known as “the Creek country.” Because it lay directly athwart the best
water communications between the settlements in Tennessee and the
outside world, and because its lands were among the most fertile in the
South, the eyes of the American pioneers were turned covetously upon
it. Now, no one realized better than the Creeks themselves that if they
were to hold their lands they must fight for them. Their decision to
resist American encroachments was strengthened by the appearance among
them of the great northern chieftain, Tecumseh. In October, 1811, this
remarkable man, in pursuance of his scheme for uniting the red men from
the Great Lakes to the Gulf in an Indian confederacy for the purpose
of resisting the white man’s further progress westward, suddenly
appeared at a Creek council held on the upper Tallapoosa. Perhaps the
most brilliant orator the Indian race has ever produced and gifted
with extraordinary personal magnetism, he held his audience spellbound
as, standing in the circle of light thrown by the council-fire,
ringed about by row on row of blanketed and feathered warriors, he
outlined his scheme for a union of all the Indians of the West in
a confederation powerful enough to bid defiance to the white man.
Standing like a bronze statue, the firelight playing on his haughty
features, his copper skin, and the single eagle feather slanting in his
hair, he held aloft his war-club; then, finger by finger, he slowly
relaxed his grasp until it crashed to the ground. By that significant
pantomime, so powerful in its appeal to the primitive intellects of his
hearers, he drove home with telling effect the weakness which comes
from disunion. Though a few weeks later, on the banks of the Tippecanoe
River, William Henry Harrison broke Tecumseh’s power forever and drove
him from American soil, he had aroused in the Creeks a determination
to retain their lands or to go down upon them fighting.
Meanwhile British agents had been secretly at work among the
discontented Creeks, whooping them on to a campaign of extermination
against the American settlers and supplying them with arms and
ammunition in return for the promise of their assistance in the war
which every one realized was now at hand. On the 18th of June, 1812,
Congress declared war on England, and a week later every Creek fighting
man was daubing the war-paint on his copper skin. Though the danger
of a war with the Creeks was perfectly understood in Washington, the
military authorities were too busy pushing forward their preparations
for an invasion of Canada to spare much thought for the settlers
dwelling along our unprotected southern frontier. But the Indians,
under the leadership of the half-breed war-chief Weatherford, had
nothing to divert their attention from the business in hand.
A pioneer farmer named Samuel Mimms had built a stockade for the
protection of his cattle on Lake Tensaw, twenty miles or so north of
Mobile, and here the settlers of the surrounding region had taken
refuge, Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, hurrying a small force of
militia under Major Beasley to protect them. In August, 1813, the
place, popularly known as Fort Mimms, sheltered within its log stockade
five hundred and fifty-three persons: soldiers and settlers, men,
women, and children. Although Governor Claiborne had himself visited
the post during the preceding month and had urged on its commander
the necessity for the most unrelaxing vigilance, Beasley and his men
evidently came to look upon the affair as a false alarm as the summer
days slipped by without bringing any signs of hostile Indians. So
cocksure did they become, indeed, that even after a friendly Indian had
brought word that the Creeks were preparing to attack the place they
continued to leave the gates of the stockade unguarded during the day.
They paid a fearful price for their negligence, however. At noon on the
30th of August, when the occupants of the fort were at their dinner,
a thousand fiends in paint and feathers slipped like shadows from the
gloom of the encircling forest, sped on noiseless, moccasined feet
across the strip of cultivated ground without the walls, and, before
the demoralized garrison realized what had happened, were pouring
through the unguarded entrance in a howling, shrieking wave like demons
pouring through the gates of hell. Though taken completely by surprise
and outnumbered five to one, the garrison put up a most desperate
and gallant resistance. The scene was dreadful beyond imagination.
It was hand-to-hand fighting in its bloodiest form: bayonets against
war-clubs, muskets against tomahawks, pistols against knives.
Increasing the horror of the situation a hundredfold were the women and
children, for there was no question as to their fate if the Indians
were victorious. Beasley fell at the first attack and every officer
died at the gateway in a vain attempt to stem the Indian rush. A young
lieutenant, badly wounded, was carried by two women to a blockhouse,
but when he was a little revived insisted on being taken back that he
might die with his comrades on the fighting line. Though hopeless from
the first, the defense was prolonged for hours; for after the men of
the garrison had fallen, the women and children shut themselves up in
one of the blockhouses, where they held off the yelling savages with
the courage of despair. Finally, however, the Indians, by means of
burning arrows, succeeded in setting the building on fire, and after
that it was no longer a battle but a butchery. Of the five hundred
and fifty-three people within the fort, only twelve escaped. It was a
dearly bought victory for the Indians, however, for piled around the
gateway were four hundred of their best fighting men.
