Hillabee

More from April 5, 2006. I didn’t have time to go to one of the sites of the Creek town of Hillabee. It didn’t look like public roads could take me very close, anyway. So I satisfied myself with taking photos like this.

Alabama state highway 22 crosses Hillabee Creek near its mouth. The town of Hillabee was way upstream, maybe 7 miles by crow.

During the Creek civil war, Redsticks did some violence there. According to Claudio Saunt (1999), “In Hilabee, for instance, Redsticks stripped Mrs. Grayson of her clothing and destroyed all of her property, including a stock of cotton, a loom, and a bolt of finished cloth. Grayson had been hired by Creek leaders to instruct women to spin and to weave.”

The violence seems to have been because the Redsticks were opposed to the new gender roles that threatened their masculinity. It’s somewhat paradoxical, though. It’s not a simple issue of feminine independence, though that seems to be what all this weaving and spinning was giving to women. The new ways had been introduced over many decades by meztizo offspring of English traders and Creek women. These new ways were characterized by private property and patriarchical inheritance. The older society was matriarchical, which one would think is not what your average male chauvinist would be trying to bring back. Yet the Redsticks seemed to have been extremely distraught by the new innovations in gender roles.

It seems it’s not enough to think in the simple categories of our time. Maybe instead of skipping around in Saunt’s book (“A new order of things”) I should re-read the whole thing from cover to cover.

I did a little googling about Grayson and Hillabee. An Alexander Grayson of Hillabee was one of the signers of the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Was he the husband of “Mrs. Grayson”? There seem to be descendants of Graysons, who ended up being removed to Oklahoma, who are trying to learn about the Grayson genealogy and Hillabee. On one genealogy forum where these things were being discussed I saw a suggestion that one of Saunt’s other books may have a lot more information about Hillabee.

It’s interesting, btw, how many Alabama place names are found in Oklahoma, too. There apparently was a Hillabee post office at one time, somewhere east of Oklahoma City.

a jackson