Tuckabatche

This is as close as I could get to Tuckabatche on the public roads. When the town existed, it was located somewhere between here and the Tallapoosa River, where the trees are in the background. In 1793, 18 years before Tecumseh’s famous visit, it had a population of 780 people. That was probably similar to its size in 1811, too. It was spread over four miles along the river. (This information is from “Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838, by Amos J. Wright, Jr. (2003).

One thing from Claudio Saunt’s book seems a paradox. He says those who were adopting the new ways of cattle raising and private property ownership lived in settlements away from the towns. Those were the types of people who formed a new type of leadership of the Creek people. But Saunt also says the dissident factions who didn’t accept the new type of leadership were dispersed, away from the towns, which made it difficult for the new leadership to control them.

I’m not ruling out the possibility that both could be true — that perhaps the dissidents were even more dispersed than the property-owning leaders.

In the Creek Wars, the dissidents destroyed Tuckabatche. Most of the Upper Creek towns came to be Red Stick villages, on the side of the dissidents. “Redsticks had converted nearly every Upper Creek town to their cause.” But Tuckabatche, the largest town and the center of influence, was one of the few that did not. Tuckabatche was put under siege by these dissidents. Most of the inhabitants fled to Lower Creek villages. The Redsticks then burned it down.