Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796

PATROLLING THE BORDER

Early American Places is a collaborative project of the University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, Northern Illinois University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press. The series is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.earlyamericanplaces.org.

ADVISORY BOARD

Vincent Brown, Duke University

Andrew Cayton, Miami University

Cornelia Hughes Dayton, University of Connecticut

Nicole Eustace, New York University

Amy S. Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, University of Chicago

Peter Charles Hoffer, University of Georgia

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University

Joshua Piker, College of William & Mary

Mark M. Smith, University of South Carolina

Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

PATROLLING THE BORDER

Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796

JOSHUA S. HAYNES

© 2018 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017042882

ISBN: 9780820353166 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN: 9780820353173 (ebook).

For Janice and Terry

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Whole Nation in Common: Native Rights and Border Defense, 1770–1773

2 Neither the Abicas, Tallapuses, nor Alibamas Desire to Have Any Thing to Say to the Cowetas but Desire Peace: The White-Sherrill Affair and the Rise of Border Patrols, 1774–1775

3 Settle the Matter Yourselves: The American Revolution in Creek Country, 1775–1783

4 We Mean to Have the Consent of Every Headman in the Whole Nation: Treaties, Resistance, and Internal Creek Political Conflict, 1783–1785

5 Always in Defense of Our Rights: The Creek Threat, Real and Imagined, 1786

6 An Uncommon Degree of Ferocity: Border Patrols and the Oconee War, 1787–1790

7 The Indians Still Desputed Giving up Their Rights to That Land: Renewed Border Patrols, 1790–1793

8 Like Pulling Out Their Hearts and Throwing Them Away: State Control, 1793–1796

Epilogue: All the Apprehensions of Savage Ferocity

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

1. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1770–1800

2. A general map of the southern British colonies in America

3. A New and Accurate Map of the Province of Georgia in North America

4. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1776–1783

5. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1783–1785

6. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1786

7. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1787–1790

8. Forts and Blockhouses Built in the Upper Oconee River Valley, 1780s–1790s

9. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1790–1792

10. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1793–1795

11. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1796–1800

Figures

1. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1770–1800

2. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1776–1783

3. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1790–1800

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would have been impossible without the mentorship, support, patience, and friendship of so many people that it would be impossible to thank them all here. First and foremost, however, I would like to thank Claudio Saunt, whose keen insights and disciplined approach to the historian’s craft have helped me navigate a long and winding path. Like Claudio, Jace Weaver, John Inscoe, and Stephen Mihm each read multiple drafts of the project in its earliest stages. Several colleagues and friends generously volunteered to read subsequent versions and provided valuable feedback, including Kathi Nehls, Drew Cayton, and Kyle Zelner. I especially wish to thank Robbie Ethridge for her unflagging support since my earliest attempts at scholarship. She and a second, anonymous reader unwound the manuscript and helped me see it more clearly. Walter Biggins at the University of Georgia Press has been patient and supportive. I hope the book is worthy of the time they invested, and, of course, the errors that remain are mine alone.

Several organizations have supported the project over the years. While a struggling Ph.D. candidate, I received a Summer Doctoral Research Fellowship from the University of Georgia’s Graduate School, a research grant from the UGA Department of History’s Amanda and Greg Gregory Graduate Studies Enhancement Fund, and a travel grant from UGA’s Institute of Native American Studies. A grant from the American Philosophical Society Phillips Fund for Native American Research funded additional research that became the bedrock of the initial chapters. As a junior faculty member at the University of Southern Mississippi, I received an Aubrey Keith Lucas and Ella Ginn Lucas Endowment for Faculty Excellence Award that supported final research and the preparation of the book’s several maps.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Janice and Terry Haynes. Love and gratitude, always.

