Creek Country Research Articles

Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill

Reviewed by: Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill Angela Pulley Hudson Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818. By James L. Hill. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 323 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. In his influential essay "Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations," historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen "outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history."1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as "legal oddities" since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field's oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no "foreign policy" and were both "disconnected from" and "irrelevant to … international events."3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill's monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill's study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years' War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay's indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and [End Page 408] Miccosukee figures, as Hill's careful analysis demonstrates, used maritime voyages, overland travel, and shrewd diplomatic dealings to advance their aims and protect their autonomy. Though the overall success of their actions was undoubtedly modest, Creek Internationalism lays bare the importance and impact of their efforts. It thus effectively answers DeLay's call for scholarship that undertakes "excavations of the struggle between indigenous polities, settlers, and states for practical control over space" and engages with "Indian polities and individuals as historical actors, rather than mere objects of state and settler aggression."5 Creek Internationalism argues that the two competing movements that emerged in the late eighteenth-century Creek world—one pushing for centralization (a nascent Creek nation) and one striving to protect and even enlarge town (talwa or talofa) autonomy and power—both engaged in inter/intranational diplomacy to achieve their aims. This broad assertion contributes to a long-standing discussion (some call it a debate) in Creek historiography: the degree to which the term nation appropriately describes what the Creek confederacy was or what mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Creek people wanted it to be. Scholars such as Steven C. Hahn, Joshua Piker, and Andrew K. Frank, among others, have produced thoughtful analyses around the question of Creek nationhood, as have a new generation of historians including Bryan C. Rindfleisch and Steven J. Peach.6 But consensus is elusive. And Hill's study does not move us any closer to resolution. To be fair, that is not his goal; instead, he takes that fundamental tension as a given and convincingly uses it as the foundation for his exploration of how foreign relations informed the internal debate in Creek country to a degree not fully recognized in extant literature. Through six more or less chronological chapters, Hill examines key episodes in which both Creek nationalists (those advocating some level of centralization) and Creek localists (those working on behalf of a distinct talwa or group of talwas) deployed "internationalism" (15), which he defines as a strategy designed "to secure recognition that their communities possessed sovereign rights" (15–16) on par with nation-states. Creek Internationalism makes two significant...

Matrilineal Management: How Creek Women and Matrilineages Shaped Distinct Forms of Racialized Slavery in Creek Country at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Matrilineal Management: How Creek Women and Matrilineages Shaped Distinct Forms of Racialized Slavery in Creek Country at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property": Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property"Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Miller Shores Wright The General [Alexander McGillivray Sr.] left behind him a considerable property in negros, horses, and cattle, little of which went to his children. According to the custom of this nation a man's children have no claim to his property, it belongs to his relations on the maternal line, and they seize upon it, as was the case in this instance. Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Weatherford, the first a sister and the other a maternal sister only, took possession of the greatest part of the property. . . . —Benjamin Hawkins, 1809 In 1809 the United States of America's Southern Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins, wrote the above description of what occurred to the property of Creek headman Alexander McGillivray Sr. aft er he died in Pensacola in 1793. Writing sixteen years aft er the events occurred, Hawkins demonstrated that during his career among the Creeks, he had come to understand and appreciate the importance and power of matrilineages to the Creek people and other southeastern Native groups.1 Evidence shows that both Creeks and Euro-Americans understood some of the differences in how each organized their societies—including property inheritance and gender norms. Fueled by disputes over property that began within Creek families and expanded to include the involvement of Euro-Americans, changes within Creek property relations began to challenge the place of women and matrilineages in Creek society at the turn of the nineteenth century. [End Page 158] At the time of his death, McGillivray owned extensive lands, "sixty negroes, three hundred head of cattle, with a large stock of horses."2 He attempted to leave this property to his own children, but his matrilineal kin asserted their Creek rights to his property instead.3 Six years later, in 1799, McGillivray's sisters Sophia (Durant), Sehoy (Weatherford), and Jeannette (Milfort/Crook) also struggled to take possession of the property of another brother, Malcolm McPherson Sr., from McPherson's son. Both disputes were part of a new phenomenon that had only recently come to Creek country, in present-day Alabama and Georgia, with the colonial introduction of patrilineal property inheritance among the Creek peoples. Euro-Americans introduced these differently gendered property relations slowly over centuries of contact and intermarriage, which occurred in southeastern North America mostly aft er the middle of the seventeenth century.4 However, by the turn of the nineteenth century patrilineal property inheritance had become widespread enough to inspire conflicts and violence between Creeks following the deaths of family members. This violence exacerbated other tensions in Creek society—tensions that further attracted the participation of Euro-Americans in Creek affairs—and eventually exploded in the Creek Civil War of 1813–14.5 By the late eighteenth century the loose affiliation of Native groups that became known to the British and Americans as the Creek Confederacy was home to people from a multitude of Native ethnic groups that spoke several Native languages, including (but not limited to) Muskogee, Alabama, Uchee, Natchez, Koasati, and Hitchiti.6 Aft er first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, Native populations in southeastern North America were decimated by waves of disease and the Native slave trade. The peoples who would form the confederacy known as the Creeks responded to the subsequent demographic collapse by coalescing into loose alliances built on the incorporation of outsiders into towns and clans.7 At the turn of the nineteenth century, geography placed the Creeks in close proximity to expansionist Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, to whom they had ceded lands in several previous treaties. The ceded territories were supposed to alleviate the desires for land of expansionist Americans, quash violence on the colonial periphery, and settle massive debts that Creeks incurred to British, American, and Spanish traders.8 As Tennessee was granted statehood in 1796, the Mississippi Territory was incorporated in 1798, and the Louisiana Territory was purchased in 1803, American expansion south, east, and westward into Creek country became a near certainty. Furthermore, the location of the Creeks, who were being surrounded [End Page 159] by American and Spanish...

Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827 ed. by Richard W. Starbuck

Reviewed by: Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827 ed. by Richard W. Starbuck John Ellisor Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827. Edited by Richard W. Starbuck. (Tahlequah, Okla.: Cherokee Heritage Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 3255-3768. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-9826907-9-6.) The correspondence in this volume of the Moravian records continues to reveal the day-to-day efforts of the Moravian missionaries in spreading their religion among Native Americans in a time of great uncertainty and stress for the Cherokee Nation. The missionaries, Johann Renatus Schmidt at Springplace and John Gambold at Oochgeelogy mission, detail a variety of their problems: incompetent assistants, poor finances, competition from the Methodists and Native leaders, and even an overabundance of venomous serpents in their gardens and kitchens. But the men also speak of successes: the building of a mission house and new school for Cherokee youths at Oochgeelogy, the strong support of the nation's two principal chiefs, the new converts, and a wave of religious fervor sweeping the Cherokee country aided, no doubt, by the Second Great Awakening and, more particularly, by the work of Methodist evangelists and their emotional appeals. Nevertheless, the doom "cloud of removal" hung over the Moravian missionaries and the Cherokees during this period (p. xvii). In 1825 the Creek headman William McIntosh, who had close ties to the Cherokees, accepted a $50,000 bribe to cede all of the Creek lands to the United States. Creek leaders executed McIntosh for his treachery, but the Creek country bordered that of the Cherokees, and Natives and missionaries alike knew that if the federal government allowed the treaty to stand and forced the Creeks to move to the West, the Cherokees would be the next targets of fraudulent dispossession. In fact, Brother Schmidt stated that he believed the government's treaty commissioners could certainly find '"Halfbreeds and other Speculators'" willing to take bribes to cede land (p. 3319). But at first, Schmidt seemed to secretly support removal as a cure for the Cherokee Nation's problems. He decried the fact that wealthy slave-owning Cherokees of mixed descent controlled the nation's affairs, while the poor Indians starved in a country depleted of game. He saw murders increasing in the land along with corruption spread by intruding white settlers. All helped convince Schmidt that the movement west would give the Cherokees and missionaries a fresh start and a brighter future. Fortunately, the federal government did not honor McIntosh's treaty and compel the Creeks to move beyond the Mississippi River. Accordingly, the furor over removal died down somewhat in the Cherokee country. In the interim, Schmidt had time to further assess Cherokee public opinion and decided that they were determined to stay where they were and defend their country. Consequently, he changed his view of emigration and, like most Moravians, proclaimed that removal would actually demolish everything the Cherokees and missionaries had built. And, indeed, the Cherokees did continue to build their own republic as a means of holding on to their nation as it existed in portions of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Moravian correspondence notes that Sequoyah invented his syllabary in 1825, allowing the Cherokees to read and write their own language and the missionaries to produce Cherokee hymnals and bibles. The Cherokee National [End Page 434] Council also authorized the printing of a national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, as well as building a national academy at New Echota, the Cherokee capital. Then, in 1827, the National Council adopted a constitution similar to that of the United States, adding to all their other accomplishments as a "civilized" Indian nation. However, the Moravians and Cherokees suffered great losses that year. The Cherokees' longtime principal chief, Pathkiller, and his successor and friend of the Moravians, Charles Renatus Hicks, died within two weeks of each other. And following those two men, Brother Gambold passed to his reward after many years of service in the Cherokee country. Moreover, the Cherokees and Moravians had to know that...

Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South by Christopher D. Haveman

Reviewed by: Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South by Christopher D. Haveman Steven J. Peach (bio) Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South. By Christopher D. Haveman. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. 414. Cloth, $65.00.) In his first book, Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South, Christopher D. Haveman [End Page 580] examines Creek Indian emigration and relocation in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the late 1820s and accelerating in the 1830s, thousands of white settlers invaded Creek country. With state and federal backing, settlers squatted on Creek lands that Alabama and Georgia claimed for their citizens. Land speculators subsequently defrauded Creeks out of their remaining lands with an arsenal of legal tactics. Altogether, Haveman contends that federal, state, local, and private interests implemented a "systematic program of ethnic cleansing" to remove Creeks from the South (3). Although some scholars suggest that President Andrew Jackson promoted removal to save Indians from "annihilation" by whites, Haveman exposes removal for what it was: a "land grab" (4). Still, the Creeks were not powerless victims. While military authorities forced the Cherokees west "at the end of a bayonet," the vast majority of Creeks "moved west through a combination of coercion and negotiation" (9). Rivers of Sand tells the story of Creek removal based upon government correspondence, southern newspapers, oral traditions, and the records of private emigration companies, such as Sanford & Company, which won contracts from the federal government to remove Creeks to Indian Territory. Joining other scholars of nineteenth-century Creek history, such as Duane Champagne, Mary Jane Warde, Claudio Saunt, Gary Zellar, and David A. Chang, Haveman seeks to understand how Creeks adapted to wrenching change. To a degree, he probes the oral traditions gathered by the Works Progress Administration to exhume Creek understandings of emigration, coercion, and culture change. His method provides a good example of how written documentation and oral traditions can complement one another in Native American history. Unfortunately, Haveman's analysis of the dissolution of the Creek economy, society, and government following the 1832 Treaty of Cusseta covers the same ground as John T. Ellisor's The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier (Lincoln, NE, 2010). Still, Have-man makes several original contributions to the southern Indian removal scholarship. First, Haveman devotes his study to the twenty-three thousand Creeks who emigrated to Indian Territory in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. By moving beyond studies that center solely on the sixteen thousand Creeks who were coerced west in 1836 and 1837, he complicates the seemingly straightforward term "removal." To do so, he argues that Creeks trekked west as "voluntary," "forced," or "coerced" migrants (xv, 200). In 1825, [End Page 581] for instance, the U.S.–Creek Treaty of Indian Springs inaugurated a federal voluntary migration program. Since the treaty also ceded Creek lands east of the Chattahoochee River to Georgia, the Lower Creeks who lived there migrated to the Upper Creek lands claimed by the state of Alabama. The Upper Creeks struggled to incorporate the refugees, prompting about 3,500 Creeks to voluntarily move west by 1836. Facing hunger and dislocation, the remaining Lower Creeks launched an armed rebellion known as the "Second Creek War" in the spring of 1836. The conflict fizzled out by summer, in part because the Upper Creeks assisted federal and state forces in apprehending about 2,500 of the Lower Creek rebels. Imprisoned, the defeated rebels were led to Indian Territory by Sanford & Company. These prisoners were the only Creeks to experience what scholars normally call "forced removal" (185). In late 1836 and early 1837, the U.S. "coerced" sixteen thousand Creeks to migrate west (200). The stream of voluntary migrants continued into the early 1840s when one thousand Creeks left the Southeast to "rejoin family members" in Indian Territory (265). Additionally, Haveman compares federal reports, private contractors' records, and oral traditions to show the endurance of Creek culture. For one, the Creeks continued to listen to their headmen, not white authorities. During the coerced relocations of 1836 and 1837, headmen "deliberately stalled...

