Horseshoe Bend Research Articles

Design and Implementation of Large-Scale Hard Rock AMD Dewatering and REE Production

To develop a domestic Rare Earth Elements (REE) supply chain the Hydraulic Preconcentrate (HPC) produced at the Horseshoe bend treatment plant (HSB) was evaluated as a potential source for feedstock. After the clarifiers were flipped to the desired pH set points, a total of 24 Geobags were repeatedly filled and allowed to passively dewater. The Geobags evaluated were comprised of a mix of Woven, Non-woven, and Capillary Channel Fiber (CCF). The bags were constructed with either a composite of woven and nonwoven or only woven geotextile. Half of the bags of both types also included “fins” made of CCF to evaluate their impact on dewatering. Column Filtration Tests (CFTs) were performed onsite to provide laboratory value for hydraulic conductivity. Throughout their dewatering, the geobags were sampled to determine their rate of dewatering. Influent samples from HSB were also tested to produce a Specific Gravity (Gs), via pycnometer testing and Grain Size Distribution (GSD), via sieve and hydrometer analysis. The dewatering ability of the geobags was high regardless of bag material with a mean total solids percentage of approximately 40% across all samples after only one month of dewatering. The GSD performed on the HPC is gap graded with most particles having a diameter of approximately 0.5-0.05mm. Hydraulic conductivity values for the filter cakes during Column Filtration Testing ranged from 0.5 to 2.5 meters/day. This data will help to guide development of future large-scale HPC dewatering and the parametric design of an REE oxide production plant at the HSB site.

Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols (review)

Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols (review)

The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide by Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher

Reviewed by: The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide by Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher Vicki L. Tinnon The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide. Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2019. pp. vii and 164; maps, diagr, photos, notes, and index. $24.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8173-5930-0). Originally, the Federal Road was created to provide a shorter distance of travel between Washington and New Orleans. Prior to the creation of the Federal Road, postal riders and travelers made their way from Washington to New Orleans through the Appalachian Mountains to Nashville, and then down the Natchez Trace. This was a 1,500-mile isolated route and travelers had to pack their own food and water and risk the possibility of being attacked by robbers. The Federal Road would decrease the travel distance by approximately 500 miles. Though the Federal Road traversed many states, Braund, Waselkov, and Christopher focus on the history and geography of the Old Federal Road in Alabama. The book is composed of two parts — one focusing on the history and geography and the other on driving tours. The first chapter delves into the early history of the paths and roads in the region. Using published accounts, the authors detail the early work of surveyors trying to map the potential route. Of particular interest in this chapter is the account of Isaac Briggs and his assistant, Thomas Robertson. The pair entered the Creek Nation from Georgia on October 6, 1804. The obstacles they faced are well documented, including the fact that they got lost and wandered. According to Briggs, they wandered for 112 miles. One of the goals of this expedition was to calculate the latitude and longitude for several points along the route. The only instrument Briggs had was a surveyor’s pocket sextant. On a humorous note, the authors state that Briggs only came up with three points along the paths that would become the Federal Road. The latitude calculations were quite accurate and close to those we use today. The longitude calculations, however, “were consistently too far west by 11 to 21 minutes” (22). Briggs did not have a chronometer and had to rely on astronomical observations to calculate longitude. The second chapter focuses on the building of the Federal Road. It is also noted in this chapter that many Native Americans objected to roads through their land. Officials, like Benjamin Hawkins, worked to expand the transportation network across the Mississippi Territory through negotiation and treaties. The treaties contained information that indicated the indigenous land would eventually be used for immigration traffic. However, the most pressing need at this time was the creation of a route that would allow for efficient mail service. Over time, traffic on the route increased substantially. Much of the route went through wilderness so travelers often dealt with potential danger — anything from accidents to snake bites to being injured from attack. The authors state that as traffic increased, Creek opposition to the Federal Road also increased. [End Page 290] The Creek War and the defeat of the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend are briefly discussed in the third chapter. The authors touch on the Creek War (and the War of 1812) to point out that travel on the Federal Road was essentially halted during that period. After the war, the Federal Road was once again safe for travel and immigration soared. It is also noted that there were immense changes in the cultural landscape between 1814 and 1820. There was still tension between the Red Stick Creeks and the United States. As a result, the Gulf Coast region was militarized. Also of significance in this chapter was the discussion on the maintenance and funding of the Federal Road. The federal government only maintained the road during the territorial period. Once Alabama achieved statehood in 1819, most of the funding and maintenance fell to state and county officials. In the fourth chapter, the authors used published accounts of travelers on the Federal Road to document what the experience was like. These accounts not only provide information on what...

Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols (review)

Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols (review)

Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols

Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols

Remembering Hermannsburg and the Strehlows in cantata form: music, the German-Australian past and reconciliation

ABSTRACTThis essay uses the 2003 symphonic Cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend to examine some of the different entangled memories of German missionisation in Central Australia, including those held by the settler-European librettist Gordon Kalton Williams and members of the Indigenous Ntaria community choir, among others. Rather than simply reading this as a pernicious settler-Australian appropriation of Aboriginal culture, or as a simple story of harmonious intercultural collaboration, the author seeks to open up the multiplicity of meanings – the consonances, as well as the ambiguities and the disconcerting moments of uncanniness and clash that lie beneath the surface of a musical act of memory.

"A Sea of Blood and Smoking Ruin": Reflections on Sam Houston and Slavery

"A Sea of Blood and Smoking Ruin":Reflections on Sam Houston and Slavery Randolph B. Campbell* Click for larger view View full resolution Sam Houston in half-plate daguerreotype produced at the studio of Mathew Brady between 1848 and 1850. [End Page 134] The institution of slavery in the United States, the holding of people of African descent as chattel property, was a curse and a tragedy to everyone involved. The "Peculiar Institution," as southerners called it—not because it was strange, but because it was largely limited in the United States to the South and therefore defined the South—was wrong. It was wrong not primarily as a political matter and not as an economic matter, but wrong as a matter of morality. Well before the middle of the nineteenth century, many societies in the western world had generally concluded that the practice of one human owning another human as a piece of chattel property and treating that human the way any other chattel could be treated—for example, buying and selling it at will—was wrong.1 Nothing could make slavery "right." The way slaves were treated mattered, of course. For example, slaves' hours of labor, their food, their housing, and the punishments inflicted by their owners—every aspect of their day-to-day lives—obviously mattered in determining what life was like for those who had to endure slavery. However, it must always be understood that no amount of "kind" treatment could make slavery anything but wrong. Certainly, those who were enslaved knew it. [End Page 135] William Owens made this point perfectly in his memoir of growing up in North Texas, This Stubborn Soil. As a youth Owens visited two aged former slaves in Lamar County. Having been taught that slavery was an essentially benign institution, he believed that his hosts had been well taken care of in terms of food and shelter and said, "You'd a been better off staying slaves." One of the former slaves replied, "Don't say that. You don't know what you saying. Somebody else done said it and you believed 'em. … Don't let anybody tell you nothing about slavery … You don't know nothing about being a slave until you been one."2 So, take that old man's word for it, nothing could make slavery more than a wrong to be endured. The institution came with a huge price, the largest part of which certainly was paid by the enslaved, but in reality it exacted a price from virtually every human in the antebellum South, no matter how important or powerful they were. Consider the relationship between the greatest of all Texas leaders—Sam Houston—and the institution of slavery. Sam Houston was born into a slaveholding family in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in 1793, and he remained entangled in the peculiar institution for the entire seventy years of his life. When Sam Houston was born, his father, Major Samuel Houston, was too busy with his military career to place much emphasis on building a plantation, but the biographer Marquis James wrote that a slave named Peggy cared for Sam as a toddler and that at least five slaves accompanied the family members when they moved to East Tennessee in 1807 following the death of Major Houston. Sam Houston knew slavery from his infancy. It was always a fact of his life.3 During the twenty-five years from 1807, when he moved from Virginia to Tennessee, until 1832, when he first went to Texas, Sam Houston led a wild and reckless existence that only a very fortunate person (such as his hero Andrew Jackson) could have survived. Sam refused his family's demands that he settle down to a steady occupation, ran away, lived with the Cherokee Indians for almost three years, and joined the United States Army. He fought in the War of 1812 and nearly lost his life at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. After the war, he became a lawyer in Nashville and began a highly promising political career that took him to the governorship of Tennessee in 1829, but the breakup of his ill-fated [End Page...

