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. 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. 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, were the mountaineers of their race.  They dwelt among the blue-topped ridges and lofty peaks of the southern Alleghanies, 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; 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. 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, 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 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. 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," 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.

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, and alone sent representatives to the general councils.  Many of these were as large as any in the back counties of the colonies; but they were shifted from time to time, as the game was totally killed off and the land exhausted by the crops. 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, 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.

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, besides another made from fermented corn, which tasted much like cider. 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.

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.

Though they sometimes burnt their prisoners or violated captive women, they generally were more merciful than the northern tribes.

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. 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.

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.

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." 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.