When I am speaking to various groups and am asked the question “What Indians lived here?” my answer is to reply with another question: “When?” Many Native American tribal groups have lived in the Southeast in “historical times.” The names of many of these are familiar names only to specialists in anthropology or history. I usually add: “I am assuming you mean in historical times.” And, even the phrase “historical times” is problematic. It suggests a European perspective. I am using this convention to define the period since Columbus’ “discovery” of the “New World” of the Americas. For Georgians, the question most often boils down to “Was the land where this town exists today Creek or Cherokee land?”

I begin by saying that the boundaries of today’s Georgia encompass lands mostly ceded by people often referred to as “Creeks.” This sometimes brings quizzical looks. School books and even popular histories seldom mention the Creeks, if at all. And, the phrase “This land was once occupied by fierce Indians,” often found in local histories, betrays a lack of specific knowledge. Many histories of Georgia counties were first written during the 1930’s, when Georgia was celebrating the 200th birthday. History and archaeology had added little to most Georgians’s knowledge of their state’s Native American history or culture at that point in time. With the emergence of Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs encompassing almost 40 of Georgia’s counties, popular interests have tended to focus on the north Georgia and the Cherokee. I will comment on this in a future essay. For now, let me simply show you a map, the one above, that clearly shows that most of Georgia was acquired as a result of Creek cessions of land to the colony and state. Keep in mind that Georgia is the largest of all the eastern sates-that’s right, larger than Virginia, Kentucky or even New York.

As originally published, this map was the work of the American Historical Association and published as the cover of the Smithsonian Magazine. I have superimposed the words “Creek Cessions” and “Cherokee Cession” to emphasize that most of Georgia was created from Creek lands, and most as a result of negotiated treaties. The Cherokee Cession, though enormosuly important in Georgia’s history and economic development, was far smaller. Many things influence our perceptions. Influencing perceptions in this case are the facts that Atlanta now dominates the state, populations have declined in much of the former cotton kingdom of south Georgia and new comers to the state, if aware of the Native American influence in Georgia, recall little beyond the story of the Cherokees’ remarkable modernization and their controversial removal.

The organization or “confederation” of the Creeks was largely the result of two phenomena associated with the arrival of the European explorers and traders.

First was the disastrous impact of diseases introduced by Europeans; the second was the inevitable rise of the “Indian Trade,” a commercial relationship which both enriched some Native Americans, on the one hand, while undermining their traditional cultures on the other.

Native American populations collapsed in the generation following discovery because of the introduction of diseases by European explorers. Scholars of this disaster estimate that indigenous populations declined by between 60 and 90 per cent. Incredible? Exaggerated? If so, this has not been disproved or even much revised in the decades since it became widely accepted among social scientists.

Reorganization and cultural accommodations brought together remnant groups to form new tribal entities. Among these were the people often referred to as Creeks by traders and explorers because of their preference for settling along waterways. Muscogee-speaking villages apparently dominated the trade with Europeans and these villages also wielded some political influence throughout the confederacy. The confederacy was a loose one and member villages (as well as individuals) enjoyed considerable freedom in some matters, making or abstaining from war for example.

It seems likely to me that those Cherokees first encountered by Europeans were also an amalgamated people, fused by necessity into what came to be referred to as a “nation”-another European convention. No doubt, trade encouraged coalescence . Cherokee “lower” villages along the upper Savannah River represented the most significant Cherokee presence in Georgia before the American Revolution.The colony of South Carolina also claimed the region. The larger Cherokee domain lay over a vast range in parts of what would become Tennessee, Kentucky, Northern Alabama and Northwest Georgia, but by any standard, their population cannot have been dense. An English estimate of their numbers in 1709 was approximately 9,000. Imagine a town of 10,000 with a city limit that made it as big as a state. As with other Native American territories, their claims extended to the lengthy trails and broad hunting areas over which they exercised essentially titular control. The deerskin trade system upon which they were reliant tended to encourage village life, not scattered farms-a lifestyle more typical of European practice on the fringes of their empires.

Even before European colonies were founded along the eastern seaboard, explorers had introduced dreadful and often fatal diseases, including measals, smallpox, malaria and the bubonic plague. The Spanish “Entrada” (“Invasion”) led by the Spaniard Hernando de Soto into the southeast resulted in the collapse of cultures that were thousands of years old. This was a holocaust on an unimaginable scale. The tribal organizations so often referred to in popular histories and school lessons as being very ancient ones are in some cases relatively new organizations of mixed populations and mixed cultures, amalgamations, and were adaptations to a catastrophe. Even those cultures that survived were profoundly altered.