The “Owner of the Town Ground, Who Overrules All When on the Spot”: Escotchaby of Coweta and the Politics of Personal Networking in Creek Country, 1740–1780

The “Owner of the Town Ground, Who Overrules All When on the Spot”Escotchaby of Coweta and the Politics of Personal Networking in Creek Country, 1740–1780 Bryan C. Rindfleisch (bio) In March 1770 Escotchaby of Coweta put the finishing touches on his plans to assert control over the Indian trade in Florida, capitalizing on the inability of the British Empire to fill the vacuum of power in that territory following the Spanish expulsion after the Seven Years War. Rather than working actively against or antagonistically toward the empire, though, Escotchaby preferred to operate from behind the scenes, employing his relationships with both Europeans and Natives to achieve his ends. In this instance, Escotchaby utilized his kinship, friendship, and partnership with the Indian trader and merchant George Galphin to stake his claim to the Florida trade. Accordingly, Galphin labored secretly on behalf of Escotchaby (as well as himself) by sending a series of letters to the governor of East Florida, James Grant, asking permission to “carry on a trade in East Florida” and unveiling plans to “build a trading house” at St. Marks. Governor Grant responded enthusiastically, for “if it [Galphin’s plan] succeeds, of which I think there is next to a Certainty . . . the greatest part of the Trade of the Lower Creeks must Center there.” But as Galphin pitched his proposal, he let it slip that “the [Creeks] has sent me word Severall times they wood build a house there for me.” While Grant dismissed Galphin’s offhand remark as just another boast of “his influence with the Creeks,” this statement in fact hints at Escotchaby’s intrigues for Florida. For it is no coincidence that one of Galphin’s merchant contacts, John Gordon, learned in confidence from Galphin that he “for sometime past had it in contemplation to settle a Store at the desire of the Indians on their ground” in Florida. If one reads between the lines of Galphin’s correspondence, then, what emerges is a Native-driven initiative, spearheaded by Escotchaby, to shape the onset [End Page 54] of imperial power in that region. By deploying his intimate connection to Galphin and setting Galphin up as the primary intermediary for Creek and British peoples in Florida, Escotchaby had for all intents and purposes wrested control and influence away from the empire.1 In fact, when put into the context of imperial anxiety after the Seven Years War, Escotchaby’s efforts to exert influence over the Florida territories—à la Galphin—become all the more clear. Even before the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Escotchaby ventured to Spanish Havana, where he promised peace with the Spaniards and claimed the “Apalache” area of Florida as his own, already unsettling English plans to colonize and incorporate that region into the empire. And over the next seven years, Escotchaby forced British officials to keep an anxious eye out for any signs of “clandestine correspondence between [Escotchaby] & the Spaniards.” When on several occasions imperial authorities tried to confront Escotchaby about such proceedings related to Florida, Escotchaby simply pleaded ignorance, for “I know nothing certain concerning the Spaniards otherwise I should not keep it a Secret from my Father.” British authorities even convinced Creek leaders like the Pumpkin King to find out “what Talks the Cowetas had brought from the Spaniards,” who later informed imperial agents that Escotchaby intended to grant the Spanish “Liberty to settle upon this Land [Florida].” With panic threatening to paralyze the imperial interest in Florida on account of Escotchaby’s intrigues to Spanish Cuba, Governor James Wright of Georgia time and again “prevail[ed] on them [Creeks of Coweta, specifically Escotchaby] to go to Mr. Galphin.”2 While imperial authorities like Wright knew that Galphin frequently collaborated with the Creeks of Coweta, they failed to understand the depths of the intimacy that existed between them, in particular the personal connection between Escotchaby and Galphin. Because Galphin was married to Escotchaby’s sister, Metawney, Escotchaby intimately associated with Galphin as early as 1741 and over the course of three decades forged a partnership that bound these two “Friends” together. Through their close familiarity with one another, Escotchaby emerged as Galphin’s main contact, informant...