Journey to Horseshoe Bend

Journey to Horseshoe Bend

The Visual Re-Mediation of a Complex Narrative: Re-Imagining the "Small World" Stories of Journey to Horseshoe Bend

This article has its foundations in a research project that was launched to compile a range of related archival records and media resources into a digital database repository with the intention of hyperlinking this material to specific and significant points in a selected text, T.G.H Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend. There are elements of the text that are of potential and particular relevance to the Aranda community based at Ntaria – also known as Hermannsburg – in Central Australia. The article traverses across a range of issues pertinent to the knowledge communities marked out by the text, and presents a case for representing and reimagining Journey to Horseshoe Bend in database narrative form.

Caddo Ceramic Vessels from the Womack Site (41LR1), Lamar County, Texas

The Womack site (41LR1) is an ancestral Caddo settlement situated on an alluvial terrace in a horseshoe bend of the Red River in north central Lamar County in East Texas. Harris completed the analysis and study of their 1938-mid-1960s investigations at the site, but the findings from the earlier archaeological investigations conducted at the site by the University of Texas (UT) in 1931 have only been recently published.

The Womack Site (41LR1), an Ancestral Caddo Settlement on the Red River in Lamar County, Texas

The Womack site (41LR1) is an ancestral Caddo settlement situated on an alluvial terrace in a horseshoe bend of the Red River in north central Lamar County in East Texas. Harris completed the analysis and study of their 1938-mid-1960s investigations at the site, but the findings from the earlier archaeological investigations conducted at the site by the University of Texas (UT) in 1931 have not been previously published. In this article I discuss the 1931 investigations by UT at the Womack site, and also summarize the character of the artifact assemblage recovered at the site during this work. Lastly, I consider the occupational character and settlement history of the Womack site—particularly its history of settlement by ancestral Caddo peoples—and define a Womack phase for the ca. A.D. 1690-1750 archeological components at the Womack, Sanders (41LR2), Goss Farm (41FN12), and Harling (41FN1) sites along the upper Red River and the Gilbert (41RA13) and Pearson (41RA5) sites in the upper Sabine River basin.

Soil Aggregates and Associated Organic Matter under Conventional Tillage, No-Tillage, and Forest Succession after Three Decades

Impacts of land use on soil organic C (SOC) are of interest relative to SOC sequestration and soil sustainability. The role of aggregate stability in SOC storage under contrasting land uses has been of particular interest relative to conventional tillage (CT) and no-till (NT) agriculture. This study compares soil structure and SOC fractions at the 30-yr-old Horseshoe Bend Agroecosystem Experiment (HSB). This research is unique in comparing NT and CT with adjacent land concurrently undergoing forest succession (FS) and in sampling to depths (15–28 cm) previously not studied at HSB. A soil moving experiment (SME) was also undertaken to monitor 1-yr changes in SOC and aggregation. After 30 years, enhanced aggregate stability under NT compared to CT was limited to a depth of 5 cm, while enhanced aggregate stability under FS compared to CT occurred to a depth of 28 cm and FS exceeded NT from 5–28 cm. Increases in SOC concentrations generally followed the increases in stability, except that no differences in SOC concentration were observed from 15–28 cm despite greater aggregate stability. Land use differences in SOC were explained equally by differences in particulate organic carbon (POC) and in silt-clay associated fine C. Enhanced structural stability of the SME soil was observed under FS and was linked to an increase of 1 Mg SOC ha−1 in 0–5 cm, of which 90% could be attributed to a POC increase. The crushing of macroaggregates in the SME soil also induced a 10% reduction in SOC over 1 yr that occurred under all three land uses from 5–15 cm. The majority of this loss was in the fine C fraction. NT and FS ecosystems had greater aggregation and carbon storage at the soil surface but only FS increased aggregation below the surface, although in the absence of increased carbon storage.

