raged on. “Accursed be the race that as seized our country and made women of our warriors,” he snapped. “Our fathers from their tombs reproach us as slaves and cowards. I hear them now wailing in the winds . . . the spirits of the mighty dead complain. Their tears drop from the wailing skies. Let the white race perish. They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.”
And the Red Sticks raged with him.
The Ridge fought for attention.
No one listened.
He raised his voice, but his words were drowned out in the passion and the frenzy that Tecumseh had hurled across the southland.
“My friends,” The Ridge warned, “the talk you have heard is not good. It would lead us to war . . . and we would suffer; it is false; it is not a talk from the Great Spirit.”
The Prophet, the shadow in Tecumseh’s bold footsteps, had screamed that those who turned their back on his master’s admonitions would be condemned by the gods to die. The Ridge was unafraid. “I stand here and defy the threat,” he barked. “Let the death com upon me. I offer to test this scheme of imposters.”
The Ridge stood.
And he did not die.
The gods did not touch him.
But a band of Cherokees, inflamed by Tecumseh’s call for a trail of blood, attacked the Ridge and almost beat him into a grave not yet dug but awaiting the corpse of anyone begging for peace when the rumors of war crouched like shadows in the darkness.
The Ridge is a heretic, the Prophet shouted. He is a disbeliever, and disbelievers must pay a great and terrible price.
It had been ordained.
A hailstorm would come out of the heavens, the Prophet warned. And all who stood with the Ridge would perish. Come, he said to the Cherokees, come with me to the mountaintop where we will watch his destruction and escape the wrath that falls upon him.
Hundreds followed him back to the highlands, to an ancient and timbered peak that would save them. They waited. They watched with contempt.
No hailstorm came.
The Ridge did not perish.
And, at last, they all finally shrugged and walked back down out of the mountains again, meeker but wiser men.
The Red Sticks simmered.
They knew their chance would come, and they were in no hurry. They looked on but kept their distance as Americans in 1812 again battled the British. It was not their fight. It was not their war. Their rifles remained silent, their long knives in their belts, their anger buried deep inside them.
But suddenly, at Burnt Corn Creek in Southern Alabama, the Americans attacked a small band of Creeks, led by Peter McQueen, who had been given “a small bag of powder for each of ten towns and five bullets to each man” by the Spanish governor as “a friendly present for hunting purposes.” An odd collection of disorganized American soldiers ambushed the Creeks as they bedded down for the night and chased them into the swamps.
The force from Fort Mims began looting Indian rifles and shotguns, fishing hooks and hunting knives, even stealing the colored cloth that McQueen’s band had bought in Pensacola for their wives. The creeks had turned their backs on war, but war sought them out. Death stalked them.
The time had come for the angry Red Sticks to strike, and they moved swiftly.
Red Eagle had asked for calm, but his plea fell on deaf ears. He warned his people, “Do not avenge Burnt Corn. Civil War will only weaken us.”
In the darkness of the Creek chokafa, the warriors quickly voted to fight. Still they needed a leader, a man of honor, and they turned to Red Eagle. He was heartbroken. But he did not refuse them. Red Eagle stood and walked silently out of the chokafa.
Death would follow where he led it.
Red Eagle, on a hot August day in 1813, rode through the swamp and cane fields toward Fort Mims. The battle would not last long, he reasoned. The fort was much too strong. His warriors would attack, then fall back, then go on home where they belonged.
Red Eagle was not a worried man.
He would bravely perform his duty.
The battle, he knew, was lost before the first shot had been fired.
From behind the walls, a drum roll signaled the noon hour. Red Eagle nodded. And his screaming, yelling Red Sticks, their faces black, their arms yellow, swarmed down upon the stockade fortress.
The prophets danced.
Gunfire exploded across the Alabama countryside.
Red Eagle was aghast. He saw that the front gates had been left open.
Mims burned. The fort lay in ashes.
No one escaped the sound and the fury. Soldiers and settlers, women and children, blacks and Indians lay where they fell.
The prophets danced.
The warriors howled.
And Red Eagle, in the shroud of an early-morning fog, began burying the dead, all five hundred and fifty-three of them, in the plowed dirt between the potato rows. In the faces of the dead, he saw his own.
Andrew Jackson lay in the bed of his Tennessee home, his left shoulder shattered by a bullet, the aftermath of an ill-fated duel. He was pale, ashen. But he could not forget the carnage at Fort Mims. He was a hard man. He did not forgive easily. Jackson swore: “By the Eternal, these people must be saved.”
During the moon of the roasting ears, Andrew Jackson turned his horse toward Alabama. He would not face Red Eagle alone. The Cherokees left their farms to join his mission of revenge. After all, they had become Americans too, and the peace was theirs to uphold.
Eight hundred marched with Jackson, including The Ridge, John Ross, Charles Hicks, and a half-breed who walked with a limp, a man they called Sequoyah. From the Creek Nation came Gen. William McIntosh and an army of warriors to fight against their own people and blow away the cloud of war that the Red Sticks had hung with blood above their heads. The Choctaws filed in from the west.
The chase was on.
The Red Sticks were on the run.
The troops of John Coffee, Jackson’s vanguard, cut down a hundred and eighty-six of them at Tallussahatchee. Coffee reported that the Creeks “met [death] with all its horrours, without shrinking or complaining. Not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit.”
Davy Crockett remembered. “We shot them like dogs.”
They left Tallussahatchee in burned ruins. The ashes spread with the winds. The ground stained with the blood of the Red Sticks would never be sacred again. Vengeance belonged to the man riding with a military sword. Vengeance belonged to Jackson.