PATROLLING THE BORDER

Introduction

In March 1822, Creek Depredations Claims Commissioner James P. Preston wrote the following lines to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun from his office in Athens, Georgia: The period under consideration [1786–90], undoubtedly, was one of great suffering and privation to the border settler on the frontier adjoining the territory of the Creeks, whose frequent irruptions into the white settlements, appear to have been marked with an uncommon degree of ferocity.¹ Americans broadly shared and often repeated Preston’s assessment of Creek Indian relations with Georgia in the late eighteenth century. By contrast, Creek leader Alexander McGillivray described a particular violent incident in 1786 in milder terms: Only six persons lost their lives on the part of the Georgians, and these fell victims to their own temerity. McGillivray likely captured most Creeks’ perspective on Creek-Georgia relations when he wrote that this affair, which their iniquitous proceedings had drawn upon them, has been held forth by the Georgians as the most violent unprovoked outrage that was ever committed.² In 1789, Secretary of War Henry Knox reported to President George Washington that the State of Georgia is engaged in a serious war with the Creeks.³ Matters grew more grave over the ensuing decades until one Georgia settler despaired in 1812: May it please your Honor if we don’t get some assistance we shall have to move off of this frontier or our familys will be kiled and skulpt by the Indians. We are too weak to Stand in our own defence.⁴ Almost a century later, Georgians held Creeks in their historical memory as by far the most numerous, powerful and warlike of all the Indian tribes in North America, and their name had gotten during the Revolutionary war, to strike terror around every hearthstone in Georgia.⁵ In what early Georgia historians called the Oconee War, Creeks waged irregular, desultory . . . savage warfare inspired by their supreme chief, Alexander McGillivray, who was especially animated by hatred of Georgia.⁶

In the late eighteenth century, Georgia’s colonial encroachment pressured Creeks to manage their borders more actively. Creeks found that stemming the tide of Georgia settlers was a difficult task under their indigenous political system based on local autonomy and a system of leadership that privileged older, elite leaders yet encouraged younger men to achieve status through warfare. Border conflicts contributed to energetic debates among both Creeks and Anglo-Americans over what kind of government best suited the people. Creeks and Georgians alike favored local power, yet resolving border conflict required more centralized management of land and people. Georgia’s expansion forced Creeks into a conversation about the very nature of political leadership that resulted in a remarkable period of innovation, compromise, and coalescence.

Creeks met the colonial threat by experimenting with several leadership strategies that infringed on local autonomy. Teams of town leaders conducted diplomacy. Skilled figurehead executives claimed centralized authority based on kinship ties and status achieved through war, diplomacy, and trade. Most importantly, common Creek men conducted nearly a thousand raids best understood as border patrols.

Despite experiments with centralized action, Creek people remained committed to the autonomy of each talwa, social units comprising a town and its associated villages, or talofa.⁷ As intrusions from Georgia became more severe, the diverse people of Creek country reluctantly accepted that, to remain independent, they must restrict men’s freedom to raid. They did so, however, in ways that emphasized talwa autonomy. They accommodated structural conflict between older leaders whose status derived from kinship and success in war and diplomacy, younger Creeks who aspired to high status through similar achievements, and a new generation of elites whose status rested on wealth accumulation.

White Georgians focused on the occasional violence of border patrols to craft a lasting political narrative that exaggerated Creek ferocity. This justified Georgia’s overwhelming violence against Creeks and punitive land taking. Georgia’s militias frequently transgressed Creek boundaries. Each intrusion provoked a response until Georgians’ rhetoric about Creek ferocity became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Georgians’ actions also challenged federal authority over Indian affairs, ultimately leading to U.S. intervention.⁸ For these reasons, Creek border patrols determined the course of Creek-Georgia relations and shaped fundamental debates over the structure of government in both Creek country and the United States.

Late eighteenth-century Creeks constituted a coalescent society in which independent talwas and their talofas were the core units of political, social, and spiritual life.⁹ Most Creeks foregrounded local interests in their relations with Georgia. The autonomy of Creek talwas derived from the preceding two hundred years of coalescence during which people from several different cultures and language groups banded together. European contact shattered Mississippian chiefdoms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with cycles of violence, epidemic disease, disruption of subsistence practices, and a devastating trade in Indian slaves. Many refugees from shattered Mississippian chiefdoms migrated to present-day central Alabama and southwest Georgia where they built towns near those of local populations. These new provinces became the heart of Creek country. Towns valued their distinctiveness and competed for standing with one another, yet they coalesced into a large, multilingual society capable of cooperating on matters of mutual concern. By the 1770s, Muskogees were the largest group in a Creek confederacy that also included Alabamas, Apalaches, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Hitchitis, Koasatis, Natchez, Shawnees, Tunicas, Yamasees, Yuchis, and others. The Muskogee language predominated, but residents of Creek country also spoke Koasati, Alabama, Yuchi, Shawnee, and several other indigenous, European, and likely African languages.¹⁰