Common Justice: Vengeance and Retribution in Creek Country

Through the 1700s and early 1800s, Creek nationalism had the potential to both assert political autonomy and devolve into catastrophe. Projected externally, Creek nationalism engaged Euro-Americans and afforded room for local negotiation among towns and clans. However, the nationalist dynamic shifted with increased external pressure and the centralization of domestic political authority. Embodied in the suppression of retaliatory killings, the nationalist assertion of control fundamentally changed Creek country and had broad cultural ramifications. The push for exclusive authority over domestic justice forced each Creek to evaluate clan, town, and national loyalties, contributing to the many divisions leading up to the 1813 Creek War.

The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country

Tiya Miles NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 88 Notes from the Field TIYA MILES The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country IN THE LATE 1990s, I was casting about for a dissertation topic in the subject area of nineteenth-century African American and Native American women’s history when I noticed a pattern of black women’s assertive activities in Muskogee Creek communities of present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma. A few of the women who caught my eye moved out of slavery by marrying into Creek families. A couple of the women became hoteliers in Indian Territory at a time when neither Native nor white women were doing the same. And one of these women of African descent, a young adolescent, was distinguished as an extraordinary pupil at the first mission school in the Creek nation. I considered writing a dissertation about the composite experience of these African American women in the context of Creek society. However, upon realizing that the source material was extremely sparse, I set aside this topic and instead located my work within Cherokee society, where I concentrated on the experiences of enslaved blacks and Afro-Cherokee tribal members. Nevertheless, there was one person I had uncovered among the population of black women living in Creek communities who never left my imagination. This was Mary Ann Battis, a teenaged girl of Creek, black, and white ancestry, whose residency at the Alabama-based Asbury Mission School in the 1820s became a point of controversy for Battis, her family members, Protestant missionaries, and a U.S. Indian Agent. According to the Methodist administrators and teachers at the school, Battis chose to remain in the Southeast with them while her own mother, uncle, and siblings emigrated west with other Creeks during the Indian removal period. It took the intervention of Thomas McKenney, head of Indian affairs in the War Department, to settle the conflict. When I first encountered this story as a graduate student, it struck me as unusual that an Indigenous young woman would refuse the requests of her mother and uncle (who in Creek matrilineal kinship terms would have been like a father) to relocate with them in favor of staying behind with white mis- NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis 89 sionaries. I pursued the matter and found that two historians had offered varying interpretations of Battis’s choice. Adele Logan Alexander, author of Ambiguous Lives, a lyrical history on free women of color in Georgia, had concluded that “Battis was raised a Christian and apparently felt a strong kinship with the settlers’ community because she remained at the Moravian [sic] mission near Milledgeville and chose not to go West when others in her tribe were forced out of Georgia.” In Alexander’s interpretation, Battis’s was an act of loyalty to “the missionaries who had raised her” and to “her own religious devotion.”1 Daniel F. Littlefield, a prolific chronicler of African American and Five Tribe Indian relations, argued in his book Africans and Creeks that Battis was a pawn in the political maneuverings between Indian Agent David Brearley, who was charged with overseeing Creek removal, and the missionary couple who had already lost students to this policy.2 While I admired the work of ­ Alexander and Littlefield, I was not fully satisfied with the explanations about Battis’s life that they had teased from the (admittedly) stingy historical record. Alexander had assumed an acculturative identity as the main push factor for Battis, while Littlefield had attributed the conflict to the white actors and allowed Battis’s own viewpoint to drop out of his analysis. I wondered at the time what might be uncovered about the intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and religion in Creek communities if Battis’s motivation were examined more closely. It would take more than a decade, though, for me to attempt such an examination. I have found through a renewal of my research on Mary Ann Battis that her story was even more unusual than I had perceived all those years ago—unusual enough for a key document in the case, Battis’s...

The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country

The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country

Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (review)

Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South. By Angela Pulley Hudson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 252. Cloth, $65.00.)Reviewed by J. M. OpalThis book is a reminder of how a simple change in focus can illuminate a given place and time. Over the past ten years, the Gulf Coast region during the decades around 1800 has attracted new attention, especially by historians of slavery. The making of the deep south or cotton kingdom by enslaved black workers and their white masters now claims center stage in larger narratives of western expansion. Hudson's book offers a fresh glimpse of that vast and complex region by focusing on the ways its native inhabitants, especially the Creek Indians, moved through it. In other words, the book makes mobility and territoriality - the ways native peoples and their neighbors traveled through the country and understood their rights to do so - the central topics of inquiry. Who could move through Indian country, and according to what treaties, customs, or agreements? What did new roads and paths through that territory mean to young braves, opportunist chiefs, and American speculators, soldiers, and settlers? In addressing these questions, Hudson offers a compelling narrative of the Creek Nation from the 1 770s to the 1830s as well as a provocative interpretation of U.S. expansionism and regional politics during the early national age.Hudson's early chapters explore Creek understandings of the landscape and of the pathways leading through it. By the time of the American Revolution, an intricate network of paths connected the forty Upper Creek towns and twenty Lower Creek towns. Travel through the forests and along the rivers was essential to both the semi-nomadic, mixed economy of the Creeks and to their cultural and spiritual understandings of the land itself. While attempting to forge a more cohesive nation out of their largely noncoercive society (63), Creek headmen tolerated American travelers along their paths, if only because they were increasingly reliant upon credit, gifts, and supplies. Single white men were seen as innocent passersby. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, however, Creeks encountered more and more family groups traveling along their roads, in some cases with slaves and in many cases in wagons that physically expanded the paths themselves. Such persons were obviously coming to settle, not to trade. Their appearance worsened or created divisions within the Creek population, with some arguing for a negotiated coexistence and others for a more radical break with white ideas, goods, and demands. This latter group noted that no treaty made with the Anglo Americans had yet restrained them from swarming into Creek hunting grounds and that any crime committed by a single Creek - a stolen horse or slave, for example - became the collective responsibility of the entire Nation, while American authorities shrugged off thefts or murders by white settlers as the regrettable actions of a few bad men.Among the many benefits of Hudson's approach is the view it offers of the new American state, which managed to infuriate borderlands elites for alleged partiality to Indians and to take a very active role in building roads through Creek country. Especially after 1805, when both the Creek and Cherokee leadership officially agreed to let American citizens freely pass through their nations, U.S. soldiers chopped down the trees and laid down the stones to connect the Tennessee settlements with the Carolinas and New Orleans. …

Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West

Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West

Review Jon Thiem Deborah DimonRabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. xxvii + 440 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, indices. $29.95.)

