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RED EAGLE AND THE WARS WITH THE CREEK INDIANS OF ALABAMA.
_FAMOUS AMERICAN INDIANS._
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.
NEW YORK:
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY,
751 Broadway.
COPYRIGHT BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY.
1878.
[Illustration: RED EAGLE'S LEAP.]
PREFACE.
A work of this kind necessarily makes no pretension to originality in
its materials; but while all that is here related is to be found in
books, there is no one book devoted exclusively to the history of the
Creek war or to the life of William Weatherford, the Red Eagle. The
materials here used have been gathered from many sources--some of them
from books which only incidentally mention the matters here treated,
touching them as a part of larger subjects, and many of them from books
which have been long out of print, and are therefore inaccessible to
readers generally.
The author has made frequent acknowledgments, in his text, of his
obligations to the writers from whose works he has drawn information
upon various subjects. By way of further acknowledgment, and for the
information of readers who may be tempted to enlarge their reading in
the interesting history of the South-west, he appends the following list
of the principal books that have been consulted in the preparation of
this volume:
Parton's "Life of Andrew Jackson."
Eaton's "Life of Andrew Jackson."
Pickett's "History of Alabama."
Drake's "Book of the Indians."
McAfee's "History of the Late War in the Western Country."
Claiborne's "Notes on the War in the South."
Meek's "Romantic Passages in South-western History."
"Indian Affairs, American State Papers."
Kendall's "Life of Jackson."
Waldo's "Life of Jackson."
Russell's "History of the Late War."
Brackenridge's "History of the Late War."
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. Showing, by way of Introduction, how Red Eagle happened to be
a Man of Consequence in History
CHAPTER II. Red Eagle's People
CHAPTER III. Red Eagle's Birth and Boyhood
CHAPTER IV. The Beginning of Trouble
CHAPTER V. Red Eagle as an Advocate of War--The Civil War in the Creek
Nation
CHAPTER VI. The Battle of Burnt Corn
CHAPTER VII. Red Eagle's Attempt to abandon his Party
CHAPTER VIII. Claiborne and Red Eagle
CHAPTER IX. Red Eagle before Fort Mims
CHAPTER X. The Massacre at Fort Mims
CHAPTER XI. Romantic Incidents of the Fort Mims Affair
CHAPTER XII. The Dog Charge at Fort Sinquefield and Affairs on the
Peninsula
CHAPTER XIII. Pushmatahaw and his Warriors
CHAPTER XIV. Jackson is helped into his Saddle
CHAPTER XV. The March into the Enemy's Country
CHAPTER XVI. The Battle of Tallushatchee
CHAPTER XVII. The Battle of Talladega
CHAPTER XVIII. General Cocke's Conduct and its Consequences
CHAPTER XIX. The Canoe Fight
CHAPTER XX. The Advance of the Georgians--The Battle of Autosse
CHAPTER XXI. How Claiborne executed his Orders--The Battle of the Holy
Ground--Red Eagle's Famous Leap
CHAPTER XXII. How Jackson lost his Army
CHAPTER XXIII. A New Plan of the Mutineers
CHAPTER XXIV. Jackson's Second Battle with his own Men
CHAPTER XXV. Jackson dismisses his Volunteers without a Benediction
CHAPTER XXVI. How Jackson lost the rest of his Army
CHAPTER XXVII. Battles of Emuckfau and Enotachopco--How the Creeks
"whipped Captain Jackson"
CHAPTER XXVIII. How Red Eagle "whipped Captain Floyd"--The Battle of
Calebee Creek
CHAPTER XXIX. Red Eagle's Strategy
CHAPTER XXX. Jackson with an Army at last
CHAPTER XXXI. The Great Battle of the War
CHAPTER XXXII. Red Eagle's Surrender
CHAPTER XXXIII. Red Eagle after the War
List Of Illustrations
RED EAGLE'S LEAP.
TECUMSEH ENTERING THE COUNCIL.
FORT MIMS.
FORT MIMS (INTERIOR.)
THE DOG CHARGE AT FORT SINQUIFIELD.
COL CALLER'S ROUTE TO BURNT CORN CREEK.
JACKSON CONFRONTING THE MUTINEERS.
MAP OF BATTLE SITE.
RED EAGLE AND THE WARS WITH THE CREEK INDIANS.
CHAPTER I.
SHOWING, BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION, HOW RED EAGLE HAPPENED TO BE A MAN OF
CONSEQUENCE IN HISTORY.