Within this large, diverse Creek polity, talwa members labored to retain their distinctiveness in political processes, spiritual practices, and material culture while cooperating and competing with other towns and provinces.¹¹ Anthropologist John R. Swanton declared almost a century ago that each talwa should be considered a little state.¹² Subsequent scholars have agreed that each talwa was institutionally complete, with all the human and material resources needed to sustain itself and provide its members fulfilling lives.¹³

Creeks changed their leadership systems throughout the eighteenth century to better manage their borders, yet they drew on precontact, Mississippian concepts including the importance of warfare.¹⁴ Late eighteenth-century Creek talwas typically possessed an all-male town council led by mature civil and diplomatic leaders known as miccos. Miccos were assisted by a contingent of subordinate political, military, and religious officers. Together, they conducted internal and external affairs. Scholars have struggled to reconstruct eighteenth-century southeastern Indian leadership systems by carefully evaluating documentary evidence, the archaeological record, and the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists. In addition to miccos, they have identified several other Creek leadership titles. Many of the men who attempted to control Creek border patrols in the late eighteenth century claimed such titles. Alexander McGillivray took the title isti atcagagi thlucco, or great beloved man. Translators likely rendered literally the war title tustanagee thlucco, or great warrior, when they introduced the Head Warrior of Cussita and the Big Warrior of Cussita. The Second Man of Little Tallassee also went by Neothlocko, or heneha thlucco, a vice chief and peace advocate who presides over other town elders and advisors.¹⁵ Scholars suggest a moiety system may have underpinned such leadership positions. Dual organization divided Creek towns and provinces into war/red and white/peace moieties from which people selected peace and war leaders. Such a moiety system may have been developed to integrate diverse peoples into the coalescent society in the late seventeenth century. As a social mechanism, it may have maintained a ranked check-and-balance system between older towns designated Hathagalgi, white, and newer towns designated Tchilokogalgi, red. Tchilokogalgi can also be translated as speakers of a different language, and the more pejorative term stinkard often was used to indicate the lower status of newer, non-Muskogee speaking communities.¹⁶ Late seventeenth-century Creek dual organization, however, is still poorly understood, and by the late eighteenth century, moieties appear to have played little if any role in southeastern Indian leadership. Men’s rankings, particularly war titles, by contrast, retained their resonance.¹⁷

In the late eighteenth century, success in warfare remained as critical to a Creek man’s identity and prospects as it had been for hereditary, precontact Mississippian elites. Across the Mississippian world, members of high-ranking lineages competed fiercely for control of chiefdoms, and success in warfare was crucial to continued leadership. In the postcontact period, hereditary hierarchies collapsed, but competition between older miccos and ambitious young men became a customary feature of eighteenth-century politics among Creeks and other Deep South coalescent societies. Young men needed war honors to prosper, and patrolling Creek borders provided an opportunity to secure them. With a distinguished military career, a man gained war titles, influence in town councils, and perhaps could eclipse older miccos eventually. By the end of the eighteenth century, access to Euro-American manufactured goods was another critical component of influence. Such access typically required strategic alliances with traders or colonial agents, or, for young men, success in hunting and raiding. Some scholars interpret this generational conflict and the eager pursuit of rank as evidence of enduring dual organization. Tension between youth and age perhaps mirrors that between red/war and white/peace moieties. Even so, older men typically dominated town councils, arriving at consensus among themselves and informing young men of their decisions.¹⁸

Town councils took precedence over individual miccos and distinguished warriors in eighteenth-century talwa government, and some talwas outranked others in the larger Creek polity. More importantly, both town councils and miccos lacked the power to enforce decisions. Archaeological evidence suggests that some Mississippian chiefdoms also had possessed councils, though their relationship to chiefly power remains unclear.¹⁹ Also like their Mississippian forebears, eighteenth-century Creek leaders occasionally claimed the right to speak for multiple towns, especially leaders from older, Muskogee talwas. Several refugee groups joined Muskogees during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but Swanton argued that each talwa remained virtually self-governing after joining the federated body.²⁰ He even suggested that the word talwa itself rather covers the English concept ‘tribe.’²¹ In the late eighteenth century, U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins used the terms tribe and town interchangeably when describing Creeks.²² Later arrivals in Creek country such as Yuchis and Shawnees appear to have been forced into subordinate positions. Dominant towns required newcomers to seek permission before settling and to defer to their leadership in the coalescent society’s politics.²³ For most of the eighteenth century, there was no larger, national government with authority over towns and their residents, though the major provinces and the broader confederacy held multitown councils with increasing frequency.²⁴ In recent years, a growing chorus of scholars has called for closer attention to the independent towns, villages, and regional divisions that comprised eighteenth-century coalescent societies, rather than focusing on larger, ill-defined associations such as tribes, nations, or confederacies. This book contributes to that conversation by analyzing the ways conflict in a particular early American place influenced life in the talwas.²⁵

