RED EAGLE'S PEOPLE.
Red Eagle, or William Weatherford, was only in part an Indian, as we
shall see presently; but his life was so entirely the life of an Indian,
in that part of it at least which gave him his title to a place in
history, that we must naturally think of him as a member of his mother's
race, rather than as a white man, and we must regard the Indian nation
to which he belonged as his people. He was born a Creek, and not only
so, but a great chief of the Creek nation; that is to say, a chief of
the highest hereditary rank.
The Creek nation was not a tribe, but a confederacy of tribes, united as
the Roman Empire was by successive conquests. The original Romans in
this case were the Muscogees, a tribe of Indians so much further
advanced toward civilization when white men first encountered them than
most of the Indian tribes were, that they had been able to preserve
greatly more of their own history than savages are ordinarily able to
do. They had fixed laws, too, not merely rules of the chase, but laws
by which they were governed in the ordinary affairs of life; and many of
their practices when the tribe was first known to white men indicate
that they were then rapidly working out a system of government and
semi-civilization for themselves, or else that, as they themselves
believed, they were descended from a race formerly civilized, of whose
civilization they still retained traces in their customs.
About the year 1775, an adventurous young Frenchman named Le Clerc
Milfort visited the Creeks, and marrying a woman of the nation became a
chief among them. After living with them for twenty years, he returned
to France and was made a brigadier-general. In the year 1802, Milfort
published a book about the strange people among whom he had lived half a
lifetime, and from him, or rather through him, the world has learned
what the Creeks believe to be the history of their nation.
This history, Milfort says, existed in the shape of a sort of
record--not a written record, of course, but not merely oral tradition.
The Creek historians had certain strings of beads, shells, and pearls
which aided them somewhat as written books aid civilized men to preserve
the memory of their nation's past. These beads meant different things
according to their arrangement, and by their aid the historians were
able to remember and transmit the traditions committed to their charge
with something like accuracy.
The story, as they tell it, is probably apocryphal in most of its
details, but it is less improbable, at worst, than is the story of the
foundation and early history of Rome. According to the Creek historians,
the Muscogees fought with the Aztecs against Cortez, and when the
Spanish invader gained a secure foothold in Mexico they took up their
march northward. On their way they encountered the Alabamas, whom they
drove before them for years, following them from one part of the land to
another, and giving them no rest. They chased the Alabamas to the
Missouri River, thence to the Ohio, and thence to Alabama, whither they
followed their steps. Finally, in the early part of the eighteenth
century, the persecuted Alabamas despaired of finding a secure refuge
from their relentless persecutors, and to save themselves from further
destruction consented to form a close alliance with the Muscogees,
submitting to the laws of their conquerors and becoming in effect
Muscogees. This was the beginning of that confederacy which afterward
became the Creek Nation. The Tookabatcha tribe, fleeing from their
enemies in the north, sought the protection of the Muscogees next and
became members of the nation. Other tribes were added to the nation one
after another, until the confederacy, whose seat was in the region along
the Alabama, Coosa, and Tombigbee rivers, became an empire, embracing in
its rule all the people round about them, and carrying terror even to
the tribes beyond the Savannah River.
The country which the Muscogee confederacy inhabited was and still is
singularly well watered and fertile. Their two great rivers, the Alabama
and the Tombigbee, are fed by numberless creeks of large and small size,
and the number of these streams prompted the white men who traded with
the Muscogees to call their land the Creek country, and from the land
the name was transferred to its people, who were thereafter called the
Creeks.
These Creeks, as we have said, had a sort of semi-civilization of their
own when the whites first visited them. They had fixed rules and customs
governing marriage and divorce. They lived in houses, wore scanty but
real clothing, and were governed by a rude system of laws. Curiously
enough, they even had a system of social caste among them, a sort of
graduated order of nobility. There were certain families who held high
hereditary rank, hereditary privileges, and hereditary authority--the
family of the Wind, the family of the Bear, the family of the Deer,
etc.; and of these the family of the Wind was the highest in rank and
authority. They constituted, indeed, a sort of royal family, the family
of the Bear ranking just below them.
When Colonel Benjamin Hawkins was sent on an important mission to the
Creeks in the year 1798 he found an organized and somewhat complicated
system of government in existence among them. Each town had its separate
local government, presided over by a Micco, who belonged always to one
of the chief families. They had their public buildings and pleasure
houses, their fixed rules for the conduct of public business, for the
promotion of warriors, and for all the other things which need
systematic regulation.
