10 - A Sacred Fire Flickers

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The Lower Creeks and related tribes gradually lost territory in the 1700's. A trickle of settlers moving into Georgia swelled to a flood. More and more white people claimed land that various governments had guaranteed belonged exclusively to the Indians.

The settlers, for the most part, were rough-hewn and ready to fight for a better life. They had fled Europe for common reasons-to escape religious persecution, crowded conditions, and few economic opportunities. They had abandoned family, home, and friends, cutting virtually all ties with their pasts, in pursuit of dreams. When they arrived in the New World, many began small farms. They soon discovered that choice agricultural ground was near major rivers in the rich, fertile flood plains.

Acreage farmed away from rivers without benefit of the nourishing silts deposited by flooding often wore out quickly. Land in the hill country also quickly eroded when etched by the plow and stripped of trees. Discouraged by their hard existence, homesteaders were easily lured further west by rumors of fruitful, uninhabited land. Everyone knew that the first settlers into a new area had the best chance of claiming the lush river-front property.

There were also other reasons compelling settlers westward. New immigrants arrived every day from Europe looking for the promised land they had heard about, boosting competition for the best sites. Too, established homesteaders chaffed at being hemmed in by new neighbors. They wanted territory with fewer people.

Many probably didn't consider the effect their encroachments were having on the Indians. The Native Americans, according to a popular view, were dangerous nuisances blocking the way of civilization. When the Indians attacked, fear, anger, and a thirst for vengeance enveloped the colonists. Volunteers sometimes traveled long distances to fight and hurl back what they considered savage killers. Brutality committed on both sides fostered smoldering and long-lasting resentments.

When there was war, the Indians invariably lost to better equipped and larger armies. The resulting peace treaties almost always required them to relinquish more land. They lost still more property because of mounting debts they accumulated in dealings with traders. Thomas Jefferson was one of the early leaders who advocated placing trading posts near the Indians, exchanging goods for indebtedness, and then acquiring Indian land to wipe out the debt.

Georgia's colonial government in 1773 forgave Indian debts with traders in exchange for land. Called the New Purchase, the agreement was negotiated with Creek and Cherokee leaders in Augusta, Georgia. The document added 1.5 million acres to the colony, pushing its boundaries far north of Augusta. William Bartram attended the meetings leading to the cessation of land and wrote, "...the negotiations continued undetermined many days; the merchants of Georgia demanding at least two millions of acres of land from the Indians, as a discharge of their debts, due, and of long standing. The Creeks, on the other hand, being a powerful and proud spirited people, their young warriors were unwilling to submit to so large a demand."

The warriors appeared ready to break off the talks and fight, according to Bartram, who thought they were unwilling "to listen to reason and amicable terms."

"However, at length, the cool and deliberate counsels of the ancient venerable chiefs, enforced by liberal presents of suitable goods, were too powerful inducements for them any longer to resist, and finally prevailed."

By the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the Creeks still claimed much of Georgia. Their lands extended to the far eastern portion of the state to the Ogeechee River. The vast territory was important to the people living along the Chattahoochee River. Many of the Creeks left their villages on extended hunting trips, particularly in winter. Traveling in small groups, some did not return to their villages until February or March, laden with smoked meat and many animal skins. Deer continued to be the most important quarry, although the Indians also hunted other animals, including bear, which they prized for its oil, essential to their cooking and ceremonial life.

When the Indians killed an animal, they recited a ritualized chant asking the animal's forgiveness. They believed that failure to follow the ritual could result in the animal's spirit following the hunter and causing illness. On winter hunts, Indians often offered the first deer in a sacrificial fire. On subsequent hunts, when they ate meat, they sometimes threw one piece into the fire as an offering. Corn and other cultivated plants, such as beans and squash, were still vital to the survival of the Creeks, Yuchis, and other natives who lived along the Chattahoochee.

After the Revolutionary War, military veterans began locating on Indian territory based on government grants in reward for their service. John O'Quinn, for example, apparently moved onto Fort Benning land in the 1780's, although some researchers think he didn't arrive until the 1820's. O'Quinn, a relative of the Eelbecks, who later operated an important rural grist mill, was buried on Fort Benning land, according to archeologist Frank Schnell Jr.

