THE APPALACHIAN CONFEDERACIES, 1765-1775.
When we declared ourselves an independent nation there were on our
borders three groups of Indian peoples. The northernmost were the
Iroquois or Six Nations, who dwelt in New York, and stretched down
into Pennsylvania. They had been for two centuries the terror of every
other Indian tribe east of the Mississippi, as well as of the whites;
but their strength had already departed. They numbered only some ten
or twelve thousand all told, and though they played a bloody part in
the Revolutionary struggle, it was merely as subordinate allies of the
British. It did not lie in their power to strike a really decisive
blow. Their chastisement did not result in our gaining new territory;
nor would a failure to chastise them have affected the outcome of the
war nor the terms of peace. Their fate was bound up with that of the
king's cause in America and was decided wholly by events unconnected
with their own success or defeat.
The very reverse was the case with the Indians, tenfold more numerous,
who lived along our western frontier. There they were themselves our
main opponents, the British simply acting as their supporters; and
instead of their fate being settled by the treaty of peace with Britain,
they continued an active warfare for twelve years after it had been
signed. Had they defeated us in the early years of the contest, it is
more than probable that the Alleghanies would have been made our western
boundary at the peace. We won from them vast stretches of territory
because we had beaten their warriors, and we could not have won it
otherwise; whereas the territory of the Iroquois was lost, not because
of their defeat, but because of the defeat of the British.
There were two great groups of these Indians, the ethnic corresponding
roughly with the geographic division. In the northwest, between the
Ohio and the Lakes, were the Algonquin tribes, generally banded
loosely together; in the southwest, between the Tennessee--then called
the Cherokee--and the Gulf, the so-called Appalachians lived. Between
them lay a vast and beautiful region where no tribe dared dwell, but
into which all ventured now and then for war and hunting.
The southwestern Indians were called Appalachians by the olden writers,
because this was the name then given to the southern Alleghanies. It is
doubtful if the term has any exact racial significance; but it serves
very well to indicate a number of Indian nations whose system of
government, ways of life, customs, and general culture were much alike,
and whose civilization was much higher than was that of most other
American tribes.
The Appalachians were in the barbarous, rather than in the merely
savage state. They were divided into five lax confederacies: the
Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. The latter
were merely a southern offshoot of the Creeks or Muscogees. They were
far more numerous than the northwestern Indians, were less nomadic,
and in consequence had more definite possession of particular
localities; so that their lands were more densely peopled.
In all they amounted to perhaps seventy thousand souls.[1] It is more
difficult to tell the numbers of the different tribes; for the division
lines between them were very ill defined, and were subject to wide
fluctuations. Thus the Creeks, the most formidable of all, were made up
of many bands, differing from each other both in race and speech. The
languages of the Chickasaws and Choctaws did not differ more from the
tongue of the Cherokees, than the two divisions of the latter did from
each other. The Cherokees of the hills, the Otari, spoke a dialect that
could not be understood by the Cherokees of the lowlands, or Erati.
Towns or bands continually broke up and split off from their former
associations, while ambitious and warlike chiefs kept forming new
settlements, and if successful drew large numbers of young warriors from
the older communities. Thus the boundary lines between the confederacies
were ever shifting.[2] Judging from a careful comparison of the
different authorities, the following estimate of the numbers of the
southern tribes at the outbreak of the Revolution may be considered as
probably approximately correct.
The Cherokees, some twelve thousand strong,[3] were the mountaineers of
their race. They dwelt among the blue-topped ridges and lofty peaks of
the southern Alleghanies,[4] in the wild and picturesque region where
the present States of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas
join one another.
To the west of the Cherokees, on the banks of the Mississippi, were
the Chickasaws, the smallest of the southern nations, numbering at the
outside but four thousand souls;[5] but they were also the bravest
and most warlike, and of all these tribal confederacies theirs was the
only one which was at all closely knit together. The whole tribe acted
in unison. In consequence, though engaged in incessant warfare with
the far more numerous Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, they more than
held their own against them all; besides having inflicted on the
French two of the bloodiest defeats they ever suffered from Indians.
Most of the remnants of the Natchez, the strange sun-worshippers, had
taken refuge with the Chickasaws and become completely identified with
them, when their own nationality was destroyed by the arms of New
Orleans.