Like political decision-making, Creek social and spiritual life also revolved around the talwa, its public square ground, and the sacred fire at its center. Even religious observances simultaneously asserted talwa autonomy and provided a site for cooperation and competition between towns. The most important event on the Creek religious calendar was the annual busk, or poskita, a purification and world-renewal ritual that bound talwa members together. The busk could last several days and included renewing human relationships by forgiving all transgressions short of murder and physical renewal through the purging of old possessions. The fundamental rite of spiritual, social, and material renewal was the extinguishment and rekindling of a sacred fire at the center of the square ground. Each household took embers from the sacred fire for a new hearth fire. Dominant towns occasionally invited allied towns to share in their poskita celebrations while excluding others, illustrating the capacity to build community yet assert primacy. The talwa’s role as political, social, and spiritual center accounts for the remarkable durability of Creek dedication to talwa autonomy.²⁶

Matrilineal clan membership was another critical element of Creek identity that occasionally motivated border patrols and complicated both internal politics and Creek-Georgia relations. Matrilineal clan membership and exogamous marriage practices helped foster a broader Creek identity that could transcend barriers between talwas, provinces, and speakers of different languages. Clan-based justice derived from Creek religious beliefs and served as the basis of domestic law. Usually referred to as the law of crying blood or blood revenge, clan-based justice required balance. If a person suffered death or injury, that person’s clan kin were responsible for restoring cosmic balance by causing an equivalent death or injury, though material compensation could substitute in some cases. Clan-based justice emphasized restoring balance over punishing offenders, so the particular individual responsible for an offense need not be the target of a crying blood killing. When applied to homicides committed by non-Creeks, the larger polity demanded compensation from the offending polity, though the victim’s close clan kin from his/her talwa likely led the chorus demanding satisfaction. Creeks decided at the talwa level whether to participate in taking satisfaction through violence. In the late eighteenth century, conflicts between Creeks and Georgians resulting from border raids often went unresolved because justice based on crying blood clashed with Euro-American notions of warfare, crime, and the punishment of guilty individuals.²⁷

White Americans’ assessments of Creek ferocity in late eighteenth-century border conflicts disregarded Creek territorial rights, as well as their motives and methods of border management. A systematic analysis of claims submitted by white Georgians reveals that late eighteenth-century Creek raiders were far more interested in divesting white settlers of their property than in depriving them of their scalps. Georgians attributed to Creeks almost a thousand raids between 1770 and 1800, yet just over 150 of them resulted in bloodshed. Brief spikes of violence followed controversial land cession treaties, especially in 1788 and 1793. In the last three decades of the century, Creeks allegedly killed at least 275 people out of a total non-Indian population of 83,000. During the same period, however, Georgians killed 108 Creeks, and probably many more not documented, out of a total Creek population of just over 17,000.²⁸ Proportionally, then, Creeks suffered greater loss.

FIGURE 1. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1770–1800

While such bloodshed could be devastating for all involved, the pattern of Creek raiding reveals more than violence. Almost 75 percent of raids resulted in horse theft. Mapping Creek raids illustrates that 76 percent of them (746 of 977) took place in the Oconee strip, a long swath of land between the Oconee and Ogeechee Rivers stretching some 150 miles, roughly from present-day Athens to Vidalia, Georgia. For much of the period, the Oconee River was the contested border between Creek country and Georgia.²⁹ The frequency of theft, the dearth of violence, the geographical focus, and the timing of raids show that what Georgians remembered as savage warfare is much better understood as property confiscation by border patrols asserting Creek sovereignty and territoriality.