The second phenomena that transformed the lives and cultures of the southeast was trade. After the founding of Charles Town (Charleston) in 1670, traders penetrated “upcountry” into the Cherokee domains, and into the “Creek Country” beyond the Savannah River in to what was to become Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. They also used friendly Creeks and others to carry out raids into the Spanish missions of Florida. Profits from the sale of Native American captives as slaves likely financed the emerging plantation system for labor- starved and under-capitalized Carolina settlers.

The form and practice of the “indian trade” (another problematic expression) was established before General James Oglethorpe and the first settlers arrived in 1733 to found Savannah and the new British colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe began immediately negotiating with the Creek leaders and relied upon a half-Creek woman, Coosaponakeesa (better known to English speakers as Creek Mary), as translator and adviser.

Augusta, established by Oglethorpe at the falls on the Savannah was strategically placed to attempt to regulate and replace the trade out of Charleston. I have discussed the trade and its impact elsewhere on this site. But, the geography of Georgia provided a natural course into the “backcountry” of the Creeks, a path that led from one river crossing to another along the Fall Line, where the Piedmont gives way to the Coastal Plain.

The Creek Confederacy was formed from more than 30 scattered groups of Native culures about the middle of the eighteenth century. Some of these shared the trade language of the Muskogee, some shared no linguistic connection. Its principle villages came to be clustered along waterways-hence the name “Creeks,” according to early European commentators. The corporate trade system by Carolina and Georgia traders involved placing traders in “stores” in the major Creek towns, and supplying them using pony caravans.

Creek hunting domains covered most of what is now Georgia and Alabama, as well as parts of Tennessee, Florida and even the Carolinas. Their principle “lower”villages were re-situated to take advantage of trade with the Europeans, first along the middle Ocmulgee River around modern day Macon and later focused at the Fall Line or “falls” of the Chattahoochee River in the vicinity of modern Columbus, Georgia, and along the middle Flint River. But isolated villages persisted and unity among the Creeks was more apparent than real.

It has been argued that the Creeks continued to occupy the areas that archaeologists have labeled Mississippian culture, the hierarchical, medieval, mound-building city-state culture so often portrayed in museum exhibits and National Geographic articles. Certainly the Creeks claimed the same areas. Some have suggested they arrived from the west and came to be the ruling class in some Mississippian city states such as those referred to today as the Ocmulgee and Etowah sites.

As Native American populations recovered, European traders often referred to the Creeks who lived in areas most distant from the trade centers of Augusta and Savannah as the “Upper Creeks” and those nearer-mostly in future Georgia- as “Lower Creeks.” The adjective has little to do with terrain. Upper Creeks were not “highlands people.” Creek towns were scattered in both the Piedmont and Coastal Plains regions, and important towns remained in Northwest Georgia and eastern Alabama.

Where the Cherokee were to be found prior to the American Revolution is pretty clear. Except for the “Lower” villages along the Tugaloo Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River, the evidence for Cherokee presence in Georgia is thin and contradictory. The Revolution changed this. The Tugaloo Villages (“Lower Towns”) were devastated after a failed rising against the Carolina colonists during the American Revolution, inspired in part by the colonists’ vulnerability during the British attack on Charleston.

The Cherokee bet on the wrong horse in the Revolution. Afterwards, as white settlers poured into Tennessee and Kentucky, new villages were established in the northwest corner of Georgia, the “Ridge-and- Valley” region. The Cherokee domain was much reduced and isolated within the confines of the emerging United States. Increasingly reflecting the cultural and economic influences of the surrounding white-governed states, the Cherokee modernized, building an agricultural economy as the deerskin trade became irrelevant. Their rapid “advancement” and state-building inspired envy and resistance-a story I will cover later.

By the end of the 18th century, the Cherokee maintained effective control only in western North Carolina, Northeastern Alabama, Southeastern Tennessee and Northwest Georgia. Consolidation and reliance on agriculture were centrifugal forces, scattering the population into isolated, extended family settlements just as an elite and European-modeled minority sought to build a national state, adopting a male-dominated, politically centralized government patterned on the American model, complete with African slavery, primogeniture and a police force. The reconstructed site of their capital at New Echota recalls the aspirations of a political elite. Though important for building the concept of a Cherokee state, the town attracted little permanent population or enterprise.

The map above helps “reset” our historical understanding by giving us a clear picture of an inescapable fact. Most of Georgia as it now exists was created through the cession of lands belonging to the Creeks.

Another reason for underscoring the importance of the Creeks as we seek to understand Georgia’s past, is to encourage the study of the relationship between Georgia’s European-descended people and the Creek people. I also want to raise the question of why the rise of the Cherokee Nation in Georgia and its people’s forced removal have generated so much empathy and – is it too much to say ? – romantic idealization. Certainly any account of Cherokee history inspires sympathy and admiration. At the same time, I feel compelled to ask “Why have the Creeks, who also endured the loss of their lands and forced removal, not inspired a similar response, either among Georgians in general or historians in particular?” I will discuss this in a later post.