Beginning thus with a foundation of recognized customs upon which to
build a civilization, the Creeks improved rapidly under the influence of
the white men when they were brought into contact with them. They
already cultivated the ground, and, according to their tradition, had
always done so. From the white men they learned to trade, to carry on
their commerce with regularity, and even to manufacture cloths and other
needed articles. They lived generally in peace with the white men, and,
when the war that destroyed all this good beginning came, these people
had their horses and their houses, their farms, their hoes, and their
looms. They were not yet civilized, but they were well advanced toward
the acquisition of the arts of peace. They had too much hunting land,
and the spontaneous or nearly spontaneous productions of their rich soil
and genial climate made living somewhat too easy for their good; but in
spite of these strong incentives to idleness, the Creeks were steadily
improving. Many of them intermarried with the whites, and in part
adopted white men's modes of living. Missionaries went among them, and
even the traders were in an important sense missionaries. Many of the
Creeks learned to read and write, a few were educated men, most of these
being half-breeds, whose fathers sent them north to attend schools.
Their condition was made the more favorable for advancement by the good
treatment they received at the hands of the United States Government. It
is constantly said in our time that the government has never dealt
justly or kept honest faith with the Indians, and this reproach is
usually coupled with a reference to the wiser, better, and more humane
methods of the British in Canada; but if one were disposed to argue the
question, it might easily be shown that both the assertion of the
uniform failure of the Americans to deal justly with Indians, and the
implication that the English have as uniformly treated the savages well,
are false. In the case of the Creeks, it appears to be certain that the
American Government did all that could be done to elevate the savages,
and was only thwarted in the attempt by the interference of British
agents--red and white--who incited Red Eagle's people to undertake the
war which resulted in the destruction of their prosperity and their
ultimate removal from the land they inhabited.
Mr. Nathaniel Herbert Claiborne, a prominent citizen of Virginia, and a
man specially well informed on the subject, in a work which was written
immediately after the Creek war ended, wrote as follows on the subject
of the government's treatment of the Creeks:
"It has been demonstrated that the conduct of the United States to the
Creek Indians was both just and honorable. Without any consideration
save that which arises from the consciousness of doing a good act, the
government of the United States had, for more than twenty years,
endeavored to reclaim them from a savage to a civilized state. By the
exertions of government, bent only on augmenting the stock of human
happiness, it was evident that the situation of the Creeks was greatly
ameliorated. Many of them spoke and wrote our language. Pious men were
sent, at the expense of government, to instruct them in the religion of
Christ. The rising generation were instructed in numerous schools.... A
sentiment of pity, a fit cement for lasting friendship, had taken
possession of the American breast toward the Indians; and our citizens
and government vied with each other in acts of benevolence and charity
toward them. They were instructed in the fabrication of the implements
of husbandry. The loom and the spinning-wheel were in full operation
through the whole nation; while the art of house-building, so essential
to the accommodation of man and his protection from the winds and waters
of heaven, was rapidly approximating to perfection. If any of our
citizens injured them a punishment was provided by law, and the temper
of the nation, in unison with the temper of the government, rendered its
infliction certain. And such was the progress of the Creeks in
civilization, and the obligations they were under to the United States,
that no one believed they could be cajoled into a confederacy against
us."
One other point must not be overlooked, because, although its bearing
upon the prospects of the Creeks may not be fully evident to readers who
have given the subject no attention, it was really the most promising
thing in their situation. The tribal relation among them was weakening.
They were taking the first steps from communism, which is the soul of
savage life, to that individualism which is the foundation of
civilization. They were beginning to hold individual property, and
thereby to become men, with interests and wills of their own, instead of
mere members of a tribe. This was brought about in part by their trading
with the whites and in part by their intermarriages. The traders who
married Creek wives and lived in the nation were shrewd fellows,
strongly inclined to look sharply after their own interests; and their
half-breed children, who retained their rank as Creeks, many of them
being chiefs of high degree, inherited their fathers' instincts and
learned their fathers' ways. It would not have required many years of
peace in these circumstances to have made of the Creeks a nation of
civilized men. Until the seeds of hostility to the Americans were sown
among them by the agents of the British and the Spanish, their
advancement was steady, and the effort which the Americans were making
to civilize them was the fairest and most hopeful experiment perhaps
that has ever been made in that direction on this continent.