Most of us have a tendency to “conflate” what we learn about specific periods of history so that we often fix in our own minds that Native Peoples of the eighteenth or nineteenth century lived as they had lived in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Native Peoples experienced dramatic changes in their ways of living and even in their locations. European arrival and colonization had a transformative effect on Native Americans as it did on the Europeans’ lives and practices. Communicable diseases brought by Europeans devastated Native American populations. Some researchers have concluded that losses amounted to more than 90% of native populations.
There are many common misconceptions about the Southeastern Indians, especially the Cherokees and Creeks whose history has become conflated into a minor subtext in school books -especially in Georgia. One is the assumption that their areas of occupation were static, that Native Peoples had lived in these locales where Europeans first encountered them for eons of time. Areas occupied by Native Americans typically had few clear boundaries and once the European invasions began, many village sites relocated out of fear or a desire to relocate to places that offered easier avenues of trade with the newcomers, or at safe distances from negative influences.
Boundaries became much more important after European settlers began to arrive in greater numbers and the pressure for new settlement areas for whites arose. For example, when South Carolina was settled in the late seventeenth century, several southern and a few non-southern Native American entities established a trading presence on the Savannah River by movinging villages there. This was to establish proximity to the trade paths used by the Carolina traders and to be certain they could serve as the middle men in any exchanges over the horizon. This included Creeks, Cherokees, Shawnees, and Chickasaws among others. In general, Native Peoples desired trade with the Europeans whose steel weapons, woven clothes and muskets were eagerly sought. The medium of exchange was-in the deep south-essentially deerskins. An epidemic among cattle herds in the British Isles in the early eighteenth century meant the demand for American hides was intense for several decades.
This trade also involved the capture and enslavement of more distant and weaker “Indian” tribes. South Carolina equipped many expeditions conducted by Creeks to seize the pacified and disarmed Indians of the Spanish missions in Florida. Many South Carolina plantations were capitalized with profits from the Indian slave trade. It became common practice to sell the Indian slaves to buyers in the West Indies and use the profits to acquire African slaves. By the time Georgia was settled in 1733, the Charleston traders were well established on what became the Georgia side of the Savannah River.
General James Oglethorpe, organizer of the newest British colony in America, faced a challenge in gaining control over the deerskin trade in Georgia. The creation of the town of Augusta was an intentional interdiction of Charleston’s trade with the Creeks, whose villages, by the time of the establishment of Georgia, were mostly clustered around the central Chattahoochee River at its fall line rapids (near today’s city of Columbus, Georgia). Oglethorpe also went to great efforts to cultivate Creek consent to cessions of territory, inviting Creek leaders to meet with him at Savannah. He mandated strict requirements for licensing the traders and made concessions for Creek participation in Savannah’s economic life. Slavery was also prohibited in the new colony. That prohibition would eventually be set aside when the Crown established control over the colony. The crown was financially limited and the nobility wanted to maximize profits on their lands in the colonies-so the crown gave in and permitted slavery in Georgia as it had done in other colonies.
Creek interpreter, Mary Musgrove, became the chief cattle rancher and meat supplier to the town. She also served as the chief interlocutor between her own people and the new colony. The wiregrass and longleaf pine forests provided the necessary grazing lands. It was not chance that placed her in this role. She was living near Charleston with her deerskin-trader husband when news of Oglethorpe’s arrival was published in Charleston. She immediately relocated to Georgia, actively seeking out the role she played in facilitating Oglethorpe’s initial contacts with the Creeks. The Creeks were neither hostiles nor isolationists and they responded positively to Oglethorpe’s respectful initiatives.
The colony of Georgia’s relationship with the Cherokees was initially less significant. Their claims and presence along the northern tributaries of the Savannah placed them far from Oglethorpe’s mind. Their trade with the Carolinians was well established and that trade was maintained along shorter routes to the north and west of Charleston.
An oft- repeated version of Cherokee history goes something like this: “The Cherokees were the dominant Native Americans in the Southeastern area of what became the United States. By the time of their removal, the Cherokees lived mostly in northwest Georgia (where they established their capital), and western North Carolina (where they had lived since the mound-building cultures predominated). By the time of their removal in the 1830’s the Cherokees’ domain was reduced to northwest Georgia. Here, they had become very civilized, founded a capital at New Echota and adopted a constitution similar to that of the United States. Having developed a written language, they were publishing their own newspaper and, with federal encouragement, they had become farmers.”
An example will help in reimagining how these First People changed their locations over time. Before the American Revolution, some of the Cherokees’ villages were once established in what was to become North Carolina, South Carolina and Kentucky. But the Cherokees were driven from most of South Carolina. This area included parts of future North Carolina/Georgia in the upper reaches of the Savannah River watershed. The ownership of these lands was to be disputed between the states for a century or more after the American Revolution. How do you create “political maps” when frontiers are in flux and the country is mountainous and unsurveyed?Early maps are often inspired by ambitious hopes and a desire to “claim” lands by drawing a map of them on a piece of paper. A bit of artistic magic.
As a result of their having sided with the British in the American Revolution, the Cherokees were compelled to resettle some of their “towns” beyond South Carolina’s effective control. In the decades before as well as after the Revolution, they were also under pressure from the influx of private investment companies from Virginia and elsewhere that were incessantly sending explorers and survey parties into the Virginia-claimed lands, lands destined to become the states of Kentucky and Tennessee. So, Cherokee ownership was being constantly challenged by private developers whose interloping was winked at by colonial authorities.