Journal Article Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West Get access Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West. By Thiem Jon Dimon Deborah. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. xxvii + 440 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, indices. $29.95.) Ginette Aley Ginette Aley University of Southern Indiana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 1, Spring 2010, Pages 109–110, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.41.1.0109a Published: 01 February 2010

Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West by Jon Thiem

167 Book Notes “The memoir thing falls apart”—this too is a bit nonchalant ; the memoir thing tumults in unpredictable directions. Picture Palace is a poetic insistence to relive duration despite its impossibility. Picture Palace resists and becomes self-portrait. O’Hara once wrote: “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.” If he had read Picture Palace, he might have written : “Grace / to be born and live and write as tumultuously as possible.” Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West by Jon Thiem, with Deborah Dimon University of New Mexico Press, 2008 reviewed by James Whiteside Jon Thiem literally walked into the lives of John and Ida Elliott and Josephine Lamb. One fall afternoon in 1997, Thiem, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Colorado State University, hiked over a ridge in the Cherokee State Wildlife Area in the foothills of the Livermore area northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado. In the valley below he saw near the bank of Middle Rabbit Creek an old abandoned ranch house. His curiosity piqued, Thiem soon learned that the house and surrounding land had been the property of John and Ida Elliott and that Josephine Lamb had lived with them there, and in two later homes, for more than four decades. Thiem spent the next decade investigating the Elliotts and Lamb and their curious relationship, examining them in the multiple contexts of American frontier expansion, late nineteenth- and twentieth -century ranching, and changing social and cultural mores, including gender roles. In addition to the Elliotts and Lamb, a fourth character—the land—is also crucial to this compelling tale. Thiem and his research assistant Deborah Dimon interviewed 119 of the Elliotts’ and Lamb’s relatives and acquaintances. He combed through letters and diaries, surveyed public records, and interpreted photographs and drawings to understand the three individuals and their complicated relationship. The result is Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West. colorado review 168 John Elliott was the son of an itinerant farmer who moved his family from Iowa to Kansas and, in 1890, to Colorado. The family lived in Fort Collins until 1895, when they acquired a small ranch in the Livermore area. John also worked with his father hauling freight between Livermore and Steamboat Springs and as a ranch hand. Elliott’s father decided in 1909 to move on to South Dakota, but John stayed behind and in 1910 purchased 1,040 acres of prime ranch land on Middle Rabbit Creek. By then Elliott had married Ida Meyer. Over succeeding decades he added to his land holdings and built a reputation as an expert, self-reliant cowman, a living icon of the western rancher. He also grew increasingly tyrannical in his relationships with those around him, exhibiting a sometimes violent temper. Ida Meyer moved to Colorado in 1897 and until 1908 worked as a domestic servant in Livermore homes and as a cook and waitress in the Livermore Hotel, which John Elliott eventually owned. Meyer left her middle-class home in Lincoln, Nebraska, Thiem says, to re-create her life in the West. “It was doubtless a quest for self-realization that impelled her to move West.” The West, he continues, “was that part of the nation where a person could most easily get beyond the past and its strictures. The West was the great venue for refashioning the self.” Among Ida Meyer’s traits before she married John Elliott were her affection for people; her artistic talent, expressed through photography; and the great value she placed on her independence. But she also sought economic security. Meyer married John Elliott in December 1908. The couple moved to the Rabbit Creek ranch in 1910, and that year Ida gave birth to their only child, Orville. She was in her mid-thirties and, concerned about the risks of having more children, soon stopped having sexual relations with her husband. In the ensuing years her independence, artistry, and contact with people slipped away. Indeed, she virtually disappears from Thiem’s narrative for 175 pages. When she reappears, Thiem describes her in terms of the household spaces she occupied. In his...

Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians (review)