It is a long journey from the region round about the great lakes, where
Tecumseh lived, to the shores of the Alabama and the Tombigbee rivers,
even in these days of railroads and steamboats; and it was a much longer
journey when Tecumseh was a terror to the border and an enemy whom the
United States had good reason to fear. The distance between Tecumseh's
home and that of Red Eagle is greater than that which separates Berlin
from Paris or Vienna; and when Tecumseh lived there were no means of
communication between the Indians of the North-west and those of the
South, except by long, dangerous, and painful journeys on foot.
A man of smaller intellectual mould than Tecumseh would not have dreamed
of the possibility of establishing relations with people so distant as
the Creeks were from the tribes of the North-west. But Tecumseh had all
the qualities of a man of genius, the chief of which are breadth and
comprehensiveness of view and daring boldness of conception. The great
northern chieftain did many deeds in his day by which he fairly won the
reputation he had for the possession of genius, both as a soldier and as
a statesman; but nothing in his history so certainly proves his title to
rank among really great men as his boldness and brilliancy in planning
the formation of a great confederacy of the tribes, which extended in a
chain from the lakes on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. He
was wise enough to learn of his foes. He saw that their strength lay in
their union; that it was by "joining all their camp-fires," as he
phrased it, that they made themselves irresistible; and as he saw with
consternation that the great tide of white men was steadily advancing
westward, he understood, as few men of his race were capable of doing,
that there was but one possible way for the red men to withstand the
ever-encroaching stream. Separately the tribes were powerless, because
separately they could be beaten one by one. Troops who were engaged in
reducing an Illinois tribe during one month could be sent the next to
oppose another tribe in Mississippi or Alabama. Thus the secret of the
white men's success, Tecumseh saw, lay in two facts: first, that the
whites were united, working together for a common purpose, and helping
each other in turn; and, second, that the whites used the same troops
over and over again to fight the separately acting tribes.
Seeing all this and understanding it, Tecumseh conceived his great
plan--a plan equally great, whether we regard it as a stroke of
statesmanship or a brilliant scheme of military combination. He
determined, as he said, to build a dam against the stream. He undertook
to form a confederacy of all the tribes from north to south, to teach
them to act together, and to oppose the advance of the white men by
uniting that power which they were wasting separately.
It was in execution of this plan that Tecumseh made that journey to the
South in the year 1811 which, in combination with other causes to be
mentioned in their place, induced the Creeks of Southern Alabama to
abandon all that they had gained of civilization, and to plunge first
into a war among themselves, and afterward into that struggle with the
white men which destroyed their nation almost utterly.
In that war there was one man more conspicuous than any other--more
relentless, more daring, more desperate in his refusal to give or to
accept quarter, and at the same time more brilliant in attack and
defence, abler in counsel, and having greater skill in the field than
any of his fellow-chiefs--a man who fought Jackson, Claiborne, Flournoy,
Floyd, and Coffee, whose troops, coming from different quarters of the
country, surrounded him on every side and outnumbered him on every
field; fighting them with credit to his own skill and daring, and with
no little damage to these skilled enemies--a man of whom Jackson said,
"He is fit to command armies."
This man was Red Eagle, or, in his native Muscogee tongue, Lamochattee.
To the white men with whom he lived a great part of his life, and to his
enemies in war, he was better known as William Weatherford; and as the
historical accounts of the war in which he won his renown were all
written by white men, because Red Eagle could not write, his white name,
Weatherford, is the one by which he is generally known in books. His
fame was won as an Indian, however; it was the Indian warrior Red Eagle,
not the half-breed planter Weatherford, who did the deeds which gave him
a place in American history; and this neglect of his Indian name in all
historical works which refer to him is an example of the sarcasm of
destiny. It reminds one of the hero of whom Byron tells us, who, falling
in battle covered with glory, lost his only chance for fame by the
blunder of a printer, who misspelled his name in the gazette. We have
preferred to call the great commander of the Creeks by his Indian name,
Red Eagle, on the title-page of this book, but in writing of him it will
be necessary frequently to use the name Weatherford instead.
The story of the Creek war naturally follows the life of Tecumseh, with
which this series of Indian biographies was introduced; and indeed the
one story is necessary to the complete telling of the other. It may be
best told in the form of a life of Red Eagle, who commanded on one side,
and whose genius for command alone made the war an affair worth writing
about; but, unluckily for the biographer, the materials for a biography
of Red Eagle, in the strict sense of the word, are meagre and difficult
to get at.