White settlement in the Fort Benning area, however, was sparse during this period and apparently caused little friction with the Indians. Trouble was brewing, however, in part because many Georgians were incensed that Creeks had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. Settlers also wanted more land opened to them. They demanded that the new United States government push Indian boundaries further west. The Lower Creeks and their allies accepted the surrender of more land, this time giving up property to the Oconee River, a boundary passing through present-day communities of Athens and Milledgeville, Georgia. Negotiations to finalize the deal took place on the Oconee River in 1789 at a place called Rock Landing. Many of the Upper Creeks, however, led by a chief named Alexander McGillivray, adamantly refused to yield more territory, and negotiations fell apart.

Fighting erupted between Upper Creek warriors and white settlers and threatened to escalate into a full-blown war. President George Washington stepped in to defuse the tension by inviting McGillivray and other Creek chiefs to New York City, then the nation's capital. The president sent a personal escort to Georgia in the summer of 1790 to accompany the Indian chief McGillivray and others to New York. Eight Upper Creek chiefs joined McGillivray, his nephew, and two servants as they rode on horseback to a rendezvous with other Creek chiefs at Stone Mountain, near present-day Atlanta. Then the entire group rode north toward New York City. Once there, McGillivray eventually agreed to a treaty moving the Georgia boundary to the Oconee River. The document also guaranteed no further encroachments on Creek lands and perpetual friendship with the United States.

One subsidiary agreement to the treaty, then kept secret, committed the United States to provide each chief "a commission, a great medal with proper ornaments, and each one-hundred dollars annually for themselves and the other beloved men of their towns respectively."

The chiefs received large silver medals from four to six inches in diameter, hand engraved with elaborate etchings. The medals, along with other peace offerings, including engraved silver arm bands, were likely distributed at the signing ceremony, August 13, 1790, which was attended by President Washington. These peace offerings were highly prized by the chiefs, not only because of their monetary value, but because they were symbols of the chiefs' power and high status. One of the silver arm bands, broken in two pieces, was recently discovered on Fort Benning. The artifact was engraved with the letters "US". The husband and wife archeological teams of Dean and Karen Wood and Rita and Dan Elliot found the ornament in a northern section of Fort Benning. Such a find is extremely rare, perhaps because the peace offerings were so valued. The letters "D V" were stamped in the arm band, the mark of silversmith David Vinton of Providence, Rhode Island.

Three U.S. presidents-Washington, John Adams, and Jefferson-attempted to maintain smooth relations with Native Americans by promoting trade treaties and by trying to induce the Indians to become more settled by raising livestock and growing crops according to methods practiced by white farmers. The efforts often failed, in part because the government provided inadequate money, training, and material to help foster change. Government agents also had to deal with disgruntled natives put off by the government's inability to halt the flow of settlers across guaranteed borders.

With each new treaty, trespassing on Indian lands only seemed to worsen, leading to sporadic outbursts of violence. The greater the number of settlers who moved into some new corner of Indian territory, the more pressure there was to negotiate a new treaty, giving that land to the United States. In the early 1800's, the Creeks again agreed to relinquish more land. This time they gave up all claims east of the Ocmulgee River, slicing present-day Georgia almost in half. Benjamin Hawkins was the U.S. Government's Indian agent to the Creeks at the time. Hawkins, who spoke the Creek language, was a careful observer of Native American lifestyles. He wrote about much of what he saw, beginning in the late 1700's when he became an Indian agent.

Hawkins established his home and agency headquarters near the Flint River but his base of operation was often the village of Kasita on Fort Benning land when dealing with natives living along the Chattahoochee. He also maintained a subagency at Coweta Tallahassee, not far from the present Fort Benning boundaries. He worked tirelessly to persuade the Indians to live more like white settlers and even hired a white farmer to live among the Creeks at the Upatoi village on the northern fringes of Fort Benning land. There are indications that Hawkins' efforts were successful, particularly with the Lower Creeks and Yuchis. Beginning in the Mississippian period, Indians on Fort Benning land had maintained small farmsteads apart from centralized villages. During Hawkins' tenure, the establishment of individual farms apparently increased. Many who once lived in centralized villages, such as Yuchi Town and Kasita, moved to outlying farms, say archeologists Martin Dickinson and Lucy Wayne. Further evidence of this dispersal of settlements came with the recent discovery of the site where the small village of Upatoi once existed. The archeological teams of Wood and Elliot discovered the site north of Upatoi Creek near the fall line.

