From A Brutal Reckoning (Peter Cozzens, 2023) pp30-3
The Proclamation of 1763 ruptured the tidy status quo. Confronted with a treasury depleted by war, British authorities unwisely permitted anyone able to post a small bond to obtain a “general” license to trade anywhere, rather than in a specific talwa. A wave of colonial reprobates swept over the Creek country. The new breed of peddlers found it more profitable to deal in alcohol that “bewitched” Creek men than in the trade goods the Creeks truly needed. Within a decade, the sickly-sweet aroma of West Indies tafia (a drink similar to rum) permeated all but the most remote talwas.
In a country awash in alcohol, life became cheap, and tempers grew short. While Creek men often bartered all or part of their seasonal haul of deerskins for drink, Creek women prostituted themselves for needed trade goods, and sometimes also for tafia. It was not merely single females exercising their cultural prerogative to use their bodies as they wished; increasingly, married women risked beatings and mutilation to have sex with Georgia traders, a most “monstrous set of rogues for a major part of whom the gallows groans.” Creek marriages crumbled, overwhelming the mechanism of clan justice and creating bedlam in the talwas. The old breed of traders held their wives and métis children close and looked on in disgust.
The Creeks had few means of combating a trade system that had turned against them. Occasionally a party of sober Creeks would ambush tafia peddlers on lonely trails, crushing their kegs but sparing their lives. Far too many Creeks, however, were addicted to tafia to truly wish to halt its flow. At the same time, the Creeks had become absolutely dependent on white trade goods. “The white people,” lamented a sympathetic colonist, “have dazzled their senses with foreign superfluities.” By the latter half of the eighteenth century, a good musket was worth $jo in the Creek country, “to be paid in skins or horses.” A gun was hardly a superfluity, but a sample of nonlethal items in the inventory of a Pensacola trading house reveals the extent to which other items of European manufacture had insinuated themselves into every aspect of Creek life: fishhooks and lines; tin table spoons and forks; needles, thread, and silk; door and window hinges; iron corn and coffee mills; frying pans and coffeepots; gauze for mosquito nets; animal traps; ruffled shirts, gloves, hats, and silk handkerchiefs; and imported Chinese vermillion (an improved source of war paint were among the scores of goods available at the right price in deerskins.
To quench their thirst for tafia without sacrificing their own martial and their family’s domestic needs, as well as to put meat on the table, Creek men hunted relentlessly. From what traditionally had been a three-month fall/winter endeavor, deer hunting came to occupy six months or more of a man’s time and energy. Desperate hunters killed younger deer. Herds thinned to dangerous levels. Hunters had to travel farther afield to find game, and the Creeks and their Cherokee neighbors became increasingly unable to make their payments on British goods. Despite delivering an average of half a million pounds of deerskins annually to colonial creditors, they nevertheless descended deeper into debt. By 1773, the Creek debt totaled 670,000 pounds of deerskins.
An influx of cattle also endangered the deer population. The Creeks had welcomed horses, which they called echolucco, meaning “big deer” in Muscogee. Most Creek men owned between two and a dozen horses, but they drew the line at cattle. Introduced to talwas by resident traders, cattle herds came to represent a new and prolific kind of private property, which accelerated a cultural shift from traditional communalism toward the materialism that European trade goods had begun. As the métis offspring of traders grew to adulthood, they too acquired cattle, as did some so-called progressive Creeks, particularly in the Lower Creek talwas. The majority “traditionalist” Creeks objected to cattle both as a cultural menace and because of the destruction that the herds inflicted on communal cornfields and the canebrakes and grasses that were prime deer-grazing grounds. They railed against the whites who fostered the new economy and wished the instigators would return from whence they had come.
The whites, however, were going nowhere. Nor did the Creeks have the will to expel them, particularly after the Creeks became ensnarled in a desultory but costly war of their own making with their traditional foes the Choctaws in 1764, with whom they had long feuded over hunting land along the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers. The rus-tunnugee thlucco of an Upper Creek talwa precipitated the conflict by killing a prominent Choctaw war leader and tortring several warriors to satiate the bloodlust of his restive young men lest they instead fall out with the English, “as he knows that they must be at war with somebody.” It was a bloody reminder of the inherent tension between young and old, and war and peace, which the Creeks strove to maintain rather than ease. The Choctaws, former allies of the French who, after the British victory over their imperial friends, kept the British at arm’s length from the relative safety of their southeastern Mississippi domain, wanted conflict with no one. They were hardly a people co suffer aggression unanswered, however.
The war with the Choctaws did not go well for the Creeks. Choctaw warriors were good fighters, adept at avoiding ambushes and disciplined in battle. They also outnumbered the Creeks by at least twelve hundred men. As the conflict dragged on, some war-weary Lower Creeks drifted south to swell the ranks of their Seminole cousins in Florida. Not until October 1776, and then only with British mediation, did opposing leaders bury their war clubs “very deep in the earth.”
The Creeks had merely traded one conflict for another. Three months earlier, the American colonies had declared their independence. Great Britain expected the Creeks to help it defeat the refractory colonists, with whom the Choctaws sided. The Creeks, however, reverted to their old neutrality policy, the bankruptcy of which soon became clear. Most of the deerskin merchants were British Loyalists, also known as Tories, and when they fled South Carolina and Georgia-some to Creek talwas, others to return to Great Britain-the deerskin trade tumbled. Meanwhile, the population of Georgia doubled during the Revolutionary War to sixty thousand, more than half of whom were slaves. Unruly squatters and their human chattel availed themselves of the power vacuum in the South to spill across the colony’s Ogeechee River boundary into the eastern reaches of the Creek country, eager to exploit the rich riverine soil. Simultaneously, the young generation of Creek métis sought new sources of wealth. Together with vengeful Tory traders and Creek warriors whose livelihood was imperiled by the declining deerskin market, they periodically plundered backcountry plantations of slaves and horses.
The Creeks made few attempts to help the British directly, and their most ambitious effort ended ignominiously when a Choctaw war party slaughtered fifty members of a Creek force attempting to free British and Tory friends besieged by the Choctaws and their Spanish allies. The Creeks simply could not best the Choctaws. Neither did they seem able any longer to navigate the turbulent waters of the white man’s wars and politics.
The Creeks emerged from the American Revolution a divided and imperiled people. To traditional inter-talwa tensions and clan jealousies, the Revolutionary War added a new and deeper layer of friction in Creek society: pro-American and pro-British factions. After the British defeat, upward of four hundred Tories formerly associated with the deerskin trade retreated with their slaves and cattle to their Creek wives’ pro-British talwas, contributing their offspring to the already considerable métis population that came of age during the conflict. More than one observer was struck by the “strange medley of people… Caucasians, Indians, Africans, and several new breeds manufactured by judicious crossing” that came to characterize the Creek confederacy. The sudden profusion of adult métis Creek leaders with anglicized names also occasioned confusion. Although their Creek wives owned the property, the Tories’ slave-based agriculture, métis sons, and crop-trampling herds of cattle irritated traditionalists!’
Creek society stood at a crossroads, with no one apparently capable of selecting a viable path for the confederacy. An unlikely leader was about to emerge, however. He would lead the Creeks-some willingly, others grudgingly—into a perilous game of power politics with a new white government and reconfigured European presence in the South. In the process, this dynamic and controversial character would deepen fissures within the Creek body politic. His name was Alexander McGillivray. Born in 1750, he was the son of the Scottish merchant Lachlan McGillivray and his métis wife.
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