Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations

Abstract

Tradition says the Muscoghees [or Creeks] came from the Mississippi, the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray told Henry Knox in 1790. McGillivray, a guest in the home of the secretary of war, had traveled north to New York City to negotiate the Creeks' first treaty with the United States, a momentous occasion for his nation, which was struggling to cope with Georgia's increasingly belligerent land grabs. Continuing his narrative, McGillivray recounted a detailed history of the Creeks that included the arrival of the French (who ignited a smallpox epidemic, he noted), the Yamasee War with South Carolina in 1715, the construction of Fort Toulouse by the French two years later, and the appearance of James Oglethorpe in 1733. Having dispensed with tradition in a single sentence, McGillivray related a Creek story about the past that Knox could readily recognize as history. Chronological and mundane, it integrated the Creeks into a narrative of events already familiar to the secretary of war.1 Nearly one hundred years later, G. W. Grayson, a prominent Creek leader and future principal chief, helped record, translate, and preserve a different version of the Creek past for Albert Gatschet, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, situated in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. Like McGillivray before him, Grayson transmitted this story at a perilous time for the Creeks, for Congress was then considering measures to terminate Indian nations across the country. The narrative was nothing like the one recounted by McGillivray in 1790. It was in the beginning when the people were first created, the story opened. Far off toward the west many people came out of the ground. The story, which later appeared in a publication by the anthropologist John Reed Swanton, went on to recount a long migration, interrupted by magical episodes. While McGillivray had packaged his narrative as history, Grayson framed this one as a very old and rare Creek legend, or, as he said of a similar story, Ancient Myth, an object of study that Smithsonian scientists were busy defining in the late nineteenth century.2