The Choctaws, the rudest and historically the least important of these
Indians, lived south of the Chickasaws. They were probably rather less
numerous than the Creeks.[6] Though accounted brave they were
treacherous and thievish, and were not as well armed as the others. They
rarely made war or peace as a unit, parties frequently acting in
conjunction with some of the rival European powers, or else joining in
the plundering inroads made by the other Indians upon the white
settlements. Beyond thus furnishing auxiliaries to our other Indian
foes, they had little to do with our history.
The Muscogees or Creeks were the strongest of all. Their southern bands,
living in Florida, were generally considered as a separate confederacy,
under the name of Seminoles. They numbered between twenty-five and
thirty thousand souls,[7] three fourths of them being the Muscogees
proper, and the remainder Seminoles. They dwelt south of the Cherokees
and east of the Choctaws, adjoining the Georgians.
The Creeks and Cherokees were thus by their position the barrier tribes
of the South, who had to stand the brunt of our advance, and who acted
as a buffer between us and the French and Spaniards of the Gulf and the
lower Mississippi. Their fate once decided, that of the Chickasaws and
Chocktaws inevitably followed.
The customs and the political and social systems of these two tribes
were very similar; and those of their two western neighbors were
merely ruder copies thereof. They were very much further advanced than
were the Algonquin nations of the north.
Unlike most mountaineers the Cherokees were not held to be very
formidable fighters, when compared with their fellows of the
lowlands.[8] In 1760 and 1761 they had waged a fierce war with the
whites, had ravaged the Carolina borders, had captured British forts,
and successfully withstood British armies; but though they had held
their own in the field, it had been at the cost of ruinous losses. Since
that period they had been engaged in long wars with the Chickasaws and
Creeks, and had been worsted by both. Moreover, they had been much
harassed by the northern Indians. So they were steadily declining in
power and numbers.[9]
Though divided linguistically into two races, speaking different
dialects, the Otari and Erati, the political divisions did not follow
the lines of language. There were three groups of towns, the Upper,
Lower, and Middle; and these groups often acted independently of one
another. The Upper towns lay for the most part on the Western Waters, as
they were called by the Americans,--the streams running into the
Tennessee. Their inhabitants were known as Overhill Cherokees and were
chiefly Otari; but the towns were none of them permanent, and sometimes
shifted their positions, even changing from one group to another. The
Lower towns, inhabited by the Erati, lay in the flat lands of upper
Georgia and South Carolina, and were the least important. The third
group, larger than either of the others and lying among the hills and
mountains between them, consisted of the Middle towns. Its borders were
ill-marked and were ever shifting.
Thus the towns of the Cherokees stretched from the high upland region,
where rise the loftiest mountains of eastern America, to the warm,
level, low country, the land of the cypress and the long-leaved pine.
Each village stood by itself, in some fertile river-bottom, with
around it apple orchards and fields of maize. Like the other southern
Indians, the Cherokees were more industrious than their northern
neighbors, lived by tillage and agriculture as much as by hunting, and
kept horses, hogs, and poultry. The oblong, story-high houses were
made of peeled logs, morticed into each other and plastered with clay;
while the roof was of chestnut bark or of big shingles. Near to each
stood a small cabin, partly dug out of the ground, and in consequence
very warm; to this the inmates retired in winter, for they were
sensitive to cold. In the centre of each village stood the great
council-house or rotunda, capable of containing the whole population;
it was often thirty feet high, and sometimes stood on a raised mound
of earth.[10]
The Cherokees were a bright, intelligent race, better fitted to "follow
the white man's road" than any other Indians. Like their neighbors, they
were exceedingly fond of games of chance and skill, as well as of
athletic sports. One of the most striking of their national amusements
was the kind of ball-play from which we derive the game of lacrosse. The
implements consisted of ball sticks or rackets, two feet long, strung
with raw-hide webbing, and of a deer-skin ball, stuffed with hair, so as
to be very solid, and about the size of a base ball. Sometimes the game
was played by fixed numbers, sometimes by all the young men of a
village; and there were often tournaments between different towns and
even different tribes. The contests excited the most intense interest,
were waged with desperate resolution, and were preceded by solemn dances
and religious ceremonies; they were tests of tremendous physical
endurance, and were often very rough, legs and arms being occasionally
broken. The Choctaws were considered to be the best ball players.[11]
The Cherokees were likewise fond of dances. Sometimes these were comic
or lascivious, sometimes they were religious in their nature, or were
undertaken prior to starting on the war-trail. Often the dances of the
young men and maidens were very picturesque. The girls, dressed in
white, with silver bracelets and gorgets, and a profusion of gay
ribbons, danced in a circle in two ranks; the young warriors, clad in
their battle finery, danced in a ring around them; all moving in
rhythmic step, as they kept time to the antiphonal chanting[12] and
singing, the young men and girls responding alternately to each other.
