$23.50 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5495-2

Published: Fall 2003

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Copyright (c) 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This book is about a distant, lost world—the world of the Creek Indians at the close of the eighteenth century. I have attempted to portray this world through the surface of Creek life as lived by ordinary Creek men and women, and I have tried to understand something of the landscape in which they labored and loved, their jobs and tasks, their day-to-day affairs and concerns, and their towns and loyalties, as well as the larger historical forces at work that would eventually transform this world into an altogether different one.

But this was not a purely Indian world, nor had it been for almost 300 years. Creek life at the turn of the nineteenth century was so seamlessly stitched to that of frontier whites and blacks that it is difficult to separate Indian life from the life of others on the frontier. The territorial borders of Creek country never formed an impermeable boundary to people, goods, animals, plants, microbes, or ideas. In short, the lives of people in the American South at this time were thoroughly interwoven.[1] To portray Creek country in all its richness, detail, and complexity, then, requires telling something about Creek relationships with the others living in or near Creek country—other Indians, Africans, people of mixed parentage, and white Americans.

American Indians have played a central role in shaping the history of the nation, and they are deeply woven into the social fabric of much of American life. In the not-too-distant past they dominated the larger part of America geographically and militarily, and they played a vital role in its economy. However, only in the past few decades have Indians surfaced as more than just shadowy and tragic figures in history.[2] During the last three decades of the twentieth century, scholars of ethnohistory, of the "new Indian history," and of Native American studies forcefully demonstrated that to understand American history and the American experience, one must include American Indians.[3]

So why were Indians left out of history for so long?[4] There are many complicated reasons, of course. Perhaps the most pernicious is the well-documented construction of non-Western peoples, including American Indians, as Other—mystical, primitive, and ahistorical.[5] This conceptualization robs the Other of historical agency and effectively places people outside history. According to this paradigm, the Other is subject more to natural rather than historical processes.[6] This is one of the reasons why the study of non-Western peoples traditionally fell to anthropology and not history. Anthropology was decidedly ahistorical, if not antihistorical, for much of its history.[7] Thus, the Other and anthropology became subsumed under "natural history." To see that this conceptualization is still with us, one only has to look to natural history museums; these typically house the exhibits of the American Indians and other non-Western peoples.[8]

In the past several decades, however, scholars in anthropology and history, among other disciplines, have directed much attention to reconfiguring this conception of non-Western peoples, placing them into history, and understanding how historical processes have shaped, reshaped, and even created non-Western societies and, conversely, how non-Western societies have shaped, reshaped, and even created Western societies. Much of this work is showing that dividing history along Western/non-Western lines makes little sense. At least since contact between the Old and New Worlds, human history has comprised a single history, within a single world, composed of the interactions between all.[9] The structural elements of this single world have not changed significantly since contact. They are the elements of the modern world system wherein, on a global scale, all people participate to some degree in the modern economic system, in the colonial imperialism that underwrites this system, and in the buying and selling of commodities that fuels it.[10] At the end of the eighteenth century, Creek country was part of this modern world system, and the people, places, and historical and cultural forces within it formed a single world.[11]

Even though I emphasize that Indians have a history and are the products of that history, my purpose here is not to write a history of the Creeks. Other than a general overview of Creek life during the Historic Period (ca. 1540-1840), I do not trace Creek life through time, nor do I render a narrative of events. Rather, this book is a snapshot in time, a kind of historical ethnography—a histoire totale that attempts to account for the regular events of regular people in daily life as well as the structural and historical underpinnings of their daily lives.[12] But one should not mistake this snapshot for all of Creek history. I have tried to capture Creek men and women in action during a particular time in a particular place, making both large and small decisions that affected historical outcomes, as well as those historical forces that undoubtedly weighed on their minds as they moved through their world. In other words, I have attempted to portray the Creeks as people, caught in history, shaping history, and negotiating their own moment in time.

The day-to-day human affairs played out in Creek country emerge from the archaeological and documentary records. The deeper meanings of their lives are notably obscure. In fact, the Creeks generally refused to discuss such things with whites.[13] And about such matters, archaeology cannot speak. On the surface, Creek life resembled that of frontier whites and blacks by the late eighteenth century. But underneath there were undoubtedly some fundamental differences. In times of personal crisis or in life's transitions—birth, marriage, illness, death, or revenge—Creek men and women likely invoked a worldview quite different from that of frontier whites and blacks. I have not attempted here to sketch even the outline of the deeper meanings in Creek life. That must wait for another work.[14]

Benjamin Hawkins and Reconstructing Creek Country, 1796-1816

Because the Creeks themselves left relatively few written documents, their lives (like the lives of all people from oral cultures) must be pieced together from the historical documents, through careful use of oral traditions, and from archaeological investigation. I have used all three in this book, but each presents challenges and limitations. In my research, I have examined significant documentary sources kept by a variety of literate people in Creek country: letters, journals, trade ledgers, account books, legal depositions, land deeds, military records, and census records, to name a few. These documents were written by Euro-American white males who were either in Indian territory or dealing with Indians for various reasons. Such documents are typically the resources for historians, and they have been used with great success in reconstructing aspects of the American past. But the information they contain on Indian life is often faulty and imprecise because there was an unevenness in the writers' access to and in their understanding of what they saw of Indian life.[15] Furthermore, the Creeks did not reveal some aspects of their lives to whites, and especially not to white elites and officials. Creek voices occasionally appear in the documents, but almost always in translation and as recorded by a Euro-American male.

