As William Fyffe, a South Carolina plantation owner, wrote in 1761, “their greatest ambition is to distinguish themselves by military actions … Their young men are not regarded till they kill an enemy or take a prisoner. Those houses in which there’s the greatest number of scalps are most honoured. A scalp is as great a Trophy among them as a pair of colours among us.”
During the calm days, the Cherokee men fashioned bows, tomahawks, war clubs, and canoes. But when war stalked them, they painted their faces black, streaked with vermillion, and they adorned their hair with feathers.
It was a time, Fyffe recalled, when “there’s nothing heard but war songs and howlings.”
William Bartram, the American botanist who wandered at will through the Indian nations, wrote, “The Cherokees in their disposition and manner are grave and steady; dignified and circumspect in their deportment; rather slow and reserved in conversation; yet frank, cheerful and humane; tenacious of their liberties and natural rights of men; secret, deliberate and determined in their councils; honest, just and liberal, and are ready always to sacrifice every pleasure and gratification, even their blood, and life itself, to defend their territory and maintain their rights.”
Bartram also recognized that some of the younger women happened to be as fair and blooming as the ladies of Europe. He stumbled across a group of maidens who were wearing little or nothing at all as they picked strawberries.
Bartram always remembered them “disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool, flitting streams.” Otherwise, he found them dressed in skirts and short jackets, sometimes wearing moccasins.
The Cherokees built their homes with logs, stripping away the bark and plastering them with a mixture of clay and dried grass. Inside were cane seats, baskets, and buffalo hide chests, all placed upon rugs woven from hemp and designed with the images of birds, animals, and flowers.
To such dwellings the Cherokee men brought their wives after a simple marriage ceremony. The husband would give the bride a ham of venison, his pledge to keep the home filled with game from the hunt. And the bride would hand him an ear of corn, her assurance that she was ready to become a good housewife.
The vows were short; the dancing would go on for hours.
The Cherokees were proud and independent. As Fyffe wrote: “Every warrior is an orator.” And they called themselves “Ani-Yun-Wiya,” the real people, the principal people. But none could read and none could write.
So, the white man called them savage.
The sensitive wood sculpture of mother and child reflect the
peace and serenity of the Indians before white men came
to take away their cherished lands.
Five Civilized Tribes Museum
Muskogee, Oklahoma
Willard Stone, artist
Chapter 2: Out of the Fog
FOR A LONG time, the ancient Creeks wandered lost and blind in a great fog that wrapped itself like a gray flannel shroud around the earth. At least, that was the legend, the genesis of the clans that ruled the timbered countryside of Alabama and Georgia.
It had been a time of darkness, of separation.
Families were torn apart, husbands from wives, parents from children. And they searched and they groped. They could not see and they were alone.
Fear haunted their footsteps as they stumbled on in confusion. Hands reaching out touched other hands, and they all held on. They had found someone, and they all needed someone. Groups were formed. And the animals, crying in the fog, too frightened to be wild anymore, followed after those who chanced to cross their frantic, forgotten path.
A wind rose up out of the east and chased the fog away. The first group to fall into the light became the Wind Clan, and the other bands held on to the names of the animals who walked the darkness with them. Away from the fog marched the Bear, Beaver, Bird, Deer, Alligator, Raccoon, and Tiger Clans.
All agreed they would forever be as “people of one flesh,” always together, never apart, forming the confederacy of the Creek nation.
From them came the White Towns, the harbingers of peace and good will, and the Red Towns, whose warriors never minded lifting the hatchet and did so every chance they got. They would gather in the chokofa, the town square, or perhaps in a forest, fast awhile, drink strong medicine, hang a few charms and sacred objects on themselves, then ride out hell bent for leather to raid the Choctaws to the west or the Cherokees to the north.
War was important to the Creeks. It was the only way they had to gain recognition, to win personal distinction within the tribe.
They sought scalps.
They sought glory.
They would chase down the men among their enemies and kill them without fear or compassion. But they always brought the women and children home to be adopted into the Creek nation.
The warriors also had a habit of annexing tribes that chose to surrender rather than die. That’s how the Alabamas, the Koasatis, the Hitchitees, and the Tuskegees wound up as Creeks in the first place.
Reluctantly, even the White Towns rode out to shed blood. They didn’t like it, but they never got a promotion without it.
The Creeks worked together in a large garden, the Chiefs right alongside the lesser members, joking and singing and raising beans, corn, squash, melons, and pumpkins. The Lower Towns, with a wetter climate, produced rise. Men worked or they were fined. They worked diligently or they were chased out of town.
That was law.
And when the fields gave out, the Creeks merely abandoned them and moved on, dragging their towns along behind them. The crops played a critical role in the tribe’s way of life, other than just keeping the hungry fed.
When a man chose a girl to be his wife, he promptly moved into her house. But the marriage wasn’t fully consummated until after the harvest of the corn, giving her a few more months to be friendly with as many men as she liked. Once that corn was in, however, she had to be faithful, or her husband’s clan would promptly cut off their hair, her ears, and sometimes her nose. And the woman’s lover wound up in much the same shape as she.
The man, alas, could take as many wives as he wanted, provided the other spouses consented, and they almost always did.
By the 1790s, the Creeks looked around and realized that white men were running rampant over their Georgian lands. As one state commissioner explained, “They [the Georgians] are like a river, so very full that its banks cannot contain it.”
He wanted to purchase a great chunk of ground between the Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers. He met with the Creeks and, with a reverent tone in his voice, appealed to their compassion. He said, “No red man would refuse a white man something to eat, if he came hungry to his cabin; and yet a refusal of this land will be like a denial of bread to many hungry families, who