The great confederacy of the Muscogees or Creeks, consisting of numerous
tribes, speaking at least five distinct languages, lay in a well-watered
land of small timber.[13] The rapid streams were bordered by narrow
flats of rich soil, and were margined by canebrakes and reed beds. There
were fine open pastures, varied by sandy pine barrens, by groves of
palmetto and magnolia, and by great swamps and cypress ponds. The game
had been largely killed out, the elk and buffalo having been
exterminated and even the deer much thinned, and in consequence the
hunting parties were obliged to travel far into the uninhabited region
to the northward in order to kill their winter supply of meat. But
panthers, wolves, and bears still lurked in the gloomy fastnesses of the
swamps and canebrakes, whence they emerged at night to prey on the hogs
and cattle. The bears had been exceedingly abundant at one time, so much
so as to become one of the main props of the Creek larder, furnishing
flesh, fat, and especially oil for cooking and other purposes; and so
valued were they that the Indians hit upon the novel plan of preserving
them, exactly as Europeans preserve deer and pheasants. Each town put
aside a great tract of land which was known as "the beloved bear
ground,"[14] where the persimmons, haws, chestnuts, muscadines, and fox
grapes abounded, and let the bears dwell there unmolested, except at
certain seasons, when they were killed in large numbers. However, cattle
were found to be more profitable than bears, and the "beloved bear
grounds" were by degrees changed into stock ranges.[15]
The Creeks had developed a very curious semi-civilization of their own.
They lived in many towns, of which the larger, or old towns, bore rule
over the smaller,[16] and alone sent representatives to the general
councils. Many of these were as large as any in the back counties of the
colonies;[17] but they were shifted from time to time, as the game was
totally killed off and the land exhausted by the crops.[18] The soil
then became covered by a growth of pines, and a so-called "old field"
was formed. This method of cultivation was, after all, much like that of
the southern whites, and the "old fields," or abandoned plantations
grown up with pines, were common in the colonies.
Many of the chiefs owned droves of horses and horned cattle, sometimes
as many as five hundred head,[19] besides hogs and poultry; and some of
them, in addition, had negro slaves. But the tillage of the land was
accomplished by communal labor; and, indeed, the government, as well as
the system of life, was in many respects a singular compound of
communism and extreme individualism. The fields of rice, corn, tobacco,
beans, and potatoes were sometimes rudely fenced in with split hickory
poles, and were sometimes left unfenced, with huts or high scaffolds,
where watchers kept guard. They were planted when the wild fruit was so
ripe as to draw off the birds, and while ripening the swine were kept
penned up and the horses were tethered with tough bark ropes. Pumpkins,
melons, marsh-mallows, and sunflowers were often grown between the rows
of corn. The planting was done on a given day, the whole town being
summoned; no man was excepted or was allowed to go out hunting. The
under-headman supervised the work.[20]
For food they used all these vegetables, as well as beef and pork, and
venison stewed in bear's oil; they had hominy and corn-cakes, and a cool
drink made from honey and water,[21] besides another made from fermented
corn, which tasted much like cider.[22] They sifted their flour in
wicker-work sieves, and baked the bread in kettles or on broad, thin
stones. Moreover, they gathered the wild fruits, strawberries, grapes,
and plums, in their season, and out of the hickory-nuts they made a
thick, oily paste, called the hickory milk.
Each town was built round a square, in which the old men lounged all day
long, gossiping and wrangling. Fronting the square, and surrounding it,
were the four long, low communal houses, eight feet high, sixteen feet
deep, and forty to sixty in length. They were wooden frames, supported
on pine posts, with roof-tree and rafters of hickory. Their fronts were
open piazzas, their sides were lathed and plastered, sometimes with
white marl, sometimes with reddish clay, and they had plank doors and
were roofed neatly with cypress bark or clapboards. The eave boards were
of soft poplar. The barrier towns, near white or Indian enemies, had log
houses, with portholes cut in the walls.