Light on the Path: Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians. Edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Pp. 283. Cloth, $60.00; Paper, $34.95.)Reviewed by Laurence M. HauptmanCharles Hudson of the University of Georgia has revolutionized our understanding of the American Indians of the Southeast. After the publication of his Southeastern Indians (1976), a groundbreaking ethnography, the eminent anthropologist transformed himself into the leading ethnohistorian of the region. Largely influenced by the Annales historians, he ambitiously delved into the study of the documents of early European explorers of the Southeast. In numerous writings that culminated in Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms (1999), he significantly revised the findings of John Swanton and other earlier scholars.Thomas J. Pluckhahn, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma and author of Kolomoki: Settlement, Ceremony and Status in the Deep South A.D. 350-750 (2003) and Robbie Ethridge, McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and an anthropologist at the University of Mississippi who previously authored Creek Country: Creek Indians and Their World (2003), have coedited ten essays delivered at a conference at the University of Georgia in honor of Hudson. Seven of the essays are by anthropologists, mostly archaeologists. Although there is much valuable information presented, the coeditors have not provided connecting links to the essays. articles jump in chronology and subject matter. Introductions to each of the essays would have made for a cohesive volume.In a fascinating analysis, The Cussita Migration Legend, Steven Hahn, a historian at St. Olaf College and the author of Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (2004), explains the origins of the legend, first recorded at Savannah in 1735, that helped make the town of Coweta central in the Creek world. By positioning Coweta as the place of emergence, Chigelly, a Coweta with political ambitions, raised the town's importance in Creek history. To Hahn, in his careful study of mythmaking, Coweta was not an ancient town, but may have been an upstart migrant community.Theda Perdue, a historian at the University of North Carolina and author of Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835 (1998), discusses intermarriage. While the larger non-Indian world often viewed intermarriage as an impediment to the overall assimilationist goal of civilization, individual white men frequently saw the advantages of marrying into Indian communities because Indian women had considerable power when it came to land use and assured hospitality, friendship, and better trade opportunities. process bound these men economically, politically, and socially to these Indian communities, and, as Perdue points out, their allegiance shifted away from the Euro-American world. Although what Perdue writes is not new and conforms to other scholarly analyses focusing on French Canada, England, and the Plains, hers is a nicely presented case study.William Jurgelski's New Light on the Tsali Affair is based on the recent discovery of a document written by Nanih, Tsali's wife. Tsali is the culture hero of Cherokee resistance to the military's round up of the Indians before their forced removal west. Much of Tsali's life and actions are shrouded in mystery, which is not cleared up by the article. Jurgelewski, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia, suggests that the legend should not be dismissed so quickly by scholars.Two essays by archaeologists deserve special praise. Steven Kowalewski's Coalescent Societies focuses on the combining and recombining of southeastern societies after population collapse resulting from European contact. Kowalewski, a University of Georgia anthropologist and coauthor of Ancient Oaxaca (1999), shows some of what occurred: Chiefdoms became confederacies, the nature of myths changed, and the Green Corn Ceremony arose. …

A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814 (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 304 A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. By Gregory A. Waselkov. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. ix, 414 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1491-0. On Monday, August 30, 1813, a force of seven hundred Redstick Creeks attacked the fortified plantation home of Samuel Mims in the Tensaw District of the Mississippi Territory (now Baldwin County), killing five hundred men, women, and children. For Alabamians this event resonates as a turning point in the state’s early history. Gregory Waselkov’s exhaustively researched and eloquently written account of the Fort Mims massacre explains not only what happened but also why it occurred, and how it has since shaped American collective memory. “Remember Fort Mims” became the rallying cry of southerners during the War of 1812 and, as Waselkov insists, the event provided justification for the expulsion of the Native Americans from their territory to lands in the west. The events that climaxed in the 1813 attack at Fort Mims, as Waselkov illustrates, were more complicated than Indian reaction to white expansion . For more than a century the Creeks had adapted, preserving their independence by constantly reshaping their culture in the face of European encroachment. When the United States assumed control of the region in the 1780s, Creeks suddenly found that they had to adopt and refashion cultural elements to suit their needs while preserving their core beliefs, language, and customs. The rapid changes brought poverty and indebtedness to many Creeks and further accentuated differences between the Métis (those with Indian-white ancestry) and full-blooded Creeks. In 1811, Shawnee leader Tecumseh traveled south through the Creek country, encouraging a new pan-Indian religious, political, and military confederation. Tecumseh’s efforts revealed a social cleavage amongst the Creeks that erupted into a civil war between the conservative Redstick faction—called such because of their painted red clubs— and the faction that supported Creek assimilation into white culture. The Creek civil war between the two factions evolved into the Redstick War (Creek War) between the Creeks and the United States, which began with the attack on Fort Mims. The massacre of men, women, and children at Fort Mims generated American sympathy for a war against the Upper Creeks, the division of the Creek Confederacy situated along the Tallapoosa-CoosaAlabama river system. The states of Georgia and Tennessee, along with the Mississippi Territory, mobilized their militias for operations against the Redsticks, who in turn secured support from the Spanish in Florida and from British agents on the Gulf of Mexico. Andrew Jackson led the O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 305 Tennessee militia south into Creek country, and, on March 27, 1814, defeated the Redsticks at Tohopeka (a fortified refugee town located along a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River). The resulting American massacre of the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend seemed to balance the Creek massacre of Americans at Fort Mims. During the following weeks American troops swept through Creek country, destroying food supplies, detaining refugees, and tracking the Redsticks. By early August 1814, with their food supply exhausted and nowhere to hide, the Creeks signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, relinquishing some twenty -three million acres of land in the Mississippi Territory (present-day Alabama) and Georgia to the United States. Many of the Creeks who evaded capture fled to Spanish Florida, where they joined the Seminoles and continued their struggle against American incursions. Fort Mims, Fort Dearborn (at the site of present-day Chicago), River Raisin (in southeastern Michigan), Hampton (in Virginia), Bladensburg (in Maryland), and Washington, D.C., all experienced defeats during the War of 1812. Yet those defeats are trumped by the victories at Lakes Erie and Champlain, at Baltimore, Horseshoe Bend, and New Orleans. Understandably, selective American memory highlights the victories and minimized the defeats. Thus Jackson’s victory on the plains of Chalmette overshadows the sacking of the capital city of Washington. But, as Waselkov emphasizes, the conventional Fort Mims narrative represents the attack as a sinister massacre of innocent Americans...

Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes (review)

O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 305 Tennessee militia south into Creek country, and, on March 27, 1814, defeated the Redsticks at Tohopeka (a fortified refugee town located along a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River). The resulting American massacre of the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend seemed to balance the Creek massacre of Americans at Fort Mims. During the following weeks American troops swept through Creek country, destroying food supplies, detaining refugees, and tracking the Redsticks. By early August 1814, with their food supply exhausted and nowhere to hide, the Creeks signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, relinquishing some twenty -three million acres of land in the Mississippi Territory (present-day Alabama) and Georgia to the United States. Many of the Creeks who evaded capture fled to Spanish Florida, where they joined the Seminoles and continued their struggle against American incursions. Fort Mims, Fort Dearborn (at the site of present-day Chicago), River Raisin (in southeastern Michigan), Hampton (in Virginia), Bladensburg (in Maryland), and Washington, D.C., all experienced defeats during the War of 1812. Yet those defeats are trumped by the victories at Lakes Erie and Champlain, at Baltimore, Horseshoe Bend, and New Orleans. Understandably, selective American memory highlights the victories and minimized the defeats. Thus Jackson’s victory on the plains of Chalmette overshadows the sacking of the capital city of Washington. But, as Waselkov emphasizes, the conventional Fort Mims narrative represents the attack as a sinister massacre of innocent Americans by savage Indians and as justification for the removal of the Creeks and other Indians to western reservations. Removal enabled the expansion of cotton production , and with it the slave-based plantation system. Judiciously combining history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography , Waselkov has written a definitive account of the massacre and its consequences that fills a crucial gap in our understanding of the War of 1812. It deserves to be read by those interested in the War of 1812 generally , the southern theater specifically, and in Alabama’s early history. GENE ALLEN SMITH Texas Christian University Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes. Edited by David K. Wiggins. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006. xii, 459 pp. $34.95. ISBN 1-55728-826-7. Out of the Shadows is a collection of nineteen biographical essays on twenty African American athletes. The editor, David K. Wiggins, has been one T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 306 of the more thoughtful and prolific authorities on the African American sporting experience for the past twenty-five years. The essays provide a look into race relations and racial discrimination in America, from the 1890s to the present, through the lens of sports. They are split into four chronological sections. The first section, “Striving for Athletic Success in a Jim Crow Society,” includes essays on Jimmy Winkfield (horse racing), Marshall “Major” Taylor (bicycling), William Henry Lewis (football), and Jack Johnson (boxing). The second group, “Fashioning a World of Sport behind Segregated Walls and on an International Stage,” contains articles on Ora Washington (basketball, tennis), Satchel Paige (baseball), Jesse Owens (track), Joe Louis (boxing), Alice Coachman (track), and Jackie Robinson (baseball). The third part, “The Fight for Civil Rights through Athletic Performance, Persuasion, and Protest,” includes pieces on Althea Gibson (tennis), Wilma Rudolph (track), Bill Russell (basketball ), Jim Brown (football), Muhammad Ali (boxing), and Arthur Ashe (tennis). “Race, Sport, and Celebrity Culture,” the final section, contains essays on Michael Jordan (basketball), Tiger Woods (golf), and Venus and Serena Williams (tennis). Wiggins provides introductory comments that historically contextualize the essays in each section. As the title suggests, the book presents a collective “biographical history of African American athletes,” with the omnipresent power of race providing the common thread that connects the athletes and the essays. At the same time, the essays demonstrate that the African American sporting experience is not monolithic. The book’s organization is especially well-suited to highlight differences as well as similarities in the African American athletic experience. All of the athletes experienced racial discrimination; nevertheless, a variety of factors—such as class, gender...

Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (review)

Reviewed by: Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World Alan Gallay (bio) Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. By Robbie Ethridge. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 369. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.50.) This is a book about the Creeks and their land. A confederacy of numerous native groups that drew together in the late seventeenth century, the Creeks occupied a central place in the history of the American South through the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Settled in towns along numerous waterways mostly in modern-day Georgia and Alabama, [End Page 674] their diversity of languages was not reflected in a great diversity of lifestyles. The Creeks practiced mixed agriculture and hunting and gathering, with minor variations dependent upon the location of towns, and they adapted to new market conditions brought about by an influx of settlers to their lands after the American Revolution. Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge takes a refreshing approach to her subject. Most historians would tell a history of the Creeks by focusing on politics, diplomacy, and warfare. Ethridge provides relatively little discussion of the Creeks' external relations except in regard to treaties and settlers that had a direct impact upon Creek land. She provides no extensive discussion of Creek relations with their native neighbors, in part because of her chronological focus on the last decades of Creek Country when disputes with the Choctaw and Cherokee declined in importance. Nor does Ethridge much discuss the internal dynamics of the confederacy, such as relations between the Upper and Lower Creeks or among towns. There is, however, political, cultural and social history here, including an excellent overview of the historic period and a superb discussion of European encroachment on Creek Country. Cultural analysis informs all of her work, but Ethridge focuses firmly on the Creeks and their environment, and that focus is the strength of the book and a significant part of its great accomplishment. Ethridge forces us to reconceptualize Creek history from the perspective of the internal dynamics of the people's relationship with their land. The book's first half is largely concerned with documenting daily life in Creek towns. Drawing upon the extensive records of Benjamin Hawkins, the federal agent to the Creeks, as well as an array of other sources, Ethridge plots town locations in the surrounding ecosystem, providing an invaluable aid to future researchers. Rivers and creeks, varying mixes of trees, prairies and swamps, and much-used and valued canebrakes characterized the Creeks' "human-landscaped environment" (53). Nuts provided an especially valued dietary staple, particularly during hunting season, and Coweta Tallahasee, Etheridge notes, "maintained a 2,000 acre stand of hickory and other trees" (60). One family alone, a contemporary observer noted, gathered 100 bushels of hickory nuts, which among other things, were boiled into oil used in cooking. Just as ubiquitous near many Creek towns was Great River cane, used for building, weaving, food, firewood, musical instruments, as a refuge against invaders, and, after the adoption of domestic animals, as fodder. If the first half of the book examines traditional land use for hunting, [End Page 675] gathering, farming, and warfare, the second half documents how that usage changed as the Creek entered more fully into the market economy through production for, and exchange with, white settlers. Hawkins, who served as agent from 1796 until 1816, played a key role in mediating relations between the Creeks and the American government and its citizens. He oversaw government trading posts, allotted government payments to the Creek for their land, and directed Creek involvement in the new economy. Hawkins subscribed to a "plan for civilization" intended to shift the Creeks from hunting to the care of domesticated animals and the cultivation of commercial crops such as wheat and cotton. To replace clothing produced from deerskins, women were provided with hundreds of looms, spinning wheels, and other accoutrements of textile production. As the number of deer declined, homespun allowed the Creeks to clothe themselves and to sell the surplus for items they did not produce, such as sugar and coffee. Hawkins and other well-meaning American allies of the Creeks promoted the plan of civilization in...

:Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World

:Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World

The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810 (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810 Robbie Ethridge (bio) The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810. Edited by Thomas Foster. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv, 511. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $34.95.) This volume is one of the most important collections of published primary source material on the southern frontier, the late eighteenth-century [End Page 127] Creek Indians, and the social and physical geography of the area that once comprised the Creek Confederacy. Benjamin Hawkins was U.S. Indian Agent to the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama from 1796 until his death in 1816. The volume editor, Thomas Foster, notes in his introduction that much of Hawkins's writings have been available through various earlier publications, but all of these are now out of print. Foster's volume contains facsimile reprints of two of these publications (both of which were originally published in the Collections of the Georgia Historical Society): "A Sketch of the Creek Country, in the Years 1798 and 1799" and the "Letters of Benjamin Hawkins." The volume also contains two previously unpublished "viatories" written by Hawkins. A viatory (or "journal of distances") is the eighteenth-century equivalent of a field notebook. When Hawkins took trips around Creek country, he kept notebooks recording distances traveled and landscape features, both social and natural. Since he considered these only as field notebooks, Hawkins recorded the data in shorthand. In his introduction, Foster gives readers the necessary instructions on how to decipher Hawkins's shorthand. He also reconstructs the routes of the various trips, which is necessary for understanding location in the viatories. The viatories are staggering in their detail. Hawkins recorded geographical features, place names, environmental features, and towns along the routes that he traveled. The remarkable thing about the viatories, however, is that Hawkins, using eighteenth-century measuring conventions, located all of these features. For instance, when Hawkins noted a stand of longleaf pines on a stony ridge made of "curiously variegated- rock, flowered or spotted, of lead colour, white flint stone and dingy red, the red seems to have been spattered on" (9), he also gave a location for this feature. Using Foster's instructions, one can plot this ridge on a modern topographic map. Being able to reconstruct the historical landscape at this local level is very unusual. Even the most detailed historical sources usually do not give enough detail or are not accurate enough to allow one to pinpoint locations of environmental and social features. Yet, as ecologists make clear, to understand a landscape, one must understand the mosaic of local-level systems and their connectedness. Hawkins's viatories, then, may allow us, for the first time, to reconstruct the micro-level intricacies of the late eighteenth-century landscape and geography of what was once Creek country. The viatories are followed by a reprint of the "Sketch of the Creek [End Page 128] Country." Anthropologists and ethnohistorians regard Hawkins's "Sketch" as a reliable account of Creek life. Based on his field notes, Hawkins's "Sketch" contains detailed descriptions of all the Creek towns, local landscapes, people, and tidbits of town histories, followed by discussions of various cultural elements under headings such as "Government," "War," "Marriage," and so on. Hawkins's description of the Green Corn Ceremony, under the headings of "Boos-ke-tau," has long been considered one of the most detailed and important accounts of the late eighteenth-century Creek version of this important Southeastern Indian ceremony. The "Sketch" is followed by Hawkins's letters from 1796 to 1805. Hawkins kept regular communications with federal, state, and local leaders, both American and Creek. These letters, then, describe episodes, problems, solutions, and plans, both big and small, in which Hawkins had some role. He also recorded several "talks" of Creek leaders—a valuable source, since Indian voices are rare in the historical documents. Hawkins's writings also contain many "journals," diaries of his visits with Creek men and women that contain wonderful ethnographic descriptions of Creek towns and daily life. The Georgia Historical Society publications only contain letters through 1805, yet Hawkins remained in Creek country another ten or so years...

Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. By Robbie Ethridge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiii + 369 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50

Reconstructing the human and natural environment of the Creek Indians in frontier Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, Robbie Ethridge illuminates a time of wrenching transition. Creek Country presents a compelling portrait of a culture in crisis, of its resiliency in the face of profound change, and of the forces that pushed it into decisive, destructive conflict. Ethridge begins in 1796 with the arrival of U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins, whose tenure among the Creeks coincided with a period of increased federal intervention in tribal affairs, growing tension between Indians and non-Indians, and pronounced strife within the tribe. In a detailed description of Creek town life, the author reveals how social structures were stretched to accommodate increased engagement with whites and blacks. The Creek economy, long linked to the outside world through the deerskin trade, had begun to fail. Ethridge details the Creeks' efforts to diversify their economy, especially through experimental farming and ranching, and the ecological crisis that ensued. Disputes within the tribe culminated in the Red Stick War, a civil war among Creeks that quickly spilled over into conflict between Indians and white settlers and was ultimately used by U.S. authorities to justify their policy of Indian removal. |Reconstructing the human and natural environment of the Creek Indians in frontier Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, Ethridge presents a compelling portrait of a culture in economic, political, and ecological crisis; of its resiliency in the face of profound change; and of the forces that pushed it into decisive, destructive conflict.