Evidence of Cherokee presence in what is today northwest Georgia is thin prior to the American Revolution. Their recorded presence in northwest Georgia after the Revolution was likely the result of their relocation to safer ground following the American victory in the Revolution. Put simply, the Cherokees were on the “wrong side” in the Revolution and paid the price. White settlement, often illegal and beyond the reach of government, created hostilities and resentments of course, not only on the Cherokees’ borders, but all along the borders of the new United States. Nor were the British accepting their defeat gracefully as they urged the native tribes aid them in their effort to retain practical if not legal control of the lands beyond the Appalachian chain of mountains.
Beginning with its founding in 1733, Georgia’s colonial land area was expanded through treaty-sanctioned cessions, as indicated on the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology map (below). An exception is the area labeled “1821”. This area was forcibly taken first by military fiat and then by formal treaty. The cession resulted from the invasion of Creek lands to suppress a threat posed by the Upper Creeks who were exhausted and angered by American encroachment. Defeat came at the hands of Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee Volunteers. This episode is seldom rendered in textbooks because it is conflated into the War of 1812.
Ironically, the Lower Creeks provided military support to Jackson in his campaign against the Upper Creeks and fought in the campaign against the British, culminating in the the Battle of New Orleans.
The Creeks were defeated and much of their territory seized by the U.S. Army under Andrew Jackson’s command. His invasion of the Creeks lands was justified in the eyes of many whites because the Upper Creeks had resolved to use violence to dissuade further American encroachment on their lands. The “Creek Rising”, its causes and its consequences are not well understood by the average American, I think it is safe to say. It has remained shrouded in the much-mythologized victory over the British in the “War of 1812”. Jackson, undoubtedly exceeding his military authority, made himself the idol of the frontiersmen by dictating a treaty that cost the Creeks most of their remaining territories-a treaty that opened much of west Georgia to the plantation system. Cotton exhausts the soil and, without fertilizer, will not grow on sandy soil or on lands above about 3,000 feet in elevation. Jackson had arranged to have much of the Creek lands surveyed and he and his associates would benefit financially from the defeat of the Creeks. Nor was Jackson impressed when the Lower Creeks protested that they did not deserve to be punished for the deeds of the Upper Creeks. He punished his old friends as he did his enemies.
Bureau of Ethnology Map (1901). Federal policy toward Native American tribes was designed to encourage Native Peoples to become farmers. This was feasible to some extend in non-arid areas like the deep south. But in the case of the Cherokees, it encouraged them to emulate the agricultural culture surrounding them.
The “Cherokee Nation,” as a political entity, reflected the political and social stratification around them in white societies in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. An oligarchy of Cherokee leaders emerged, often of mixed white and Cherokee blood. John Ross, principle chief of the Cherokees at the time of the removal in 1838, could claim only to be about one-eighth Cherokee. Of course this matters only if we imagine that culture, intellect and character are somehow conveyed by blood, an assumption that carries little weight in a post-racial world. Ross was a product of his times and experiences, and was an adroit champion of Cherokee rights and interests. He was also an experienced attorney and resisted removal by every legal means. Even when the Supreme Court upheld Cherokee claims, the Executive Branch of the U.S. government in the person of Andrew Jackson refused to abide by the court’s decision.
Cherokee-owned Black slaves and “plantation”- style agriculture became one of the new means for accumulating wealth and political influence. In the traditional tribal Cherokee polity and culture, women exercised distinctive social and political influence and control over themselves. In the new order, they were excluded from the councils of government. ( It is important to note that the subject of their persistence in recovering their roles as leaders in the political and cultural sense has been well documented.) It is also important to keep in mind that the Cherokee Capital at New Echota was short lived and never became a populated center.
The nation’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was printed in two languages, Cherokee and English. Many Cherokees could read and write using the new syllabary (attributed to Sequoyah), but the newspaper was also widely circulated to offer the white world a sympathetic (and essentially accurate) view of the Cherokees. Its editor was educated in New England, where he met and married a white woman. Cherokee leadership was to an important extent of mixed race.
Cherokee Chief John Ross was only one- eighth Cherokee. One should not infer too much from this fact. Cherokee identity traditionally derived from being born to a Cherokee woman- a cultural norm that was the opposite of European tradition and therefore confusing to Europeans (and their American descendants). Indeed, European concepts of iron-clad political boundaries, primogenitor, Kings and Queens, nobility and individual ownership of land led to a thousand misunderstandings. There were no Cherokee princesses.
The concept of individual ownership of land resulted from the federal pressure for Cherokees to become farmers. Men preferred the traditional life of hunting and trade and took grudgingly to farm life. Village life also suffered from this shift and Cherokee economic and social structure came to be more like that of their white neighbors, with scattered farms and a distant capital where men made the important decisions. The winds of change also brought African slavery and the plantation system to the Cherokee Nation. In some ways the Nation had become a reflection of the white society that surrounded them. Whites would say the Cherokees were “civilized.”
All this is to suggest that understanding any aspect of history is demanding. Misconceptions are easily perpetuated unless the student, and the would -be teacher, are willing to study. It must be stultifying to teacher and student to have a mandated course of study unaccompanied by an opportunity for extensive reading and reflection. History is never static and is always incorporating the results of new research. This gives it life and continuously alters its meaning.
To learn more about the deerskin trade go to https://longleafjournal.com/white-tail-empire-the-deerskin-trade-in-the-southern-colonies-part-one-how-the-trade-worked/