The communal houses were each divided into three rooms. The House of
the Micos, or Chiefs and Headmen, was painted red and fronted the
rising sun; it was highest in rank. The Houses of the Warriors and the
Beloved Men--this last being painted white--fronted south and north
respectively, while the House of the Young People stood opposite that
of the Micos. Each room was divided into two terraces; the one in
front being covered with red mats, while that in the rear, a kind of
raised dais or great couch, was strewn with skins. They contained
stools hewed out of poplar logs, and chests made of clapboards sewed
together with buffalo thongs.[23]
The rotunda or council-house stood near the square on the highest spot
in the village. It was round, and fifty or sixty feet across, with a
high peaked roof; the rafters were fastened with splints and covered
with bark. A raised dais ran around the wall, strewed with mats and
skins. Sometimes in the larger council-houses there were painted
eagles, carved out of poplar wood, placed close to the red and white
seats where the chiefs and warriors sat; or in front of the broad dais
were great images of the full and the half moon, colored white or
black; or rudely carved and painted figures of the panther, and of men
with buffalo horns. The tribes held in reverence both the panther and
the rattlesnake.
The corn-cribs, fowl-houses, and hot-houses or dugouts for winter use
were clustered near the other cabins.
Although in tillage they used only the hoe, they had made much progress
in some useful arts. They spun the coarse wool of the buffalo into
blankets, which they trimmed with beads. They wove the wild hemp in
frames and shuttles. They made their own saddles. They made beautiful
baskets of fine cane splints, and very handsome blankets of turkey
feathers; while out of glazed clay they manufactured bowls, pitchers,
platters, and other pottery.
In summer they wore buckskin shirts and breech-clouts; in winter they
were clad in the fur of the bear and wolf or of the shaggy buffalo.
They had moccasins of elk or buffalo hide, and high thigh-boots of
thin deer-skin, ornamented with fawns' trotters, or turkey spurs that
tinkled as they walked. In their hair they braided eagle plumes, hawk
wings, or the brilliant plumage of the tanager and redbird. Trousers
or breeches of any sort they despised as marks of effeminacy.
Vermilion was their war emblem; white was only worn at the time of the
Green-Corn Dance. In each town stood the war pole or painted post, a
small peeled tree-trunk colored red. Some of their villages were
called white or peace towns; others red or bloody towns. The white
towns were sacred to peace; no blood could be spilt within their
borders. They were towns of refuge, where not even an enemy taken in
war could be slain; and a murderer who fled thither was safe from
vengeance. The captives were tortured to death in the red towns, and
it was in these that the chiefs and warriors gathered when they were
planning or preparing for war.
They held great marriage-feasts; the dead were buried with the goods
they had owned in their lifetime.
Every night all the people of a town gathered in the council-house to
dance and sing and talk. Besides this, they held there on stated
occasions the ceremonial dances; such were the dances of war and of
triumph, when the warriors, painted red and black, returned, carrying
the scalps of their slain foes on branches of evergreen pine, while
they chanted the sonorous song of victory; and such was the Dance of
the Serpent, the dance of lawless love, where the women and young
girls were allowed to do whatsoever they listed.
