April 15

On this date in 1715, four South Carolina diplomats were killed in the Yamassee town of Pocotaligo, located about a hundred miles west of the colonial capital of Charles town.

The delegation had been sent to solicit the support of the Yamasee in an effort to thwart the outbreak of a war -- rumored to be just over the horizon -- launched by the Ochese (Lower) Creek against the colony. The six ambassadors had good reason to assume their appeal would be recognized and accepted. As the most important English ally in the region, the Yamasee had waged war on behalf of the white settlers before, most recently in 1712-1713 against the Southern Tuscarora. In that conflict the Yamasee joined with an array of other regional tribes to annihilate their adversaries, pushing them out of the Carolinas and into the region, much farther north, that was dominated by the Iroquois Confederacy.

However, the cultural and economic stability of the Yamasee was under tremendous pressure during these years, and their allegiance to the English colonists was beginning to fray. The deerskin and Indian slave trades had helped secure the political and economic bonds between the white settlers and the Yamasee, but they also brought further white encroachment into Yamasee territory while depleting the deer stock. As well, the growth of massive rice plantations -- which would ultimately prove to be the source of South Carolina’s great wealth -- were also impinging on Yamasee territory. With the expansion of the Port Royal region south of Charles Town, cattle ranches quickly sprouted up along the border of the Yamasee territory; heedless of their own role in fomenting the crisis, unfenced livestock gobbled the crops on which the Yamasee depended for food.

During these early years of the 18th century, the Yamasee population showed marked decline, with the window of opportunity for resistance diminishing with each year. With fewer warriors, slave raiding was becoming more difficult. Many Yamasee resented what they regarded as abusive trade practices among the white settlers, including aggressive debt collection, intimidation and violence. They worried that unless they were able to clear their financial obligations to the colony, their own people would soon find themselves on the auction block; whether this fear was well-founded or not, the Yamasee were in the very least determined not to follow the downward trajectory of the Westoe or Cassaboe -- two other once-powerful Indian peoples who had been reduced to helpless dependency over the previous half century.

While receiving assurances from the South Carolina government of its benign intentions, the Yamasee could also not help noticing the construction of a new military fort in Beaufort.

When the delegation arrived in Pocotaligo on April 14, then, the Yamasee regarded the English ambassadors with suspicion. Several of the men in the group had already squandered the good will of the Indians, and the rest were rumored to be spies rather than earnest diplomats. Early the next morning, after hours of intrartibal debate, the Yamasee headmen decided to take the unprecedented step of killing their guests. One of them -- an Indian commissioner named Thomas Nairn -- was tortured for hours before he died.

Having dispatched the ambassadors -- and recognizing the consequences of that decision -- the Yamasee then launched a massive assault against Port Royal, killing roughly a hundred colonists and striking the first blow in a war that would consume the region for the next two years. The war would eventually bring the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Catawba, Apalachee and more than a dozen other Indian peoples into a loose alliance against the colony. Over the course of two years, South Carolina reached treaty arrangements with a number of their adversaries, while others fled the region or remained in a state of hostility.

Nearly 10 percent of the colony's settlers died in the fighting. The Yamasee, which lost at least a quarter of its population, dispersed throughout the region after the war. Some joined in with the Lower Creek confederacy, while others relocated to Spanish Florida, where they eventually merged with the Seminole.

March 27

On this date in 1814, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend occurred on a peninsula of the Tallapoosa River, located in what would soon be the state of Alabama. The five-hour ordeal pitted a contingent of 1000 Upper Creek warriors -- known as “Red Sticks” -- against the West Tennessee Militia, the 39th United States Infantry, and an complement of Cherokee and Lower Creek (“White Stick”) fighters, all of whom answered to the command of General Andrew Jackson.

The origins of the battle were complicated. The Creek, unlike their Cherokee or Choctaw neighbors, were a loose confederation rather than a distinct political and cultural entity; as white settlement and influence extended further and further into the old Southwest, divisions emerged among the Creek villages over the question of how much resistance should be offered against white encroachments. The so-called Lower Creek -- known as “White Sticks” -- tended to adopt a more accommodationist stance. Meanwhile, certain factions of the Upper Creek -- also known as “Red Sticks” -- urged a more forceful response.. Influenced by a pan-Indian political and spiritual revival that had swept down from the Ohio Valley over the previous years, the Red Sticks tended to regard many of their fellow Creeks as spineless collaborators who had adopted too much of the European-American culture.

By 1813, the United States and Britain had entered into a war with each other, and the Creek had become enmeshed in a civil conflict. For a while, the Red Sticks maintained an upper hand in the fight; they conquered and sacked numerous Lower Creek towns in an effort to destroy all vestiges of white influence in the region. In August 1813, Red Sticks killed hundreds of Lower Creek who had taken refuge under American protection at Ft. Mims, located North of Mobile. Though most of the victims at Ft. Mims were Indian, the episode sent the region into a complete panic. Whites feared that the Red Sticks would not only receive military assistance from Great Britain and Spain, but that they would also stir up slave revolts throughout the deep South.

Militias from Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia immediately entered the civil war on behalf of the Lower Sticks, and after several months of skirmishes throughout the region, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend brought the Creek civil war to a violent conclusion. Fortified by extensive log breastworks on a peninsula along the Tallapoosa River, more than a thousand warriors and hundreds of women and children faced off against a much larger force of Americans and their allies. Once the breastworks had been breached, however, the Creek were trapped. The battle turned into a slaughter, as the 2600 American soldiers and their 600 Indian allies had thoroughly demolished the Red Sticks. More than 500 died in battle, with hundreds more drowning or otherwise being killed in the river as they tried to flee. A few hundred managed to escape to Florida, where they took refuge with the Seminole.

Years later, Sam Houston -- who fought in the Tennessee militia under Andrew Jackson -- described the aftermath:

The sun was going down, and it set on the ruin of the Creek nation. Where, but a few hours before a thousand brave...[warriors] had scowled on death and their assailants, there was nothing to be seen but volumes of dense smoke, rising heavily over the corpses of painted warriors, and the burning ruins of their fortifications.

Five months later, the Treaty of Ft. Jackson ceded to the US more than 23 million acres of Creek territory in southern Georgia and throughout the area that would eventually become the state of Alabama. In a remarkable gesture of ingratitude, the US took land that had been held by Red Sticks as well as the Lower Creeks who had fought with the Americans.

Two decades later, President Andrew Jackson oversaw the complete eviction of the Creeks -- along with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw -- from the old Southwest. Meantime, the former Creek lands had been opened up to white settlement, and cotton planters flooded the region, rejuvenating the institution of slavery.