The archeologists identified Upatoi, also known as Apatai, as "a branch or satellite village" of the larger village of Kasita. The head man or chief of the village, Tus-se-kia Mico (known as the Warrior King), once lived in Kasita and apparently moved to the village in 1792.

Besides locating the village and its council house remains, the archeologists found evidence of two clusters of numerous small Creek farms nearby. Writings from the period indicate that such farms were often fenced. The Indians raised corn, pumpkins, peaches, beans, peas, and potatoes. They also tended cattle, hogs, and horses. Hawkins introduced the Indians to the iron plow in 1797.

There are also signs that Indians living throughout the region gradually changed the way they built their homes. Earlier inhabitants stuck upright posts into the ground, then wove branches between the posts and covered the frames with clay. Now they favored log cabins on short stilts, similar to frontier homes built by white settlers. They used clay to fill in the open spaces between the logs.

Adam Hodgson, a missionary, visited Kasita in 1820 and wrote that the town "appeared to consist of about 100 houses, many of them elevated on poles from two to six feet high, and built of unhewn logs, with roofs of bark, and little patches of Indian corn before the doors."

The village apparently still retained some of the ancient features of Creek Indian communities, including the large, circular town house where the chief and his counselors met in the winter. There was also a square ground with four open sheds facing each other across a plaza where the chief and important men met in good weather. Near the square ground, there "is a high pole, like our May poles, with a bird at the top, round which the Indians celebrate their Green Corn Dance," wrote Adam Hodgson.

The Green Corn Ceremony represented the most important Creek festival. It lasted eight days at Kasita, according to Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. A celebration of bountiful crops, the ceremony was held in mid to late summer when the corn was ripening. It was also a New Year's celebration, a period of thanksgiving, and a religious event to help purify the spirit.

A special reverence enveloped the annual lighting of the sacred fire. Everyone who watched grew silent. The high priest, clothed in white deer skin and white moccasins, began twirling wood against wood to start the fire, generating the sparks that grew into flames. He fanned the fire with a wing from a large white bird, probably a heron or crane. Then he placed the small fire into an earthen vessel and carried it into the open plaza of the square ground. The plaza had earlier been sprinkled with a covering of new white sand. Attendants fed dry wood into the flames. The high priest, chanting solemnly, then circled the sacred fire. He poured some of the ceremonial drink A-cee into the fire, perhaps to bless it.

The priest also dropped into the sacred fire a mixture made from button snakeroot plants and perhaps other important medicines the Indians used. The button snakeroot medicine was used to treat kidney diseases and a variety of other afflictions, including snake bite.

The ceremony neared the end when the high priest led everyone in a single-file procession to the river where they immersed themselves in the water. Then everyone walked to the village square ground for a final dance.

In 1804, Benjamin Hawkins negotiated an agreement with some Native American leaders to guarantee safe passage for whites along the Lower Creek Trail to Kasita and beyond. The United States had just completed the Louisiana Purchase and an idea blossomed to build a road eventually from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. The Lower Creek Trail, nothing more than a narrow path at first, became known as the Federal Road. Initially, it began in Augusta, Georgia. On Fort Benning land, the Federal Road followed a ridge south of Upatoi Creek and crossed the Chattahoochee at Lawson Army Air Field. In 1811, workers began widening the path and relocating some sections to accommodate wagons and the increasing traffic. At some point, crossing the Chattahoochee became easier when a ferry began carrying wagons and pedestrians.

A number of Indians, particularly among the Upper Creeks, disapproved of the Federal Road and the parade of settlers using it to move onto Indian lands. The Lower Creeks were less combative and more receptive to Benjamin Hawkins' ideas because they lived closer to white settlements and had more peaceful contacts with whites. Lower Creeks married whites more often than the upper Creeks, and some Lower Creek leaders were more willing to accept payments to comply with the wishes of settlers.