Once a year, when the fruits ripened, they held the Green-Corn Dance, a
religious festival that lasted eight days in the larger towns and four
in the smaller. Then they fasted and feasted alternately. They drank out
of conch-shells the Black Drink, a bitter beverage brewed from the
crushed leaves of a small shrub. On the third day the high-priest or
fire-maker, the man who sat in the white seat, clad in snowy tunic and
moccasins, kindled the holy fire, fanning it into flames with the
unsullied wing of a swan, and burning therein offerings of the
first-fruits of the year. Dance followed dance. The beloved men and
beloved women, the priest and priestesses, danced in three rings,
singing the solemn song of which the words were never uttered at any
other time; and at the end the warriors, in their wild war-gear, with
white-plume headdresses, took part, and also the women and girls, decked
in their best, with ear-rings and armlets, and terrapin shells filled
with pebbles fastened to the outside of their legs. They kept time with
foot and voice; the men in deep tones, with short accents, the women in
a shrill falsetto; while the clay drums, with heads of taut deer-hide,
were beaten, the whistles blown, and the gourds and calabashes rattled,
until the air resounded with the deafening noise.[24]
Though they sometimes burnt their prisoners or violated captive women,
they generally were more merciful than the northern tribes.[25]
But their political and military systems could not compare with those of
the Algonquins, still less with those of the Iroquois. Their confederacy
was of the loosest kind. There was no central authority. Every town
acted just as it pleased, making war or peace with the other towns, or
with whites, Choctaws, or Cherokees. In each there was a nominal head
for peace and war, the high chief and the head warrior; the former was
supposed to be supreme, and was elected for life from some one powerful
family--as, for instance, the families having for their totems the wind
or the eagle. But these chiefs had little control, and could not do much
more than influence or advise their subjects; they were dependent on the
will of the majority. Each town was a little hotbed of party spirit; the
inhabitants divided on almost every question. If the head-chief was for
peace, but the war-chief nevertheless went on the war-path, there was no
way of restraining him. It was said that never, in the memory of the
oldest inhabitant, had half the nation "taken the war talk" at the same
time.[26] As a consequence, war parties of Creeks were generally merely
small bands of marauders, in search of scalps and plunder. In proportion
to its numbers, the nation never, until 1813, undertook such formidable
military enterprises as were undertaken by the Wyandots, Shawnees, and
Delawares; and, though very formidable individual fighters, even in this
respect it may be questioned if the Creeks equalled the prowess of their
northern kinsmen.
Yet when the Revolutionary war broke out the Creeks were under a
chieftain whose consummate craft and utterly selfish but cool and
masterly diplomacy enabled them for a generation to hold their own
better than any other native race against the restless Americans. This
was the half-breed Alexander McGillivray, perhaps the most gifted man
who was ever born on the soil of Alabama.[27]
His father was a Scotch trader, Lachlan McGillivray by name, who came
when a boy to Charleston, then the head-quarters of the commerce
carried on by the British with the southern Indians. On visiting the
traders' quarter of the town, the young Scot was strongly attracted by
the sight of the weather-beaten packers, with their gaudy, half-Indian
finery, their hundreds of pack-horses, their curious pack-saddles, and
their bales of merchandise. Taking service with them, he was soon
helping to drive a pack-train along one of the narrow trails that
crossed the lonely pine wilderness. To strong, coarse spirits, that
were both shrewd and daring, and willing to balance the great risks
incident to their mode of life against its great gains, the business
was most alluring. Young Lachlan rose rapidly, and soon became one of
the richest and most influential traders in the Creek country.
Like most traders, he married into the tribe, wooing and wedding, at the
Hickory Ground, beside the Coosa River, a beautiful half-breed girl,
Sehoy Marchand, whose father had been a French officer, and whose mother
belonged to the powerful Creek family of the Wind. There were born to
them two daughters and one son, Alexander. All the traders, though
facing danger at every moment, from the fickle and jealous temper of the
savages, wielded immense influence over them, and none more than the
elder McGillivray, a far-sighted, unscrupulous Scotchman, who sided
alternately with the French and English interests, as best suited his
own policy and fortunes.
His son was felt by the Creeks to be one of themselves. He was born
about 1746, at Little Tallasee, on the banks of the clear-flowing Coosa,
where he lived till he was fourteen years old, playing, fishing,
hunting, and bathing with the other Indian boys, and listening to the
tales of the old chiefs and warriors. He was then taken to Charleston,
where he was well educated, being taught Greek and Latin, as well as
English history and literature. Tall, dark, slender, with commanding
figure and immovable face, of cool, crafty temper, with great ambition
and a keen intellect, he felt himself called to play no common part. He
disliked trade, and at the first opportunity returned to his Indian
home. He had neither the moral nor the physical gifts requisite for a
warrior; but he was a consummate diplomat, a born leader, and perhaps
the only man who could have used aright such a rope of sand as was the
Creek confederacy.