These border patrols drew on precontact ideas and a long history of experience with colonizers, yet their consequences were unpredictable. Late eighteenth-century southeastern Indians considered theft raids a substitute for warfare from which young men could gain rank by testing their spiritual power. By the end of the century, Choctaw war titles included words for horses and cattle, and during the Redstick War, Creek warriors took cow tails and painted them red, treating them in the same manner as enemy scalps.³⁰ When border patrols confiscated or destroyed squatters’ property, their actions sometimes pushed white leaders to negotiate less onerous treaty terms and urge settlers to respect Native boundaries. Just as often, however, Creek raids provided back-country Georgians with a political narrative they used to justify horrendous violence.³¹

MAP 1. Creek Raids in Georgia, 1770–1800

Border patrols became a central political issue in late eighteenth-century Creek country. Creeks used them to assert their sovereignty within a bounded territory, yet border raiding exacerbated deep tensions in Creek society. Border patrols harnessed a popular spirit of unity in defense of sovereignty and territory, but the stress of fighting for survival sharpened internal divisions.³² A new generation of elites who enjoyed unequal access to wealth and power attempted to control border raiding. They drew their power not from inherited status and a prestige goods economy as their Mississippian forebears had done, but from accumulated wealth, literacy, and numeracy. They envisioned a Creek Nation with a powerful, central government and an economy based on commercial ranching and slave-based agriculture. In one sense, these new elites resembled their Mississippian ancestors: they strove to institutionalize inequality and secure high status for their lineages. Indeed, several of the new, late eighteenth-century elites, most prominently Alexander McGillivray, were born into high-status, Muskogee-speaking families. Mississippian-style hereditary, chiefly power had disappeared, but a new generation appeared eager to re-create hegemonic leadership in altered form. If Creeks committed to centralized leadership could command border raiders, that control would buttress their authority and allow them to shape treaties with Georgia and the United States.³³

Assertions of centralized leadership over a unified Creek polity threatened both talwa autonomy and the livelihoods of common hunters. An economy founded on the deerskin trade and reciprocal exchange had afforded nonelites social mobility for much of the eighteenth century. For many young men, the freedom to raid the border expressed their preference for talwa autonomy and territorial sovereignty. As a substitute for warfare, border raiding furnished opportunities to rise in political and social rank, and, importantly, improve one’s economic standing. While young men’s border raiding was in keeping with customary generational tension in Creek society, it also challenged elite assertions of exclusive leadership in a unified polity.³⁴ By the turn of the nineteenth century, despite pressure to accept centralized leadership with monopoly control of theft and violence, most Creek people remained devoted to talwa autonomy.³⁵

Paradoxically, Creek border patrols represented both deep continuity with Mississippian ideas and two and a half centuries of political innovation in a colonized space. In the late eighteenth century, Creeks used Mississippian forms of diplomacy they had adapted to colonial politics. Leading miccos managed reciprocal exchange relationships first with Spanish, British, and French colonies, and later with the State of Georgia, premised on mutual recognition of territorial boundaries. Between 1717 and 1763, Creeks honed a policy of neutrality, so-called play-off diplomacy, that kept the three competing colonial powers in the Deep South at bay. In the 1760s, autonomous talwas briefly asserted nationhood in defense of Creek borders. In the years following the Seven Years’ War, Creeks sought a new foreign policy because they found themselves encircled by British colonies without the diplomatic counterweights of Spain and France. In the 1770s, they began constructing a new policy based on negotiated boundaries, border patrols, and greater coalescence.³⁶

After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War, Great Britain expanded its presence in the Deep South and tightened management of its colonies with a raft of new policies, many of which were meant to prevent conflict between Native Americans and colonials. Creeks recognized that firm borders between themselves, Georgia, and the newly British colonies of East and West Florida were critical to their independence. After 1773, Creeks understood that maintaining boundaries would require frequent diplomacy and possibly more forceful action. The Oconee River valley was the most important piece of real estate in the region. Creek country’s Lower Towns, some twenty-five talwas clustered in the lower Chattahoochee River valley, asserted superior claim to the Oconee lands as vital hunting grounds. Georgians considered the region fertile farm and ranch land essential to the colony’s growth. Moreover, the Lower Towns and several Upper Towns prized the trading path that crossed Oconee lands to connect them to Augusta, Georgia, and Charles Town, South Carolina, as their essential commercial artery. By 1783, some Creeks accepted the Oconee River as a sensible, natural boundary and worked to reorient trade to the Gulf Coast. Others insisted on retaining hunting rights to the Oconee’s east bank. Still others rejected the Oconee boundary entirely, insisting that Georgians must confine themselves to lands behind the Ogeechee River, some thirty miles east of the Oconee. Different Creek leaders worked to create stable, majority factions—if not national consensus—on border issues. Such factions typically reflected the basic geographic distribution of the Creek population into Lower Towns on the Chattahoochee River and Upper Towns along the Coosa-Tallapoosa-Alabama Rivers. However, towns from one region occasionally allied with towns from another based on converging economic and political interests. For their part, white Georgians routinely hunted, grazed their cattle, settled, and farmed both sides of the Oconee River while denying Creek hunting rights on the east bank. In the waning decades of the eighteenth century, the conflict over the Oconee boundary became increasingly bitter between Creeks themselves, as well as between Creeks and Georgians.³⁷

