The latest issue of American Historical Review has a review of “Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier” by Andrew K. Frank (2005). I wish I had known about this book in April 2006 when I rode to the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park and other sites of Creek Indian history in Alabama.
According to the reviewer, this book challenges the common supposition that the French differed from the British in their relationships with Native people. “Frank estimates that at least eight hundred European Americans found spouses in Creek villages over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Most of these were from Scotland or elsewhere in Britain. In other words, it wasn’t just the French traders who were willing to marry Indian women.
The result was a lot of children with dual identities, in a world in which they could simultaneously be Indians and European Americans. Later on such dual identities were not possible. Later on people had to choose to be one or the other.
BTW, the author said “simultaneously act as.” It’s my own wording when I say “simultaneously be.” I’ve been talking that way since reading the autobiographies of people like John Tanner and Jonathan Alder. Especially with Alder, it seems more accurate to say that for much of his life he was Indian, not that he was a white person living as an Indian, or that he was a white captive acting like an Indian. It also seems that at many times he was both.
In reading about people like Alder, Isaac Zane, James McPherson, and their wives, I have been somewhat surprised to keep coming upon references to more and more of these people — captives who had become Indian. (This is in addition to the European-American traders and/or their offspring who were Indian.) Compared to what I’ve read of Michigan history, it seems that for a while Ohio had a substantial population of these people.
Back to Alabama. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, there were Indian leaders like William Weatherford, William McIntosh, and Menawa. Weatherford fought with the Red-Stick creeks against the other Creeks and the United States. He somehow escaped, making his way to the other side of the Tallapoosa River (in the photo above) and eluding the Lower Creeks who were guarding on the other side. He later surrendered himself to Andrew Jackson and ended up becoming a wealthy Alabama Planter. William McIntosh was a leader of the lower Creeks, who were allied with the United States army against the Red-Sticks. Menawa, also of Scottish and Creek ancestry, was a leader of Red-Sticks who, like Weatherford, escaped at Horseshoe Bend. But he didn’t go over to the United States. He later led a party that assassinated William McIntosh for signing a treaty that ceded land to the U.S.
So there were three Creek leaders, children of Scottish and Creek people, who were Indian leaders at Horseshoe Bend, and whose identities took three different trajectories. It sounds like I should read Frank’s book to learn about many others, and about what it meant to be Indian or among Indians at a time before the concept of “race” came to have such overriding importance.
Here’s a googlemap showing the location of Horseshoe Bend, and the route I took to get there. The same issue of AHR that reviews Frank’s book also has reviews of two other books about Native peoples in the southern U.S. That, plus the heavy snow we’re having in Michigan, makes me think I should do some more riding down in Alabama one of these days, and perhaps should add some southern Georgia destinations, too.
