Creek

CREEK

CREEK. The Creek Nation is centered in Muskogee, Oklahoma, but its early history rests in the Southeast. In the sixteenth century, long before a Creek people existed, Old World diseases, especially smallpox, decimated Natives in the Southeast, destroying towns and forcing survivors into refugee communities. By the end of the 1600s, some of these survivors, scattered in thirty to forty towns along Georgia and Alabama rivers, joined together in an

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Their residents, numbering about ten thousand, spoke a number of languages, including Muskogee, Alabama, and Hitchiti. But despite their varying ethnic origins, they presented a united front to Spanish, French, and English colonists. South Carolina colonists were soon calling these allied peoples "Creeks," a shorthand for Indians living on Ochese Creek in Georgia.

alliance. In the late seventeenth century, the Creeks established an active trade with French, Spanish, and English colonists. The Creeks traded Indian slaves and deerskins in exchange for textiles, kettles, and guns. The slave trade declined after the Yamasee War of 1715, when South Carolina determined that the risk of enslaving Indians was too great. The deerskin trade continued to flourish, however, especially after English colonists established the Georgia colony in 1733. In the 1750s, Savannah exported over sixty thousand skins annually. In Creek towns the profits of the trade, including cloth, kettles, guns, and rum, eased the labor of Creeks but also introduced new conflicts among men and women and rich and poor.

By 1800, the deer population had plummeted, and white Americans began seeking Creek lands rather than Creek deerskins. Under compulsion, Creeks ceded vast amounts of territory. At the same time, U.S. Indian agents pressured them to adopt American economic and religious practices. Grassroots resistance to these changes built until a civil conflict known as the Red Stick War erupted within the tribe in 1813. U.S. troops led by Andrew Jackson soon entered the fray on the side of the friendly Creek leadership. The rebels were defeated, and the Creek Nation lay in ruins. Removal followed swiftly, despite Creek resistance. In 1832, the Creeks agreed to cede their remaining southeastern lands, and U.S. troops hastened the process by rounding them up at gunpoint in the Creek War of 1836.

By 1837, more than 23,000 Creeks had left their southeastern homelands for Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where they suffered terrible floods, droughts, and epidemics. The population fell almost by half to 14,000 in the space of twenty years. Yet some Creeks fared well, particularly plantation owners who exploited slave labor. The Civil War dealt yet another blow to the Creeks. It freed roughly 2,000 slaves held in the Creek Nation but devastated the land, destroying crops, buildings, and equipment. Although Creeks rebuilt their nation, at the end of the nineteenth century the Curtis Act (1898) dissolved the Creek Nation. Despite resistance organized in 1900 by Chitto Harjo, or Crazy Snake, the United States divided Creek lands into individual allotments and unilaterally dissolved the Creek government.

The Creeks lost millions of acres of land, and their government nearly ceased functioning until 1971. In that year, the Creek Nation elected a principal chief for the first time since 1899. In 2001, the revitalized Creek Nation counted more than 50,000 citizens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Debo, Angie. The Road to Disappearance. A History of the Creek Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1941.

Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Claudio Saunt

See also Georgia ; Indian Removal ; Trail of Tears ; Tribes: Southeastern .