Soil Carbon Change through 2 m during Forest Succession Alongside a 30-Year Agroecosystem Experiment

Abstract Forest succession (FS) and no-till (NT) agriculture are generally assumed to have a beneficial effect on surficial soil organic C (SOC) stocks compared with conventional tillage (CT) management; however, land use effects to depths >30 cm remain uncertain. In this research we compared SOC contents and composition to 2 m under CT, NT, and FS at the 30-year Horseshoe Bend agroecosystem experiment in Athens, Georgia, USA. Soils from 0 to 2 m were fractionated into particulate organic C (POC) (53-2000 μm) and fine C (<53 μm) fractions, and bulk soil δ13C signatures were determined. Soils from 0 to 28 cm were dry- and wet-sieved to estimate aggregate stability. Soil solutions were also collected at 0, 15, and 100 cm for dissolved organic C (DOC) analysis. Full-profile (0-2 m) SOC storage is 52 Mg ha−1 in CT, 60 Mg ha−1 in NT, and 62 Mg ha−1 in FS. Significant differences are limited to 0-5 cm and are linked to enhanced aggregate stability under NT and FS. Increases in subsoil POC under FS and changes in soil δ13C and C/N ratio indicate that substantial subsoil C cycling has occurred. DOC fluxes at 0 cm were significantly greater under NT (200 kg ha−1 year−1) and FS (210 kg ha−1 year−1) than under CT (80 kg ha−1 year−1). DOC fluxes at 15 cm are estimated to be 20 kg ha−1 year−1 under CT and NT and 40 kg ha−1 year−1 under FS. At 100 cm, DOC fluxes are 2 kg ha−1 year−1, regardless of land use. An increase in FS POC of 2 Mg ha−1 from 15 to 100 cm outweighs cumulative differences in DOC input to this layer, implicating deep forest rooting and bioturbation as active mechanisms in subsoil C change. Whereas differences in SOC content were concentrated near the surface, dynamic changes in C cycling extend well below the plow layer.

"Read, Pause, and Reflect!!"

It is a peculiarly split view of human existence in which symbolizations of meaning operate in a closed universe of their own, divorced from the real facts of historical causation.1To foreground the stakes of my comment, I want to propose two modifications of Tip O'Neill's maxim, politics is local. First: All politics is literary. Whatever else it may be, ideology is in part the product of the artful deployment of language; words are necessary, if not always sufficient, structural elements of personal interest, social cohesion, and institutional power. Second: All is politics. There is no artful deployment of language that is not beholden to some sort of ideological configuration. To say literature and political - even in the service of troubling or interrogating the boundaries between the two, as this special issue of the JER does - is to posit difference and conjunction where there is no a priori separation. The work of thinking through the consequences of this continuity exceeds disciplinary specificity: a close analysis of texts is not only the trademark gesture of the scholar, as Sandra Gustafson puts it in her introduction to this issue, but also a necessary condition of doing history.To make this case in miniature, I want to look at a set of related moments from the presidential election of 1828, in which rhetorical critiques and theorizations of writing become a way of forging (and understanding what it means to forge) political or ideological relationships. First, though, the interested parties: on the one hand, President John Quincy - diplomat, negotiator, crafter of treaties, and eloquent pleader of cases; a man of words. On the other, General Andrew - Old Hickory, the mute cudgel, a conqueror of territories and a slayer of enemies; a man of action. Cast in the popular idiom as a contest between Adams who can write and Jackson who can fight, electioneering in 1828 was not only deeply in and of itself but often took the form of what we might think of as criticism.2Consider, for example, the famous anti-Jackson Coffin Handbill, an anonymously compiled and printed broadside that circulated widely in 1828. Enormous (58 X 42 cm), salacious, vividly illustrated, and textually complex, the object is an artistic wonder: It includes heavy black borders, 18 coffins (representing white men killed by in his capacities as general, duelist, and aggrieved private citizen), a vivid account (including an engraving) of stabbing a man in the back with sword-cane, and a poem about Jackson's cruel treatment of six unwitting army deserters. Each of these elements would be worth pursuing in a traditionally literary way: The borders and coffins, reminiscent of both an eighteenth-century elegy tradition and of the broadsides commemorating the Boston Massacre of 1770, trade on print-culture commonplaces to align support for with public mourning and with antiAmerican violence. The depiction of the stabbing has analogues in the sensational fiction of the time (particularly in the emergent genre of the temperance narrative). The poem is a poem, writing Jackson's refusal to pardon Army deserters into a ballad tradition and elevating his crimes to folk-legendary status. In other words, as political hackery goes, this object is remarkably canny about convention and textual form; its points about Jackson's infamy emerge not only from the gruesome facts it presents but also from the manner in which it presents them. Jackson's political and personal transgressions are not merely newsworthy, they are epical: suitable for the artist's burin, the balladeer's voice, the tragedian's pen. They deserve the theoretical immortality of art.3But there is another layer to the broadside's interest in politics. In between the coffins- -just below and to the left of the image of running through his unarmed counterpart - there is an account of Jackson's participation in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in east-central Alabama, March 27, 1814. …

Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (review)

J U L Y 2 0 0 9 229 work that women from that state were particularly helpful as financial contributors to the projects of the Virginia LMAs. A full-scale study of the LMAs in Alabama as well as other states is beyond the scope of what Janney sets out to do here, but there is clearly more to be learned about these organizations across the region. Janney’s book is an elegant, informative study that restores these forgotten women to postwar southern history and successfully challenges important scholarly arguments. It should also inspire more work on this interesting subject. AMY FEELY MORSMAN Middlebury College Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850. By Malcolm J. Rohrbough. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xiv, 675 pp. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-253-34932-3. $27.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-253-21932-9. Malcolm J. Rohrbough’s Trans-Appalachian Frontier is an expanded, third edition of a volume originally published in 1978. It traces the Euro-American development of the trans-Appalachian West through a comparative analysis of people’s experiences, emergent societies, and fundamental institutions. While Rohrbough notes that people are at the center of this story, so, too, is the land. Trans-Appalachian Frontier is organized into six parts that examine migrations and frontiers, and concludes with an assessment of the western country’s role in the context of national development. Across the frontiers, several common goals are discernible among the pioneering class: the struggle for security, stability, and institutional structures. The frontiers tended to be as much rural and agricultural in nature as they were youthful and family-oriented. On the other hand, the tendency toward self-interest and a sense of fatalism among Euro-Americans colored Native-white relations and perpetuated racism, as evidenced by subsequent Indian removal campaigns and the discovery that “slavery turned out to be entirely compatible” with the frontier economy and society (p. 10). Although the Kentucky and Tennessee frontiers were already coming alive in the 1780s, the blueprint for western settlement was found in the ordinances of 1785 and 1787. Together, these facilitated westward expansion of the American empire in terms of land disposal, education T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 230 (by reserving sections for schools), limiting slavery (Article VI), and matters of governance. Rohrbough is particularly good at demonstrating the vitality of county-level governments, upon which the settlers were dependent for authority to establish such basic improvements as roads, ferries, licensing, and most economic activities. Given the immediacy of county governments, Anglo-American male settlers had remarkable access to local politics—and they used it. The contested nature of westward expansion was initially most keenly felt in the Old Northwest. Arthur St. Clair, the Northwest Territory’s first governor, observed in 1788 that concerning Native Americans, “Our pretensions to the country they inhabit has been made known to them in so unequivocal a manner . . . there is little probability of there ever being any cordiality between us” (p. 91). Indeed a series of destabilizing wars ensued, culminating in General Anthony Wayne’s victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. These substantially alleviated the Indian threat on both sides of the Ohio River, such that in 1803 Ohio was able to attain statehood. Rohrbough notes that south of the Ohio the federal government generally pursued more accommodating relations with Native Americans, at least until Andrew Jackson’s victory at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Some two decades later, President Jackson instigated their sweeping removal to west of the Mississippi. Slavery was another contested issue. While Article VI condemned slavery north of the Ohio, it nevertheless provoked heated debates as statehood loomed for Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The region south of the Ohio experienced the expansion of slavery and the rise of the cotton kingdom. A commercial-oriented agrarianism linked the transAppalachian frontiers, yet distinctly different societies, with different interests , were emerging. Continued trans-Appalachian development came by way of land and territorial acquisitions and two great migrations occurring in 1815–1830 and 1830–1850. Migrants of the first wave favored destinations like Boon...

