The assassination of Chief William McIntosh.
Twelve more chiefs arrived for the meeting at Stone Mountain, making twenty-three, with a lot of braves, most of whom were relatives of the chiefs, and Willet started with them on the long and colorful procession to New York.
McGillivray accepted payment for his property in Savannah that had been confiscated. The Georgia colony already had twice bought and paid for the land east of the Oconee River, but McGillivray sold the same land again, and signed a third treaty for $100,000. For assurance against further Indian troubles, Washington commissioned him brigadier general in the United States Army and awarded him a pension of $1,200 a year.
McGillivray went immediately to Pensacola, where the Spaniards proclaimed him emperor of the Creeks and Seminoles and paid him $3,500 a year to continue harassing Georgia settlers. He died in 1793 of “gout of the stomach,” which may have been an unidentified poison.
In 1802 the Creeks signed a treaty giving up their lands west of the Oconee River to the state line. Georgia then ceded the Alabama and Mississippi territories to the United States government in exchange for a promise to remove all the Indians from within the state’s borders, a pledge that was not carried out. The state began distributing the land by lottery in 1803.
Reports of the rock that was as big as a mountain continued to arouse wide interest, but they were descriptions given by Indians. Few white men still had seen it. M. F. Stephenson, the famous gold assayer of Dahlonega, wrote that in 1808 an Englishman returned to London with the story, but the location of the mountain was so far from the Blue Ridge peaks that he thought it was man-made. The president of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Paris addressed a letter to the Hon. R. W. Habersham of Savannah asking for the dimensions and other data concerning this vast relic of architectural grandeur.
The frontier continued in turmoil, which reached a climax through incitement of the Indians by the British in the War of 1812. In 1814 Andrew Jackson, with 2,500 militiamen and a lot of Cherokees, cornered and practically annihilated the militant branch of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend of the Coosa River in Alabama.
During the years several more treaties concerning the Stone Mountain area were signed and ignored. The Creeks enacted the death penalty for any chief who disposed of any more of the tribe’s properties. Then Chief William McIntosh again sold the land between the Oconee and Chattahoochee rivers for $400,000 in a treaty signed at Indian Springs in February, 1825. Two months later he was riddled with bullets from a hundred Creek rifles.
The next year, in 1826, President John Quincy Adams invited thirteen Creek chiefs to Washington and bought the land east of the Chattahoochee again.