakes to destroy an invading army. They preached the total destruction of everything, animate and inanimate, that pertained to civilization. As the nation generally was badly armed, and relied chiefly on their bows, arrows, and war-clubs for battle,[320] the moral support of magic was needed to give them confidence.