For seventeen years, dating from the Creek troubles in 1776, up to his death, he had been the guide and shield of his people. For them those were years of comparative peace, growth, and preparation for the white man’s civilization, by the example afforded in his own person of its benefits and attractions. With war raging around them, under his guidance, they reached a condition which caused him to be honored, and their alliance sought by two monarchs and a Great Republic. He moved amongst them enjoying the reverence and honor of a patriarchal sheik. Intrigue and detraction brought him under a transient cloud. But when they learned his life was closed in death, their hearts were smitten as those of a family when it loses its head. There went up from the Creek land an universal wail; and again, like a sinister prophecy of evil, there came over it the shadow it was under before the council of Coweta.
Bitter, too, to his people, was the thought, that he slept in the “sands of the Seminoles,” and not on the banks of the beautiful Coosa, which he loved so well; where he was born, where he had presided over councils, and made “paper talk” for their good, and where his hospitality was ever ready, alike for the distinguished stranger and the humble wayfarer.
The fate of Milfort may interest the reader. After the death of McGillivray he returned to France, where in 1802 he published the “Memoire De Mon Sejour Dans La Nation Crëck,” to which we owe the preservation of the traditions of that people. But sad to relate, forgetting his Indian wife, he married a French woman. He was made General of Brigade by the Emperor Napoleon. He died in 1814. His French wife was burned to death at an advanced age at Rheims.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Governor Folch—Barrancas—Changes in the Plan of the Town—Ship Pensacola—Disputed Boundaries—Square Ferdinand VII.—English Names of Streets Changed for Spanish Names—Palafox—Saragossa—Reding—Baylen Romana—Alcaniz—Tarragona.
Galvez remained but a short time in Pensacola after the surrender of the British. On their departure, he returned to New Orleans, the capital of his province of Louisiana.
In May, 1781, Don Arturo O’Niell was appointed Governor of Spanish West-Florida, and continued to hold the office until 1792. His successor was Enrique White, who was succeeded by Francisco de Paula Gelabert, whose ad interim tenure expired in 1796, by the appointment of Vicente Folch y Juan.
The events of any interest which occurred before that year, have been already mentioned in previous chapters. Folch signalized the early part of his administration by causing a town to be laid out, “between a quarter and half a mile” from San Carlos, that fort having been reconstructed between 1781 and 1796.[[48]] This town was officially known as San Carlos de Barrancas, that being the original application to the locality of the Spanish word barranca, signifying broken, in the sense in which the term is applied to a landscape.