Inevitably, friction mounted between the Upper Creeks and Lower Creeks. The spark for conflict came the following year with the outbreak of the War of 1812. The British, once again battling the Americans, sent agents to the Creeks urging them to join the war. Many Lower Creeks turned a deaf ear to the British, but many Upper Creeks listened. The British were not alone in attempts to stir the Creeks to war. The influential Shawnee leader Tecumseh agitated for all Indians to join him in an uprising to push white settlers from Indian lands. Tecumseh visited Upper Creek towns, giving passionate, eloquent speeches to gather support.

The Red Sticks, part of the Upper Creeks, were especially outraged by continuing violations of their sovereignty. Apparently, they were called Red Sticks because they painted themselves and their war clubs bright red, although some think the name derives from bundles of sticks natives sent to other villages to mark the passage of days until some significant event. If the final stick in the bundle was painted red, war would begin on that day. In February 1813, a group of Red Stick warriors, mistakenly thinking their leaders had declared war against the United States, attacked and killed seven frontier families. The assaults led to virtual civil war among Creek factions. A Creek tribal council put the Indians responsible for the killings on trial and executed them. A Red Stick chief Menawa, and other leaders, declared they would kill those responsible for the executions. They whipped up enthusiasm for wiping out all vestiges of Hawkins' Indian economic enhancement program.

Tensions mounted later that year in July when a frontier militia, composed of both whites and people of mixed blood (descendants of Creek and white parents), ambushed a Red Stick wagon train filled with ammunition in the southern part of present-day Alabama. In the fighting, the militia obliterated the Indian town Burnt Corn. The Red Sticks retaliated by storming Fort Mims, just north of present-day Mobile, Alabama. They killed more than 400 people, including black slaves and white settlers. Concern and panic spread throughout white settlements on the frontier. The Georgia militia dispatched troops commanded by General John Floyd from Athens, Georgia. The troops, following the Federal Road, passed through the Fort Benning area, crossed the Chattahoochee, and launched attacks against several Upper Creek villages. Red Stick warriors, after intense fighting, retreated, and the militia moved in and burned the villages.

Floyd also withdrew. He and his soldiers returned to the Chattahoochee where they built a fort. Called Fort Mitchell, in honor of Georgia governor David Mitchell, the stockade was located on the Federal Road about one-half mile from the river. Floyd wrote General Andrew Jackson, giving a brief description of Fort Mitchell: "have caused a strong stockade fort defended by block houses to be erected on the west side of the Rivers Flint and Chattahoochee." Located just outside the perimeter of modern-day Fort Benning, Fort Mitchell was destined to play a pivotal role in local history.

Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson assembled a powerful force composed of the Tennessee Militia, U.S. infantry, and Indian warriors. Lower Creeks, Yuchis, and Cherokees all participated heroically and decisively. The force invaded northern Alabama and struck south into the area between the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, heartland of the Upper Creeks. Prospects looked good for a quick end to the conflict when Jackson's forces won two successive battles. Then his army bogged down, hindered by the logistics of maneuvering so many men and getting supplies in dense wilderness far from his home base. Some soldiers threatened to quit and head home as their enlistments began to expire. Jackson also faced the real possibility his army would starve or would dissolve into full-fledged mutiny.

Reinforcements and supplies finally arrived in January 1814, and Jackson was once again on the move. After two bloody battles with the Upper Creeks, however, his forces were compelled to withdrew to an American stockade on the Coosa River.

The Upper Creeks were suffering even more, battered by the war and dislocated from villages where corn and other food could be found. They had fewer weapons and fewer warriors than their opponents.

A group of about a thousand warriors and their families took refuge on a peninsula formed by a tear-shaped loop of the Tallapoosa River. Protected by the river on all sides except for a thin strip of land, the peninsula was roughly shaped like a horseshoe.

During the winter of 1814, the warriors and their families hunkered down inside crude log huts against the cold. While they waited, some tried to make their position impregnable. Across the entranceway to the peninsula, they built a log barricade five to eight feet tall. They survived the long winter by hunting game in the nearby countryside.