The Creeks claimed him as of their own blood, and instinctively felt
that he was their only possible ruler. He was forthwith chosen to be
their head chief. From that time on he remained among them, at one or
the other of his plantations, his largest and his real home being at
Little Tallasee, where he lived in barbaric comfort, in a great roomy
log-house with a stone chimney, surrounded by the cabins of his sixty
negro slaves. He was supported by many able warriors, both of the half
and the full blood. One of them is worthy of passing mention. This was a
young French adventurer, Milfort, who in 1776 journeyed through the
insurgent colonies and became an adopted son of the Creek nation. He
first met McGillivray, then in his early manhood, at the town of Coweta,
the great war-town on the Chattahoochee, where the half-breed chief,
seated on a bear-skin in the council-house, surrounded by his wise men
and warriors, was planning to give aid to the British. Afterwards he
married one of McGillivray's sisters, whom he met at a great dance--a
pretty girl, clad in a short silk petticoat, her chemise of fine linen
clasped with silver, her ear-rings and bracelets of the same metal, and
with bright-colored ribbons in her hair.[28]
The task set to the son of Sehoy was one of incredible difficulty, for
he was head of a loose array of towns and tribes from whom no man could
get perfect, and none but himself even imperfect, obedience. The nation
could not stop a town from going to war, nor, in turn, could a town stop
its own young men from committing ravages. Thus the whites were always
being provoked, and the frontiersmen were molested as often when they
were quiet and peaceful as when they were encroaching on Indian land.
The Creeks owed the land which they possessed to murder and rapine; they
mercilessly destroyed all weaker communities, red or white; they had no
idea of showing justice or generosity towards their fellows who lacked
their strength, and now the measure they had meted so often to others
was at last to be meted to them. If the whites treated them well, it was
set down to weakness. It was utterly impossible to restrain the young
men from murdering and plundering, either the neighboring Indians or the
white settlements. Their one ideal of glory was to get scalps, and these
the young braves were sure to seek, no matter how much the older and
cooler men might try to prevent them. Whether war was declared or not,
made no difference. At one time the English exerted themselves
successfully to bring about a peace between the Creeks and Cherokees. At
its conclusion a Creek chief taunted the mediators as follows: "You have
sweated yourselves poor in our smoky houses to make peace between us and
the Cherokees, and thereby enable our young people to give you in a
short time a far worse sweat than you have yet had."[29] The result
justified his predictions; the young men, having no other foe, at once
took to ravaging the settlements. It soon became evident that it was
hopeless to expect the Creeks to behave well to the whites merely
because they were themselves well treated, and from that time on the
English fomented, instead of striving to put a stop to, their quarrels
with the Choctaws and Chickasaws.
The record of our dealings with them must in many places be unpleasant
reading to us, for it shows grave wrong-doing on our part; yet the
Creeks themselves lacked only the power, but not the will, to treat us
worse than we treated them, and the darkest pages of their history
recite the wrongs that we ourselves suffered at their hands.
1. Letter of Commissioners Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh, to
the President of the Continental Congress, Dec. 2, 1785. (Given in
Senate documents, 33d Congress, 2d session, Boundary between Ga. and
Fla.) They give 14,200 "gun-men," and say that "at a moderate
calculation" there are four times as many old men, women, and children,
as there are gun-men. The estimates of the numbers are very numerous and
very conflicting. After carefully consulting all accessible authorities,
I have come to the conclusion that the above is probably pretty near the
truth. It is the deliberate, official opinion of four trained experts,
who had ample opportunities for investigation, and who examined the
matter with care. But it is very possible that in allotting the several
tribes their numbers they err now and then, as the boundaries between
the tribes shifted continually, and there were always large communities
of renegades, such as the Chickamaugas, who were drawn from the ranks of
all.
2. This is one of the main reasons why the estimates of their numbers
vary so hopelessly. As a specimen case, among many others, compare the
estimate of Professor Benj. Smith Barton ("Origin of the Tribes and
Nations of America," Phila., 1798) with the report of the Commissioner
of Indian Affairs for 1827. Barton estimated that in 1793 the
Appalachian nations numbered in all 13,000 warriors; considering these
as one fifth of the total population, makes it 65,000. In 1837 the
Commissioner reports their numbers at 65,304--almost exactly the same.