I hinted at the chief cause of this meagreness and obscurity when I
said, just now, that Red Eagle could not write. I always thought, in
reading Caesar De Bello Gallico, that the Roman commander had a great
advantage over the poor Gauls in his rather remarkable dexterity in the
use of the pen. We do not know how good or how bad his handwriting was;
but whether he wrote with perfect Spencerian precision or in a scrawl as
illegible as Mr. Greeley's, Caesar knew how to tell his side of the
story, and there was nobody to tell the other side. Perhaps the tale
would read very differently if some clever Gaul had been able to write
an account of the war in classic Latin for the school-boys of the
nineteenth century to puzzle out with the aid of a dictionary. So Red
Eagle, if he had known how to write, would probably have given us a view
of the things done in the Creek war which we do not get from his
enemies.
It is not merely in the military sense that the word enemies is here
used, but in the literal one as well; for very nearly all the
information we have about Red Eagle and his performances is drawn from
the writings and the spoken testimony of men who hated him with a degree
of violence of which one can scarcely conceive in our time. These men
wrote while boiling with the passions of a war which seriously
threatened the existence of this American nation, and they hated Red
Eagle as one of the men who added very greatly to the country's peril,
and sorely taxed its resources when its resources were fewest. Their
hatred was so violent that they could not restrain its expression; while
they granted to Red Eagle the possession of courage and ability, they
could not write of him without flying into a passion and heaping hard
names upon his head.
One of them, in a grave treatise about the war, scolded in this way
about him:
"Among the first who entered into the views of the British commissioners
was the since celebrated Weatherford, with whom it may not be amiss to
make the reader better acquainted at this time. Weatherford was born in
the Creek nation. His father was an itinerant pedler, sordid,
treacherous, and revengeful; his mother a full-blooded savage of the
tribe of the Seminoles. He partook of the bad qualities of both his
parents, and engrafted on the stock he inherited from others many that
were peculiarly his own. With avarice, treachery, and a thirst for
blood, he combines lust, gluttony, and a devotion to every species of
criminal carousal."
That, certainly, is as pretty a bit of angry vituperation as one hears
from the lips of the worst of scolds, and so wholly did the
distinguished author of the book from which it is taken lose his
temper, that he lost his discretion with it, and forgot that so coarse
and brutal a fellow as he here declares Red Eagle to have been--a man so
wholly given over to debauchery--is sure to show in his face, his
person, and his intellectual operations the effects of his character,
impulses, and habits. In the very next paragraph this writer tells us
certain things about Red Eagle which forbid us to believe that he was a
drunkard, a debased creature, a glutton, or a brute. He says:
"Fortune in her freaks sometimes gives to the most profligate an
elevation of mind which she denies to men whose propensities are the
most virtuous. On Weatherford she bestowed genius, eloquence, and
courage. The first of these qualities enabled him to conceive great
designs, the last to execute them; while eloquence, bold, impressive,
and figurative, furnished him with a passport to the favor of his
countrymen and followers. Silent and reserved, unless when excited by
some great occasion, and superior to the weakness of rendering himself
cheap by the frequency of his addresses, he delivered his opinions but
seldom in council; but when he did so he was listened to with delight
and approbation."
That does not read like an account of the parliamentary methods of a
brutish man, degraded by vice and debauched with drunkenness and
gluttony; it sounds rather like a description of the wise ways of some
Webster or Clay. Drunken men with the gift of eloquent speech do not
hoard it and use it in this adroit way. This is not all, however. Men
who are given over to vice, gluttony, and drunkenness usually carry the
marks of their excesses in their appearance and their ways of thinking;
but our writer who has told us that Weatherford was such a man, tells us
how he looked and acted, and what his ability was, in this wise:
"His judgment and eloquence had secured the respect of the old; his
vices made him the idol of the young and the unprincipled. It is even
doubted whether a civilized society could behold this monster without
interest. In his person tall, straight, and well-proportioned; his eye
black, lively, and penetrating, and indicative of courage and
enterprise; his nose prominent, thin, and elegant in its formation;
while all the features of his face, harmoniously arranged, speak an
active and disciplined mind." A little further down the page this writer
calls Weatherford "the key and corner-stone of the Creek confederacy,"
and characterizes him as "this extraordinary man."