Creek warriors’ geographical focus on the Oconee River boundary is central to characterizing their raids as an experimental vehicle for asserting sovereignty and territoriality. If late eighteenth-century raids represented only random violence or opportunistic theft by cavalier young men seeking status and profit, such raids could have focused on other settlements such as Pensacola, Mobile, the Tensaw district north of Mobile Bay, the Cumberland settlements around present-day Nashville, Tennessee, or the plantation district between the Altamaha and St. Marys Rivers on the Georgia–East Florida border. Pensacola, Mobile, and Tensaw especially were geographically closer to most Creek towns and could be reached over easier paths or by boat.³⁸ While some Creek warriors raided these locales, they were infrequent events compared with the hundreds of raids that struck the Oconee valley. Raids focused on the Oconee because Creeks generally agreed that Georgia posed the greatest threat to their sovereignty.

Historians have illuminated much about early American history in the Deep South, including the political transformations of southeastern Indian groups broadly and Creek-Georgia relations specifically.³⁹ For much of the last three decades, ethnohistorians studying early America have focused on the themes of Native American agency, negotiation, and the potentially positive outcomes of diplomatic relations between groups of people who lacked the military might to dominate one another.⁴⁰ Such scholarship on eighteenth-century relations between colonizers and Native Americans often portrays an initial period of productive negotiation and trade that inevitably degenerates into violence.

In particular, some of the best scholarship on the Creek-Georgia frontier suggests that prior to the 1750s, Creeks and colonists cocreated a land of opportunity, but by the 1780s violence defined Creek-Georgia relations, careening inexorably into the Redstick War in 1813. Creeks and Georgians certainly clashed along the border in the late eighteenth century, but such clashes represented more than the collapse of a carefully negotiated frontier exchange economy into wanton violence, and their repercussions were more than merely prelude to the Redstick War. As others have argued, border tension resulted in armed conflict along the Oconee River, a Creek-Spanish alliance influenced Creek policy, the strife exposed corrosive inequality in Creek society, and the conflict invited U.S. government intervention.⁴¹

A key element of this boundary dispute has been overlooked. Historians have acknowledged Creek raiding, yet they have resisted characterizing it as the deliberate policy of a coalescing, indigenous nation. Creeks could and did act in concert when their interests aligned, yet they continued to prefer local autonomy. Border raiders frequently are presented as the retainers of individual leaders, most often Alexander McGillivray, or merely as aimless youths. On the contrary, most Creek raiders acted in accord with consensus in their talwas to defend Creek country’s borders. When they acted outside consensus, they risked reprisal from members of their clans, towns, and provinces. Their actions illuminate the kinds of innovative political actions that indigenous peoples contrived in their struggle to protect the larger polity’s independence while pursuing local interests. Creeks need not have seen themselves as a unified nation with a centralized government and identical economic interests in order to agree that white Georgians were a threat.

Historians generally agree that colonial states pressured Native American societies to transform themselves in the late 1700s, and they have identified several factors driving Creek-Georgia relations: factionalism, generational tension, talwa autonomy, nativistic religious renewal, dependence on European manufactured goods amid a flagging deerskin trade, and the disruptive influence of Creeks devoted to property accumulation, many of whom possessed mixed ancestry.⁴² Border patrols reflected and amplified these trends. They constituted a defense of Creek hunting lands—the people’s most valuable political, material, and spiritual resource. They drew on long-standing practices like talwa autonomy, admiration for young men’s reckless courage, the religious duty to balance deaths, and a conception of the Oconee strip’s spiritual value.⁴³ Border patrols attracted men who shared a broad political vision of territorial integrity and political sovereignty yet agreed on little else.