Probably both statements are nearly correct, the natural rate of
increase having just about offset the loss in consequence of a partial
change of home, and of Jackson's slaughtering wars against the Creeks
and Seminoles. But where they agree in the total, they vary hopelessly
in the details. By Barton's estimate, the Cherokees numbered but 7,500,
the Chocktaws 30,000; by the Commissioner's census the Cherokees
numbered 21,911, the Choctaws 15,000. It is of course out of the
question to believe that while in 44 years the Cherokees had increased
threefold, the Choctaws had diminished one half. The terms themselves
must have altered their significance or else there was extensive
inter-tribal migration. Similarly, according to the reports, the Creeks
had increased by 4,000--the Seminoles and Choctaws had diminished by
3,000.
3. "Am. Archives," 4th Series, III., 790. Drayton's account, Sept. 23,
'75. This was a carefully taken census, made by the Indian traders.
Apart from the outside communities, such as the Chickamaugas at a later
date, there were:
737 gun-men in the 10 overhill towns
908 " " 23 middle "
356 " " 9 lower "
a total of 2,021 warriors. The outlying towns, who had cast off their
allegiance for the time being, would increase the amount by three or
four hundred more.
4. "History of the American Indians, Particularly Those Nations
Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and
North Carolina, and Virginia." By James Adair (an Indian trader and
resident in the country for forty years), London, 1775. A very valuable
book, but a good deal marred by the author's irrepressible desire to
twist every Indian utterance, habit, and ceremony into a proof that they
are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes. He gives the number of Cherokee
warriors at 2,300.
5. Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh, in their letter, give them
800 warriors: most other estimates make the number smaller.
6. Almost all the early writers make them more numerous. Adair gives
them 4,500 warriors, Hawkins 6,000. But much less seems to have been
known about them than about the Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws; and
most early estimates of Indians were largest when made of the
least-known tribes. Adair's statement is probably the most trustworthy.
The first accurate census showed the Creeks to be more numerous.
7. Hawkins, Pickens, etc., make them "at least" 27,000 in 1789, the
Indian report for 1837 make them 26,844. During the half century they
had suffered from devastating wars and forced removals, and had probably
slightly decreased in number. In Adair's time their population was
increasing.
8. "Am. Archives," 5th Series, I., 95. Letter of Charles Lee.
9. Adair, 227. Bartram, 390.
10. Bartram, 365.
11. Adair, Bartram.
12. Bartram.
13. "A Sketch of the Creek Country," Benjamin Hawkins. In Coll. Ga.
Hist. Soc. Written in 1798, but not published till fifty years
afterwards.
14. _Do_, p. 33.
15. The use of the word "beloved" by the Creeks was quite peculiar. It
is evidently correctly translated, for Milfort likewise gives it as
"bien aimé." It was the title used for any thing held in especial
regard, whether for economic or supernatural reasons; and sometimes it
was used as western tribes use the word "medicine" at the present day.
The old chiefs and conjurers were called the "beloved old men"; what in
the west we would now call the "medicine squaws," were named "the
beloved old women." It was often conferred upon the chief dignitaries of
the whites in writing to them.
16. Hawkins, 37.
17. Bartram, 386. The Uchee town contained at least 1,500 people.
18. _Do_.
19. Hawkins, 30.
20. Hawkins 39; Adair, 408.
21. Bartram, 184.
22. Milfort, 212.
23. Hawkins, 67. Milfort, 203. Bartram, 386. Adair, 418.
24. Hawkins and Adair, _passim_.
25. _Do_. Also _vide_ Bartram.
26. Hawkins, 29, 70. Adair, 428.
27. "History of Alabama," by Albert James Pickett, Charleston, 1851,
II., 30. A valuable work.
28. Milfort, 23, 326. Milfort's book is very interesting, but as the man
himself was evidently a hopeless liar and braggart, it can only be
trusted where it was not for his interest to tell a falsehood. His book
was written after McGillivray's death, the object being to claim for
himself the glory belonging to the half-breed chief. He insisted that he
was the war-chief, the arm, and McGillivray merely the head, and boasts
of his numerous successful war enterprises. But the fact is, that during
this whole time the Creeks performed no important stroke in war; the
successful resistance to American encroachments was due to the diplomacy
of the son of Sehoy. Moreover, Milfort's accounts of his own war deeds
are mainly sheer romancing. He appears simply to have been one of a
score of war chiefs, and there were certainly a dozen other Creek
chiefs, both half-breeds and natives, who were far more formidable to
the frontier than he was; all their names were dreaded by the settlers,
but his was hardly known.
29. Adair, 279.