Memories of the Alabama Creek War, 1813–1814: U.S. Governmental and Native Identities at the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park

Memories of the Alabama Creek War, 1813–1814: U.S. Governmental and Native Identities at the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park

Wartime Prisoners and the Rule of Law: Andrew Jackson’s Military Tribunals during the First Seminole War

In April 1818, during the First Seminole War, General Andrew Jackson captured and executed two British allies of the Seminoles Spanish Florida. During the months following the executions, Americans vigorously debated the validity of Jackson's conduct, contesting and defending the general's decision to deny Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister the rights normally accorded to prisoners of war. The extensive congressional discussion of the executions and the comprehensive newspaper coverage indicate that the incident was prominent and important to contemporaries. As the Boston Intelligencer observed, the public mind was in a ferment on the subject.1Jackson's conduct during the war - his invasion of Florida, seizure of Spanish forts, and treatment of prisoners - occasioned the first major investigation by Congress, as well as the lengthiest debate engaged by the House of Representatives up to that date. In the winter of 1819, House and Senate committees investigated the matter and issued reports summarizing their findings, and the full House discussed the issues raised by Jackson's actions the Seminole War for three weeks, from January 18 to February 8, 1819. Because many newspapers were edited by close allies of party leaders, the fiercely partisan views they expressed often paralleled those articulated Congress. Beginning the summer of 1818 and continuing into 1819, the papers extensively covered the war, the executions, the congressional debate, and the larger questions of who qualified as a prisoner of war and what rights and protections wartime prisoners legally held. In fact, some newspapers, the Seminole War debate attracted even more attention than the issue of Missouri's admission as a slave state.2Although published scholarship provides excellent accounts of the First Seminole War, including general descriptions of the events and proceedings leading up to the prisoners' deaths, scholars have paid little attention to the contemporary debate and the conflicting ideas it revealed. Some commentators, for example, condemned Jackson for his failure to provide proper legal process to the two Britons. Arbuthnot and Ambrister were tried and convicted by a military tribunal, a process that these critics claimed violated the Constitution, federal statutes, and the laws of war and undermined the very principle of rule of law. Other writers derided the critics as obsessed with meaningless legal technicalities and praised Jackson for having achieved important national goals through the executions. The rhetoric of the commentaries evinces the early emergence of important ideals that later came to be associated with Jacksonian America. Occurring at the midpoint between Thomas Jefferson's and Andrew Jackson's presidencies - a decade after Jefferson left office, and a decade before Jackson became president - the executions came at an important moment political, legal, and social developments of the early national period. The ensuing debate marked an important stage the transition from Revolutionary to Jacksonian America, because it provided an opportunity to express core American values, with the sharp disagreement among commentators revealing how those values were changing.3Alexander Arbuthnot was a Scottish trader who had been based the Bahamas before going to Spanish Florida to sell goods to the Seminoles. He had also become a spokesman for the Red Stick Creeks who had fled to Florida the wake of the disastrous Creek civil war of 1813-1814. U.S. troops led by General Andrew Jackson had played a role that war, killing hundreds of Red Stick fighters at the decisive Battle of Horseshoe Bend. In Florida, Arbuthnot served as an advocate for the restoration of Creek lands Alabama and Georgia, which they had ceded to the United States the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson. Robert Christie Ambrister, a native of the Bahamas, was a former naval officer who had served with the British marines against the United States during the War of 1812. …

The Stone Site: A Waco Indian Village Frozen in Time

The Stone site (41ML38), referred to as “El Quiscat’s Village” by renchman turned Spanish explorer, Athanase de Mézères, is located on the horseshoe bend of the Brazos River, north of present day Waco. It is the last remaining of several documented Waco Indian village sites in the area from the 1770s. The personal journal of de Mézères confirms his visit to the village in 1772, 1778, and again in 1779. But in 1786, the explorer found the village abandoned. This gives archaeologists an exclusive chance to study the impact of European contact over a short time frame, by studying the archaeological record of both trade and native made goods from the site. Researchers found almost equal amounts of French and Spanish goods, including large quantities of weaponry parts as well as articles for ornamentation. But as important as the trade goods recovered, was the lack of certain types of objects such as pottery and cookware.

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...