In reconstructing Indian history, then, a more authentic Indian voice comes through oral traditions and archaeology. Oral traditions pose methodological problems that scholars are only now beginning to assess. Because of this, I have used oral traditions sparingly, and then not as literal renderings of past events or as explanations for past relationships and events but, rather, as later echoes of eighteenth-century social codes and beliefs.[16] Archaeology, on the other hand, has developed rigorous methods and interpretations for reconstructing the lives of people by examining their material remains. Because of the nature of material evidence, archaeology speaks best to the economic and material basis of life. Archaeology also gives us the spatial context of a people's life—how they situated themselves across a landscape and some sense of why they did so. Archaeology also is exceptional in delineating the long-term, persisting structures of life. However, archaeology cannot tell us everything, and it especially cannot speak definitively to the more intangible aspects of life that leave no material remains, particularly religious beliefs, ideologies, and opinions.

Much of my reconstruction of Creek life and Creek country is based on the letters, journals, and records of Benjamin Hawkins, the U.S. Indian agent to the Creeks from 1796 until his death in 1816.[17] Hawkins left a large volume of written correspondence and other documents on Creek life and Indian affairs in the South. The documents provide a rare window on a world about which we know so little. Although other scholars have put Hawkins's observations to excellent use, none has used the documents to reconstruct this world in all its detail and complexity, and I know of no other set of documents that provides such a view of this world. Certainly there were other Indian agents and literate people among the southern Indians, but none of them left such a detailed collection of documents, nor did they take such an especially ethnographic interest in the Indians.

My reliance on Hawkins also clarifies the chronological parameters of this book, 1796-1816, which cover Hawkins's tenure among the Creeks. But these parameters make sense in the Creek experience as well. The end of the eighteenth century was a time of critical transition for the Creeks. They found themselves in an economic and ecological crisis while squaring off with America over land issues. In fact, this transition brought Hawkins into Creek country in the first place, and it was this transition and the consequences of it that he witnessed and in which he participated.

There are problems with my use of Hawkins in this way, of course. By relying extensively on Hawkins, I run the risk of reconstructing his, and not the Creeks', version of Creek country. This is a thorny issue. Ethnohistorians have wrangled with such problems for some time, and the issue has vigorously resurfaced in recent years with the postcolonial critique.

I believe Hawkins's observations, tempered with the oral and archaeological record, can provide a reliable window on Creek society, however. In the first place, he entered Creek country at a time when the outsider/insider dichotomy was no longer accurate. By the end of the eighteenth century, Euro-Americans and Indians had been living together for more than 200 years. When Hawkins came among the Creeks, they did not see him as an exotic, undefinable creature; they understood him to be a white elite American, and they knew how to relate to him in that role. Nor were the Creeks exotic and undefinable to Hawkins. Indians figured much in the minds of white Americans at this time, and even Americans living in seaboard cities somewhat removed from Indian affairs had experience with Indians. Hawkins assuredly entered Creek country in a social division reserved for white elites, but this does not mean that he was outside this world. Rather, Hawkins, like the Creeks, Africans, Europeans, and others who lived there, was a part of Creek country.[18]

One must also remember that even though Hawkins brought his own biases, subjective responses, and preconceived ideas to Creek country, he did not create Creek country from whole cloth. There is some representation of Creek country through Creek eyes in Hawkins's writing, if only because Hawkins was reporting on Creek activities, Creek peoples, and Creek places. The task is to recover something of the Creeks' point of view of Creek country by examining the point of view that Hawkins has left us, while remembering that both existed in the same world.

Environmental historians have shown that the natural world always bears the imprint of the humans who inhabit it and that that imprint is a cultural consequence.[19] So, even if Hawkins's writings are necessarily the world as he understood it, we can "read" his version of the landscape of Creek country to understand the Creeks' cultural imprint on that landscape. I would argue one can do the same kind of reading for the social landscape. I can know where Creeks chose to place their towns because Hawkins gave such detailed descriptions of such. Likewise, I can locate natural resources that the Creeks identified as important, I can use Creek place-names collected by Hawkins to understand something about how the Creeks viewed the landscape, and so on.

Finally, this book contains a series of maps I constructed using information taken from Hawkins's writings, especially his Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799. These maps are unusual in that they depict Creek towns, places, and landscapes at a local level. I compiled these maps using information from Hawkins, but in effect they bring the reader into Creek country at ground level, so that the reader may imagine, for instance, what it was like for a Creek woman to walk with her sisters and cousins to the nearest stream to collect water. We can see how far the young women traveled, the gravelly spots in the path, what kinds of trees shaded their way, what inclines they had to climb, what squirrels dodged their steps, and what briars caught their skirts.[20] These maps do not contain everything that would have been salient to these Creek women as they wandered down to the river, but they can give us an approximation, which may be the best we can achieve.[21] Clearly the problems of evidence in reconstructing Indian history and the historic Indian perspective are many. Still, by reading Hawkins and the other evidence anthropologically, we can approach a fuller understanding of the Creek Indians and their world at this time.