From one end of the border to the other rose the cry for vengeance. Nor
was it long in coming. The legislature of Tennessee voted to raise men
and money to wipe out the Creeks, and called for volunteers. Jumping at
this chance to even up old scores with the Indians, the frontiersmen,
their long squirrel rifles on their shoulders and clad in their
serviceable buckskin dress, came pouring in to offer their services in
the campaign of retribution. The command of the expedition was given
to a brigadier-general of Tennessee militia who up to that time had
scarcely been heard of outside the borders of his own State. He was
a tall, emaciated figure of a man, with a clean-shaven, sallow face,
a jaw like a bear-trap, a great beak of a nose, eyes as penetrating
as gimlets and as cold as a winter’s morning, and a shock of unkempt
sandy hair just beginning to gray under his forty-seven years. He was
not at all the sort of man that a stranger would slap on the back and
address by his first name--at least he would not do it a second time.
His garments were as severe and businesslike as the man himself: a
much-worn leather cap, a short, Spanish cloak of frayed blue cloth,
and great unpolished boots whose tops swayed uneasily about his bony
knees. He carried his arm in a sling as the result of a pistol wound
received during a brawl in a Nashville tavern. Everything considered,
this man who had been chosen to strike terror to the Creeks was a
strange and striking figure. You may have heard of him--his name was
Andrew Jackson.
This was the extraordinary man who, early in the autumn of 1813, took
the field at the head of three thousand volunteers as rough and ready
as himself. A vast amount of nonsense has been written about pioneer
troops. Though some of the most brilliant and daring campaigns in which
Americans have borne a part were carried through by soldiers recruited
on the frontier and though the marching and fighting qualities of these
men have been surpassed by no troops on earth, they were, on the other
hand, nearly always insubordinate, contemptuous of discipline, impudent
to their officers, quickly homesick, and very dependent for success
on enthusiasm for their leaders. Jackson was the best man that could
possibly have been chosen to command such troops as these, for he had
been born and brought up on the frontier, he understood the men with
whom he was dealing, and managed them with energy, firmness, and tact.
He rarely had any difficulty in filling his ranks, for he permitted no
obstacles to deter him from reaching and crushing an enemy; hence the
men who followed him in his campaigns always had stories to relate and
were looked upon as heroes in the settlements. To be pointed out as
“one of Andy Jackson’s men” came to be looked upon as as great an honor
as the scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor is in France.
Jackson’s plan of campaign provided for the construction of a military
road, fifty miles in length, from the Tennessee to the Coosa, whence,
after building a fortified base of supplies, he planned to make a quick
dash southward, spreading death and destruction as he went, until he
dictated peace on the Hickory Ground. The Hickory Ground, which lay at
the junction of the Alabama and the Coosa, near the present site of
Montgomery, was the headquarters of the Creek confederacy and a place
of refuge, the Indian medicine-men having asserted that no white could
set foot upon its sacred soil and live. Jackson, as I have already
remarked, permitted no obstacles to deter him. So, when his engineers
reported that it was not feasible to build a road through the unmapped
wilderness, he took the matter out of their hands and built the road
himself. And when the contractors assured him that it was out of the
question to transport supplies for three thousand men to the Coosa
within the time he had specified, he commandeered horses and wagons
and did that, too. When one of his regiments attempted to settle a
dispute over the term of enlistment by turning about and marching home,
Jackson, his left arm still disabled and in a sling, snatched a musket
from a soldier with his right hand and, using the neck of his horse
for a rest, covered with his weapon the column of sullen, scowling
mutineers. With eyes flashing and frame quivering with passion, he
single-handed held the disaffected regiment at bay, shouting shrilly,
with a volley of oaths, that he would let daylight into the first man
who stirred. Colonels Reid and Coffee, learning of the mutiny, came
galloping up from the rear and took their stand by the side of their
commander, while some loyal companies formed up across the road with
weapons levelled, seeing which the mutineers changed their minds as to
the wisdom of going home and sullenly marched on.