While border patrols briefly harnessed a spirit of unity among Creek people to communicate sovereignty and territoriality to outsiders, the message Georgians received was quite different.⁴⁴ Georgians denied Creek rights by criminalizing resistance to white encroachment. Georgians’ depicted raids as unprovoked ferocity to justify relentless, overwhelming violence and land taking. Indeed, one early historian described the Georgians’ Oconee River valley settlements of the 1780s as semi-military colonies.⁴⁵ He intended to portray them as defensive, but from the Creek perspective, they constituted an invasion. Georgians’ narrative about Indian savagery and their desire to appropriate Indian lands precluded any acknowledgment of Creek rights to defend their borders.

As I examine the late eighteenth-century border conflict between Creeks and Georgia, I use the terms Indian, Native American, indigenous, and Native interchangeably, in keeping with prevailing trends in scholarly literature and journalism. In keeping with those same trends, I use more specific national, ethnic, talwa, and clan identifiers whenever possible. I use Muskogee to refer to the dominant linguistic group in Creek country, but I avoid using it as a general term to refer to all Creeks. I use the terms white and Indian because, by the 1770s, both Natives and non-Natives used them frequently. I use Anglo-American or British to refer to white, English-speaking people and the broader Euro-American to include colonizers associated with other European nations. As always, I use more specific identifiers whenever possible. The terms state, nation, confederacy, and tribe, are of European origin, and, while scholars struggle to define, historicize, and apply them to Native polities in meaningful ways, many ethnohistorians now avoid the term tribe altogether. This book is in part an attempt to understand the long, messy political and social process of coalescence in Creek country that defies tidy labels.⁴⁶

In the broadest sense, this book offers a model of relations between Natives and newcomers in the eighteenth century that avoids both romanticizing peaceful negotiation and exaggerating violence. It illuminates debates over localism versus nationalism in both Creek country and the United States. Scholarship foregrounding the roles of negotiation and violence has obscured the methods and motivations of Native warriors. Their raids constituted a measured political response to colonialism. Far from being chaotic, unprovoked warfare, border patrols functioned as a talwa-sanctioned institution founded on the principle of local autonomy. Patrollers sought to impose order by ejecting outsiders and confiscating their property. The preponderance of theft and the paucity of violence suggest that Georgians inflated the Creek threat to justify the expropriation of resources. Such rhetoric led to U.S. government intervention and Creek political innovation, yet, throughout the period, most Creeks persisted in their allegiance to talwa autonomy. Viewing border patrols as legitimate, talwa-sanctioned political action allows for a more nuanced understanding of colonial relations and political change in Native towns.

1 / The Whole Nation in Common: Native Rights and Border Defense, 1770–1773

By 1770, the people historians refer to as Muskogees, Creeks, the Creek Confederacy, or the Creek Nation comprised a multilingual, coalescent society whose constituents had been cooperating, competing, migrating, and mixing for more than two centuries. Eighteenth-century Creeks descended from the precontact Mississippian chiefdoms of present-day Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee. The diverse peoples of Creek country shared much owing to their common Mississippian origins, and such diversity underlain by commonality became a source of both strength and tension in the late eighteenth century.

In 1770, Creek country comprised seventeen thousand people living in sixty to eighty towns, or talwas, and their related villages. Some of the more prominent towns boasted more than a thousand residents, but most were smaller. By the early 1770s, many prominent towns were shedding population as residents separated into satellite villages to accommodate ranching and slave-based agriculture. The towns divided into five provinces, four of which clustered near present-day Montgomery, Alabama. The Coosa-Tallapoosa-Alabama River confluence region around Montgomery was home to the Tallapoosa, Alabama, Abika, and Okfuskee provinces. Over time, they became known as the Upper Creeks or Upper Towns. The fifth province, Apalachicola, clustered near present-day Columbus, Georgia, in the Chattahoochee River valley. This cluster became known as the Lower Towns or Lower Creeks. Each province emerged from a similar cycle of Mississippian chiefdom rise, collapse, migration, and coalescence over the course of the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries.¹ Differences between the talwas and provinces endured through this long period of coalescence, and those differences help illuminate the tension between local autonomy and unity in late eighteenth-century Creek country.

The Tallapoosa province on the lower Tallapoosa River developed from the fusion of Woodland Era locals and