Red Sticks fled beyond the sanctuary of the swamps as Jackson drove relentlessly toward them. His men broke ranks at Talladega, and Jackson snapped, “I’ll shoot dead the first man who makes a move to leave.”
The ranks closed.
At Horseshoe Bend, Red Eagle would make his stand.
He would run no farther. His fate would be decided on a March 27 morning in 1814. And one hundred acres of Alabama bottom land would soak up the blood of Andrew Jackson’s revenge. The Red Sticks stood behind their earthen ramparts, screaming and taunting, daring the militia to march across that open field, laughing at the troops that did not come.
From behind them, John Ross swam the river and quietly pulled away the Creek canoes. Six hundred of his Cherokee soldiers climbed inside and, slipping across the Tallapoosa, attacked the Red Sticks who did not see them until the rain of gunfire fell around their shoulders.
Major Lemuel P. Montgomery charged as the Creeks suddenly found themselves trapped in a deadly crossfire.
The laughter stopped.
Sam Houston battled his way across the field and fell with an arrow in his leg. A private jerked it out, and Houston fought on until a bullet slammed into his shoulder and, at last, he grew too weak to pull the trigger of his rifle.
Around him erupted the gunshots, the howling, the screams of three thousand men. Around him were the groans and the curses and the praying of the dying. Houston would recall, “Not a warrior offered to surrender, even while the sword was at his breast.”
Flames spit out of the thicket. The Red Sticks turned to the river to escape. But as Coffee wrote, “Few ever reached the bank, and that few was killed the instant they landed.”
Andrew Jackson himself reported, ‘The enemy was completely routed. Five hundred and fifty-seven were left dead on the peninsula.”
Red Eagle lived. He walked a broken man to Jackson’s tent and said solemnly, “I can oppose you no longer. I have done you much injury. I should have done you more, but my warriors are killed. I am in your power. Dispose of me as you please.”
“You are not in my power, “ Jackson barked. “If you think you can contend against me in battle, go and head your warriors.”
Red Eagle – only one-eighth Indian, a man called Bill Weatherford – paused and gazed for a moment out across the elysian fields of slaughter. “There was a time when I could have answered you,” he replied. “I could animate my fighters to battle, but I cannot animate the dead.” He paused again, then continued, “I have nothing to request for myself, but I beg of you to send for the women and children of the war party who have been driven to the woods without an ear of corn . . . Save the wives and children of the Creeks and I will persuade to peace any Red Sticks remaining in my nation.”
For Andrew Jackson, the war was at an end.
He shook Red Eagle’s hand and turned away. He would never forget the bend, shaped like a horseshoe, in the Tallapoosa River “The carnage,” he would say, “was dreadful.”
And so it was.
And the Creeks called him The Devil.
Chapter 7: Play Ball!
WHEN THE FRENCHMAN Bossu rode among the Choctaws in 1770, he discovered them playing ball – a recreational war practiced by most of the Five Civilized Tribes. His account may have been one of the first sports stories ever written on the North American continent:
The chactas are very active and very nimble. They have a game similar to our long racket game at which they are very skillful. The neighboring villages invite one another, inciting their opponents with a thousand words of defiance. Men and women gather in their finest costumes and pass the day singing and dancing . . . to the sound of the drum and rattle They agree upon a goal 60 paces distant and indicated by two large poles between which the ball must pass. Usually they play for 16 points. There are forty players on a side, each holding in his hand a racket two and a half feet long, of almost the same shape as ours, made of walnut or chestnut wood and covered with deer skin.
In the middle of the ball ground an old man throws up a ball made by rolling deer skin together. At once each player runs to try to catch the ball in his racket. It is a fine sight to observe the players with their bodies bare, painted in all sorts of colors, with a tiger tail fastened behind and feathers on their arms and heads which flutter as they run . . . They pus. They tumble over one another. He who is skillful enough to catch the ball sends it to the players on his side. Those on the opposite side run at the one who has seized it and return it to their own party, and they fight over it, party against party, with so much vigor that shoulders are sometime dislocated. The players never become angry . . . The wagers are considerable; the women bet against one another.
After the players have finished, the women whose husbands have lost assemble to avenge them. The racket which the women use differs from that of the men in being bent. They play with much skill. They run against one another very swiftly and shove one another like the men, being equally naked except for the parts which modesty dictates they shall cover. They merely redden their cheeks, using vermilion on their hair instead of powder.
H. B. Cushman, the missionary, would later write:
An ancient Choctaw ball play would be an exhibition far more interesting, strange, wild and romantic, in all its features, than anything ever exhibited in a circus . . . excelling it in every particular of daring feats and wild recklessness s. . . The activity, fleetness, strength and endurance of the Mississippi Choctaw warrior and hunter, were more fully exemplified than anywhere else; for there he brought into the most severe action every power of soul and body. In those ancient ball plays, I have known villages to lose all their earthly possessions upon the issue of a single play.
Chapter 8: Cures From the Mother Earth
WHEN THE SEASONS brought the sickness, old men of the tribes concocted the cures from the mother earth, and the Indians placed their lives in the gnarled, wrinkled hands of those old men.
They had no other choice.
The Choctaws took the leaves of the jimson weed, doused them in cold water, and made a band to hold around the head to break a high fever.
They cut the stalks of cockleburs and boiled them in milk, then applied them as poultice to a snakebite.
They cured headaches with chiggerweed tea and they treated bad kidneys with sassafras tea.
Choctaws chewed the bark of a buttonbush for a toothache, and sometimes they stuck the part of the prickly ash into a cavity to stop the pain.
Rattlesnake grease fought the rigors of rheumatism.
And their medicine men made a salve of honey, butter, and the juice of pole bean leaves to treat skin cancer.
Seminoles used brown glass from a broken bottle to ease pain. The medicine man made four punctures, then took a powdered herb, mixed it with saliva, and rubbed it gently on the four holes.
And sometimes, he simply placed a devil’s shoestring inside a buffalo horn and held that over the wound to draw out the pain.
For
