Holy Ground - origin of Oklahoma as a Creek resettlement territory

Civil Rights Journal, Wntr, 2002 by Gloria Jahoda

"Away back in that time in--1492--there was a man by the name of Columbus came from across the great ocean, and he discovered the country for the white man ... What did he find when he first arrived here? Did he find a white man standing on the continent then? ... I stood here first, and Columbus first discovered me."

--CHITTO HARJO, CREEK

In the north the scarlet council fires burned long and high on frost-touched nights in the spring of 1813. It was the Moon of the Running Sap, and the United States and Britain were at war. Tecumtha of the Shawnees of Ohio was urging America's Indians to declare for the British and push out of Indian land forever the rude settlers who appeared to think they were the only Americans who mattered. The Prophet Tenskwatawa, Tecumtha's brother, was traveling from tribe to tribe exhorting their clans to rebellion as the acrid flames crackled in the dark: "O Shawnee braves! O Potawatomi men! O Miami panthers! O Ottawa foxes! O Miami lynxes! O Kickapoo beavers! O Winnebago wolves! Lift up your hatchets; raise your knives; sight your rifles! Have no fears--your lives are charmed! Stand up to the foe; he is a weakling and a coward! O red brothers, fall upon him! Wound, rend, tear, and flay, scalp, and leave him to the wolves and buzzards! O Shawnee braves! O Potawatomi men!" Had not the Great Spirit first made the Shawnees before he made the French and English out of his breast, the Dutch out of his feet, and the American Long Knives out of his hands? "All these inferior races of man he made white and placed them beyond the Stinking Lake," Tenskwatawa shouted as black smoke vanished upward into a blacker sky where stars glittered crisp and blue-white. Now it was time to drive the inferior races back across the Stinking Lake. The British must be used to help exterminate the Americans; afterward, the united Indians could deal similarly with the British.

Many of America's original settlers listened spellbound to the compelling oratory of Tecumtha and Tenskwatawa as it echoed through their ebony forests. Soon exhortations to vengeance were dividing tribes into hostile factions of moderates and fanatics, none more bitterly than the southern Creeks. The Creeks, so called by the whites because most of the subtribes that comprised the nation lived on rivers and streams, owned sprawling fertile lands in Georgia and Alabama. Rivers that flowed red with Georgia clay, the Flint and Chattahoochee and Ocmulgee, and Alabama streams whose slower brown waters moved under high canopies of longleaf pines and moss-draped live oaks, the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Tombigbee, and Alabama, belonged by tradition to the Creeks. Farther south lived a scattering of Spaniards in west Florida, whose capital, Pensacola, was a boisterous town full of an assortment of outlaws, pirates between expeditions, petty Spanish officialdom, and dark-eyed senoritas who welcomed the visiting British army and navy with enthusiasm. The British Indian trading firm of Panton Leslie and Company was based in Pensacola too. In the 321 years since Columbus had begun exterminating the Tainos of the West Indies, America's Indians had become dependent on the goods traders sold them: muzzle-loading rifles, keen-honed knives, osnaburg cloth, flannel and calico and sturdy blankets, brightly colored glass beads, and also potent whiskey.

No tribe relied on traders more than the Creeks; they took to the white man's ways so readily that they were considered a "civilized" tribe. Parties of Creeks regularly journeyed from Georgia and Alabama to exchange skins and furs at Pensacola; many Creek women had married traders. Names like McGillivray, Farquharson, Weatherford, and McIntosh were common in the war towns and peace towns that lined ferny southern riverbanks. The Creeks had appropriated white customs that suited them--cloth dress, hunting weapons and ammunition, the keeping of peach orchards and livestock. But in most of their minds there was no doubt that their lands were theirs forever. "They are our life and breath," said one of their chiefs, Yahola Micco. "If we part with them we part with our blood."

The Creeks, though not as drastically as Tecumtha's Shawnees, had already felt the pressure of white expansion into their country. They watched horrified as American frontiersmen killed game not only for food but for fun. The Creeks had taken a long step into the 19th century, at the same time that they had also been pushed back from the Atlantic Coast they had once known. Some were fatalists: what would be, would be. But some were not.

When Tecumtha's Religion of the Dancing Lakes came to young Creek braves, they were ready to believe in it. As they gyrated, leaders of the dance carried red sticks that Tecumtha's followers said would show the direction from which the whites were coming. Any Indian who bore a red stick could not be injured. Soon council fires were also burning in the heavy, humid nights of the South. In the Creek war town of Tuckabatchee, 5,000 people crowded the main square to watch Red Stick dancers whirl naked except for breechclouts and eagle feathers. As the hard, hammering music of rattles and the wails of reed flutes rose and fell in the perfumed darkness, the Red Stick men undulated into the chofoka, the town meetinghouse, while sweat poured down their burnished faces. In ringing tones, they prophesied miracles. Soon afterward, in rapid succession, came a comet, a meteor shower, and a mild earthquake. Could anyone doubt Tecumtha when he said that the earth would tremble when he stamped his foot upon it? The hotheaded warriors of the Creeks did not. But Lumhe Chati, Red Eagle, had misgivings. The whites he knew in southern Alabama had been friendly. Why could the two peoples not live together?