Our purpose is not now to defend Red Eagle's memory or to extol his
character, though there is good reason to remember him with honor for
his courage in war and for his good faith in peace; and there are
abundant proofs that the praise which the hostile writer whom we have
quoted could not deny to the fallen chieftain, was far juster than the
abuse he heaped upon him. We have made these extracts merely to show in
what spirit of unfair prejudice all the contemporaneous accounts of
Weatherford's life and deeds were written. It will be better to form our
own opinions of the Creek warrior's character after we shall have
reviewed the events of his life; and no one who so examines the facts,
although they come to us only from his enemies, can fail to form a much
higher opinion of the unfortunate man than that which the chroniclers of
his day have offered to us ready-made.
The enmity and prejudice of which we have spoken operate still more
strongly in another way to embarrass the biographer who seeks to learn
details of Weatherford's life. Where the writers of his day have
misrepresented his character or conduct, it is not difficult to discover
the fact and to correct the misjudgment; but, unluckily, they too often
neglected even to misrepresent him. Caring only for their own side and
their own heroes, these historians, who were generally participants in
the events they chronicled, took the utmost pains to tell us just where
each body of American troops fought; who commanded them in the first,
second, third, and so on to the tenth degree of subordinate rank; how
many Americans and how many friendly Indians there were in each part of
every field; how many of these were killed and wounded--every thing, in
short, which they could find out or guess out about the details of their
side of the fight, while the other side seemed to them unworthy of any
thing more than the most general attention. They were so careless indeed
of the Indian side of these affairs that it is in many cases impossible
to discover from any of the accounts what chiefs commanded the Creek
forces in important battles, or even what chiefs were present. In other
cases this information is given to us by accident, as it were, not in
the accounts of the battles, but by means of a casual reference in an
account of something else. Thus one of the writers devotes many pages
and a good deal of stilted rhetoric to his account of the Fort Mims
massacre, a bloody affair, in which Weatherford won solely by reason of
the fact that he was a better and more skilful officer than the American
commander, manifesting indeed some of the best qualities of an able
general; but with all this historian's minuteness of detail, he wholly
forgets to mention the fact that Weatherford had anything to do with the
matter. His neglect is not the result of any want of information, as is
shown by the fact that, in writing of other things afterward, he
incidentally mentions the Creek warrior as the leader of the Indians at
Fort Mims.
To the carelessness of the contemporaneous writers, to whom alone we can
at this day look for information upon detailed points of interest, must
be added, as a cause of the meagreness of the record, their lack of
opportunity. The Indians kept their own secrets. They were fighting to
destroy the whites, not to win renown; and the Americans who fought them
had little chance to hear news of any kind from the forces on the other
side.
Notwithstanding this lack of detailed information respecting Red Eagle's
life and deeds, however, we know with certainty that he was, as the
writer quoted a few pages back said, the "key and corner-stone of the
Creek confederacy," the commander of the Creek armies, the statesman who
guided the Creek councils, and the general who planned and conducted the
Creek campaigns. His was the master mind on the Indian side, as
positively as Jackson's was on the side of the Americans; and therefore
while there is an unfortunate lack of information of a strictly
biographical nature concerning this remarkable man, it is still possible
to write his life by writing an account of the Creek war. After all, it
is the things a man does which make up his life; and the story of his
deeds is his biography, whether or not it includes the dates of his
birth and his death, or tells with precision when or how he did this or
that.
Accordingly, instead of beginning this story of Red Eagle's life with a
chapter about his birth and parentage, after the customary manner of
grave biographers, and following his career incident by incident,
confining the narrative to an account of his direct, personal share in
each transaction, I shall write an account of the war he made, regarding
the whole series of events as properly parts of one great affair which
Red Eagle devised and executed.
To make such an account clearly intelligible, however, it will be
necessary first to recount briefly the history of the Southern Indians,
and to show who and what the Creeks were, what their condition was at
the time of the war's beginning, and what they hoped to gain by their
contest with the whites--which was not by any means a mere outbreak of
savagery like some of the Indian troubles of our time, but rather a war
deliberately undertaken with very definite purposes, after long
consideration and no little getting ready.
Upon many points the best authorities are conflicting, partly because
their works were written each with a special purpose and from a special
point of view, and partly because of carelessness in the collection and
weighing of facts; but it is still possible to arrive at the truth in
all essential particulars, and to construct, out of the fragmentary
materials at command, a consecutive account of the brilliant campaign of
1813-14, in which Red Eagle was the foremost figure on one side, and
Andrew Jackson the master spirit on the other.