He first met the Creeks on the 3d of November at Talluschatches--now
Jacksonville, Ala.--and promptly attacked them with a thousand mounted
men. No quarter was asked and none was given, and when the battle was
over not an Indian brave was left alive. Six days later, at Talladega,
he swooped down upon a war party of a thousand Creeks who had
surrounded a band of friendly Indians and sent a third of them to the
happy hunting-grounds. At the same time General John Floyd invaded the
Creek country from Georgia at the head of a punitive expedition, while
from the west also came an avenging column under Governor Claiborne, of
Louisiana. The latter discovered a town of refuge, called Econochaca,
on the Alabama. It was built on holy ground, the Indian prophets said,
and, as a result of the spells they had cast over it, it was safe from
paleface invasion. The Americans arrived not an instant too soon, for,
guided by the throbbing of the war-drums, they burst into the village
to find the Indians, their ringed and streaked bodies more fiendish
still in the glare of a great fire, whooping and capering about a row
of stakes to which were bound white captives of both sexes, ready to be
burned. When Claiborne’s men finished their work, the “holy ground” was
carpeted with Indian dead, and the medicine-men who had boasted that it
was immune from invasion were themselves scalped and staring corpses.
Nothing more graphically illustrates the savagery and determination
with which the American frontiersmen prosecuted their campaign against
the Indians than the story of Sam Dale’s canoe fight. Dale, who was a
veritable Hercules of a man, while scouting with some companions in
advance of Jackson’s army, saw floating down the Alabama a war canoe
containing eleven Creeks. Ambushing themselves amid the bushes on the
bank, the Americans poured in a volley as the canoe swept by and five
of the Indians fell dead. Then Dale pushed off in a small boat with
three men to finish up the business. Ordering one of his companions
to hold the boats together, the big frontiersman went at the Indians
with his bayonet like a field-hand with his pitchfork loading hay.
Throwing caution to the winds in his lust of battle, he advanced upon
the Indians single-handed, and before he had time to realize his peril
and retreat the current had swept the canoes apart, leaving him in
the larger one confronting the six remaining Creeks. Two of them were
shot by his companions in the other boat, three more he accounted for
himself, the only one left alive being a famous Indian wrestler named
Tar-cha-cha.
“Big Sam!” the Indian shouted, “I am a man!... I am coming!... Come
on!” Clubbing his rifle, he rushed forward, dealing Dale a blow which
broke his shoulder and nearly sent him into the river, but before he
could get in another the frontiersman drove his bayonet home and ended
the fight.
The early months of 1814 were a time of the most intense anxiety to
Jackson, for, the terms of enlistment of his volunteers expiring,
they insisted on returning to their homes, until at one brief period
he found himself in the heart of the Indian country with less than a
hundred men. Physical suffering as well as anxiety marked this period
of the campaign--privation, exhaustion, irritation, and the drain of a
slowly healing wound producing serious effects on a system which was
habitually on the verge of collapse. It was, indeed, only his cast-iron
will that sustained him, for during one period of anxiety he slept but
three hours in four nights. But with the coming of spring the feet of
the young men became restless for the forest trails again, and by the
middle of March, his ranks filled once more, he was ready to deliver
his final blow. The Creeks had by this time abandoned their campaign of
aggression and, falling back to their stronghold of Tohopeka, on the
Tallapoosa, known to the whites as the Horseshoe Bend, they prepared to
make their last stand.
On the morning of March 27, 1814, Jackson’s skirmishers came
within sight of the Indian encampment. On a peninsula formed by a
horseshoe-like bend of the river, a thousand warriors with three
hundred of their women and children were encamped. They comprised the
very flower of the Creek nation, or rather, all that was left of it.
The neck of the peninsula was only four hundred yards wide, and across
it the Creeks, profiting by the lessons they had received from their
Spanish and British allies, had built a zigzag wall of logs, eight
feet high and pierced by a double row of loopholes. The angles formed
by the zigzags enabled the defenders to sweep with a deadly cross-fire
the ground over which an attacking column must advance, while trees
had been felled at intervals in such fashion that their interlaced
branches provided admirable cover for sharpshooters. All in all, it
was a tough nut that Jackson found himself called upon to crack. But
cracking that particular kind of nuts was a specialty of Jackson’s. His
artillery consisted of two small brass field-pieces, not much larger
than those employed on yachts for saluting purposes. Sending Colonel
Coffee across the river with his cavalry to cut off the escape of the
Indians in that direction, Jackson planted his miniature field-guns on
a little hill only eighty yards from the Creek fortifications. Either
the guns must have been very weak or the fortifications very strong,
for after a two-hours’ bombardment no appreciable damage had been done.
