King of the Creek
You were born to rule the Creek.
In this land lineage is from the mother not the father,
so your birth was favored.
You had the right mother, she was of the Snake clan.
It was their turn.
So you got to be King by right of inheritance
confirmed by the Council when you came of age;
it was your right, you deserved it.
The Muskogee Nation was called Creek for short.
An English word Creek meaning a stream or little river
named for all the waters flowing South into the Gulf and Lake Ponchartrain.
These waters flowed through much of the land of the Creek Confederation,
called the Five Civilized Tribes.
Besides the Muskogee there were the Cherokee and Choctaw
Chickasaw and Seminole
with many other smaller tribes and groups
the Native people of the whole Southeast.
The Creek were dominant in the land
for reasons of history
for reasons of tradition
for reasons of religion
for reasons of economy
for reasons of population
for reasons of power.
When the French had destroyed the town of Natchez,
the Natchez people took refuge with the Creek and merged with
them.
The Mound Builders had ruled this land up to the Ohio Valley
for a thousand years.
In this way the Creek became heirs to the old line.
Legitimacy was important to the Native people.
The Creek Confederation was not an empire but a commonwealth.
There were no taxes.
Some tribes sent as fealty only token gifts.
Many communities sent nothing.
Muskogee was not a race but a language.
Many kinds of people were Creeks.
Free African people lived here in the Creek way.
A slave ship off Florida was taken by the Africans aboard;
now masters, not cargo, the people beached the ship.
They settled, made a town,
Black people, speaking Seminole,
part of the Seminole Nation of the Creek Confederation.
Large numbers of Scots moved to Creek lands;
after the battle of Culloden Moor,
many Scots swore not to kneel to an English king.
They had no problem mingling with the Creek.
The French after their way were adaptible and tolerant.
They too filtered into the Creek lands, becoming Creeks.
English and Spanish people were seen as too greedy.
They didn't get far.
The Creek were a culture, not a clan.
These people were the reason North America doesn't speak Spanish.
Mexico, Central America, Peru fell like dominoes before the
conquistadores.
The expeditions sent here against the Mound Builders
were much larger, but were beaten.
Ponce de Leon failed. Narvaez failed.
Four times the Spaniards invaded
four times they were beaten off.
De Soto came with nine hundred Spanish soldiers
and twenty priests, with three thousand Aztec soldiers;
also some slaves and concubines who didn't count.
With them were a thousand horses, and
four thousand cattle, and hogs which didn't count.
In the land of the Mound Builders they found gold.
they found also copper jewelry and gems and river pearls,
fresh-water pearls by the ton
piled in wooden chapels atop pyramids built of dirt.
The Spanish found these items of some interest.
The Natives were restless.
They didn't fall for the same old
take me to your leader ploy
which had destroyed the Incas and Aztecs.
They didn't think bearded characters with muskets
even on horses reminded them much of gods.
They didn't like people who robbed sacred tombs
of gold and bushels of pearls.
They fought the bastards.
Spanish chronicles record an endless series of victories
with fewer Spaniards after every battle
to move on to the next glorious conquest.
De Soto left a brass cannon in the middle of a Creek town
to lighten his load, it was so urgent
to bring his message of civilization elsewhere
far from these particular damn Indians.
This cannon became a Creek legend.
De Soto also stayed in this land.
He was in a lead box under the Mississippi.
The expedition built a boat and went to Mexico.
Three dozen of them.
One priest,
no concubines,
no slaves,
no Indian soldiers,
no horses,
no cattle nor hogs,
no cannon,
no pearls and no gold.
The Indians here trashed the conquistadores.
They lived free for another three hundred years.
Known as the Five Civilized Tribes,
though there were many more than five tribes,
these people were mainly farmers.
Some of them were fishers and sailors,
some were herders, others hunters,
some were trappers, others traders.
They lived in towns, and they built roads.
Many of our roads in the Southeast were first laid out by the natives.
They built canals for irrigation and flood control.
They kept slaves, but they were not racist.
They practiced equality of servitude.
A slave might be red, black or white.
The condition was individual, not inherited, and they didn't have jails.
They had peace towns and war towns,
A situation now hard to understand.
A peace town had a white log stuck upright in the ground.
A war town had a red log.
Baton Rouge was a war town, and so named.
It wasn't just that a peace town could change to being a war town
whenever somebody pissed them off.
The culture went deeper than that.
There was some meaning there we can't quite grasp.
The Creek had a war king and a peace king.
We don't really comprehend that.
The elders of the Creek knew how to read the signs.
They knew when the crunch was coming and who would be involved.
The Creek had horses, boats and guns.
The elders knew what else they would need to keep their land.
They sat and spoke about De Soto's brass cannon.
The council decided on a new war king.
The war king of the Creek was a Frenchman, a soldier.
He happened to be a specialist in artillery.
The elders of the Creek were not dumb.
After mad George Third of England gave up
they knew that only Indians with cannon
could keep the United States behind its proper frontier.
The United States was where waters flowed East.
Indian land was where waters flowed South.
The ridge between the watersheds was the frontier.
The frontier was a new problem.
People were spilling out from Georgia onto Creek land.
The elders wanted a treaty with the United States.
When the United States was one,
You went to the President.
The Peace King of the Muskogee, you sailed
on your ship into New York Harbor
and were honored by the United States Army
with a twenty-one gun salute
as befits a head of state.
You met with the President as an equal.
In the treaty you did give up some land
to the Georgians to keep the peace
for four thousand head of cattle
and ten blacksmith shops,
fully equipped with ten blacksmiths.
]The elders wanted to start an industrial base;
they figured with ten smithys they could build a foundry
to cast church bells, they said,
as they leaned back on De Soto's cannon.
The treaty was agreed and signed.
For the United States of America,
George Washington, President.
For the Muskogee Nation,
Alexander McGillivray, King.
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