On the morning of March 27, Jackson's forces, more than 3,000 soldiers and warriors strong, approached the Upper Creek fortress. Jackson later wrote that the horseshoe bend in the river contained possibly "eighty or a hundred acres [of land]. The River immediately around it, is deep, and somewhat upwards of a hundred yards wide. As a situation for defense it was selected with judgment, and improved with great industry and art."

Jackson ordered General John Coffee to move some 700 mounted infantry and 600 Cherokee, Lower Creek, and Yuchi warriors across the Tallapoosa River. Silently, in the early morning hours, these forces fanned out and surrounded all sides of the peninsula, except for the entranceway. Here, Jackson readied 2,000 troops to storm the barricade.

The Upper Creek defenders, numbering about one thousand, waited on the other side. At about 10:30 a.m., Jackson ordered soldiers to fire two cannons repeatedly. Despite a two-hour barrage, the shelling had little effect. The barricade still stood.

During the cannon rounds, one of the Cherokee leaders, Junaluska, swam across the river with another Indian. Without being noticed, the two warriors cut loose many of the Upper Creek canoes anchored and unoccupied on the peninsula side of the water. They pulled a number of the canoes back across the river where other Indian warriors stealthily climbed inside and paddled silently back across the river. The warriors began firing their weapons as they stormed into the back side of the Upper Creek encampment.

Simultaneously, sometime after noon, Jackson ordered his soldiers to charge the barricade with fixed bayonets. The soldiers clambered over the impediment and began a hand-to-hand fight with the Upper Creeks.

The battle lasted for hours and ultimately dissolved into a slaughter as the Upper Creeks were driven into the river and into withering fire from white soldiers and Indian warriors.

As Jackson later wrote, "The event could no longer be in doubt. The enemy, although many of them fought to the last with the kind of bravery desperation inspires, were at last entirely routed and cut to pieces. The whole margin of the river which surrounded the peninsula was strewed with the slain."

Jackson lost about 200 soldiers and warriors in the fight. The Upper Creek force was just about wiped out. Some estimates indicate that only 41 of them survived, while others think about 200 Upper Creek warriors managed to escape. Though severely wounded, the Upper Creek leader, Menawa, did manage to elude capture. The Americans took about 350 Upper Creek women and children prisoner.

The battle all but finished the Creeks as a power in Alabama and Georgia, although many of them would rise to fight again. The Creeks signed a peace treaty with the now familiar proviso that they give up land, some 20 million acres, more than half of their ancestral territory. They surrendered a huge block of territory in south Georgia and what became central Alabama. A wide strip of land on both sides of the Chattahoochee still belonged to them, but would shrink rapidly over the next decade.

Even after their horrible defeat, many Upper Creeks remained defiant. Only one of their chiefs signed the peace treaty. Many Upper Creeks slipped away into northern Florida where, with runaway slaves and African-American freemen, they formed a major part of the people known as the Seminoles. The Seminoles, who learned to live in virtually impenetrable swamps, were to have their own battles with American forces. The ultimate outcome, however, favored the Indians.

The Fort Benning area continued to be the focus for Lower Creek and Yuchi settlement. The building of Fort Mitchell added a new element. Eventually an entire community grew up around the fort, including residences, a Native American trading house, a tavern, and a hospital.

A number of Creek Indians apparently camped near the trade center. Called a "factory," the enterprise was sponsored by the United States government as a kind of store where the Indians could buy goods at low prices. It was never highly successful, and the center was sold to the Creeks in 1820. There were various taverns located along the Federal Road, including the one at Fort Mitchell. Apparently places where travelers could rest for the night, the taverns were located about 16 miles apart, which was a day's wagon ride. Generally, a tavern was operated by a Native American with an American partner, according to historian Jeffrey Holland.

The state of Alabama was established in 1819, formed from Indian lands. While not as large as Alabama today, the newly designated state resulted in the Creeks being surrounded by whites. There were now state governments and legal white settlements on both sides of their land. In 1821, the Creeks signed over still more territory. This time they were restricted in Georgia to ground between the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers. Instead of easing tensions, however, the new boundary only increased pressure on the Creeks.

Chapter 11: As Long as Grass Grows

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