Then Jackson, who was always for getting to hand-grips with an enemy,
told his men to go in and do the job with the bayonet. Whereupon the
Tennesseeans, who had been as fidgety and impatient as hounds in leash,
swept forward with a whoop. As regardless of the withering fire poured
into them as if it had been hailstones instead of bullets, they hacked
their way through the abatis of branches and clambered over the wall,
shooting, bayonetting, clubbing with a ferocity which matched that of
the Indians. And, imitating the customs of the savages they had been
fighting for so long, many of the frontiersmen paused to scalp the
Indians that they killed. For the Creeks it was a hopeless struggle
from the first, but they were not of a breed that, finding themselves
beaten, whined for mercy. Retreating to such protection as the place
afforded, they fought and kept on fighting even after a flag of truce
had been sent them with an offer to accept their surrender. By three
o’clock the battle of the Horseshoe Bend had become a part of the
history of the frontier. So completely had Jackson done his work that
only twenty Indians escaped. Eight hundred copper-colored corpses lay
upon the blood-soaked ground beside the Tallapoosa; the rest were
prisoners. It is a significant fact that there were no wounded among
the Indians. The Americans had nearly two hundred killed and wounded,
among the latter being Jackson himself and a youngster named Sam
Houston, who, in after years, was to win fame fighting a no less savage
foe on the banks of the Rio Grande.
The battle of the Horseshoe Bend broke the Creek power of resistance
for good and all. Since the commencement of hostilities they had lost
in battle nearly three-fourths of all their fighting men. The rest, not
much more than a thousand in all, fled to their cousins, the Seminoles,
in Florida, where they promptly began hatching plans for vengeance.
On the 1st of August, Jackson sent word to such of the chieftains as
had not fled into Spanish territory to meet him on the Hickory Ground.
Here he received their submission and here he imposed on them his
terms of peace. His demands were so rigorous as to bring a gasp of
astonishment even from the Americans, for he insisted on the cession of
an L-shaped tract of land which included more than half the territory
of the Creeks, thus forming a barrier between them and the Choctaws and
Chickasaws on the west and the Spaniards in Florida.
Jackson now turned his face toward Nashville. He had ridden out of
there an unpopular and almost unknown officer of militia. He returned
to find himself a military hero, the stories of whose exploits were
retailed in every settler’s cabin from one end of the frontier to the
other. In recognition of his services, the President commissioned
him a major-general in the regular army and gave him command of the
Department of the South, with headquarters at Mobile. Our second war
with England had now been dragging its tedious course along for nearly
two years, marked by British successes on land and American victories
on the sea. The air was filled with rumors of a great British armada
which was on its way to attack New Orleans, and these solidified into
fact when word reached Jackson that a portion of the British fleet
had anchored in the harbor of Pensacola and proposed, in defiance of
Spanish neutrality, to use that port as a base of operations against
the United States. Pensacola was in Florida, and Florida was still
owned by Spain, and Spain was professedly a neutral; but if the British
could violate that neutrality, argued Jackson, why, so could the
Americans. Without waiting for authority from Washington (and it was
well that he did not, for the city had been burned by the British and
the government had fled), Jackson crossed the Mobile River and invaded
Spanish territory at the head of three thousand veterans. On November 6
he was at the walls of Pensacola. A messenger was sent to the Spanish
governor under a flag of truce with a peremptory demand from Jackson
that the fortress be turned over to the United States until such time
as the Spanish were strong enough to maintain the neutrality of the
port. The governor, emboldened by the fact that seven British war-ships
were lying in the harbor, showed his defiance by firing upon the flag
of truce. But he didn’t know the type of man that he was defying.
Jackson was no more awed by the might of England or the majesty of
Spain or the sacredness of neutral territory than he had been by the
Indians’ “holy ground.” Instantly he ordered forward his storming
parties. So sudden was his attack that the British ships had no time
to up anchor and bring their guns to bear for the protection of the
town. The Spanish soldiery fought well, however, and a sharp battle
ensued in the streets, the batteries opening on the advancing Americans
with solid shot and grape while a heavy fire of musketry was poured
into them from houses and gardens. But the Spaniards were driven back
everywhere by the fierceness of the American assault, whereupon the
governor, seeing that further resistance was useless, sent a messenger
to the American commander to inquire what terms he would grant him.
“Nothing but unconditional surrender,” answered Jackson, and the
haughty Spaniard had no alternative but to accept his terms. Slowly
the flag of Spain, which had flaunted defiantly above the fort, sank
down the staff and in its stead rose a flag of stripes and stars. The
machinery of conquest, with Andrew Jackson at the crank, had pared off
another slice of Florida.
Jackson’s capture of the fortifications having made the harbor
untenable, the British blew up the Spanish forts at the Barrancas,
which commanded the harbor entrance, and departed, whereupon Jackson
evacuated the town. His work in Pensacola was finished. Eight weeks
later (January 8, 1815) he won his immortal victory at New Orleans,
with his untrained frontiersmen and scanty resources meeting and
annihilating the British regiments that had conquered Napoleon. At a
single bound he leaped from the status of a backwoods soldier to one of
the great leaders of his time.