The Battle of Horseshoe Bend, 1814

Halfway along its 270-mile course through east-central Alabama, the Tallapoosa River loops back on itself around a wooded peninsula of about 100 acres, with a ridge of high ground down its middle and an island off its west side. On March 27, 1814, this "horseshoe bend" was the scene of the decisive battle of the Creek War (1813–1814).

Horseshoe Bend from the air. Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, NPS.

The battle drew together three long-running threads in American history: war between European Americans and American Indians; divisions among American Indians, even within one nation; and white governments backing one Native faction against another.

The Creek

Before European exploration, perhaps two million American Indians lived in the Southeast, in as many as 100 tribes that farmed and supplemented their crops with fishing and hunting. By 1776 five groups dominated: the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw; the Seminole, formed from remnants of tribes that moved into Florida; and the people Europeans called the Creek — not a single tribe but a political confederacy of about 50 villages in Georgia and Alabama.

English traders began using the name around 1680 for people living by Ochesee Creek in northern Georgia, and gradually applied it to many tribes across present-day Georgia and Alabama, dividing them into Lower Creek to the south and east and Upper Creek along the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. The Creek themselves rarely used the name; they identified with their town, or talwa — Coweta, Alabama, Tuskegee — or tribe. Councils of town representatives, festivals, athletic contests and a clan system spanning the towns held them together, but Georgia's constant pressure for land split the Lower Creek, nearer the settlers, from the Upper Creek, and a cultural divide separated those who considered themselves Muskogee, mostly Lower Creek, from those who did not.

European contact devastated them. After Hernando de Soto's expedition of 1539, disease above all cut the native population; by around 1800 it may have been only a fifth of its level before 1500. Britain, France and Spain each courted the Creek as allies, but the Creek mostly stayed out of outsiders' wars, fighting European Americans chiefly when threatened, as in 1786 when settlers kept moving onto land promised them by treaty.

Rising pressure

Around 1800, tensions grew. Frontier families feared the British and the Indians, often with reason, and the U.S. government pushed rapid settlement, frequently forcing tribes to give up land guaranteed by earlier treaties. Thomas Jefferson's policy of "civilization" meant giving each Indian a small farm and teaching European ways. As he wrote in 1803:

When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are extensive forests and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessities for their farms and families.

Many Creek welcomed European livestock, crops, horses, guns and iron tools, and marriages between white men and Creek women were not unusual. But most wanted to keep their languages, religion and festivals, and believed land should belong to the tribe and much of it stay forest for hunting the deer whose skins they traded.

In the early 1800s the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, called on all tribes to set aside old quarrels and resist further expansion together. In 1811 Tecumseh toured the Southeast; to the Cherokee he described tribes and hunting grounds vanishing before the settlers and asked whether they would take up the tomahawk with the Shawnee. Cherokee chiefs declined, answering that the settlers were as many as the leaves of the forest and that they had prospered in peace.

The Lower Creek likewise refused. Some Upper Creek did not. Among them was Red Eagle (William Weatherford), who like many Creek had both European and American Indian ancestors. His followers became known as Red Sticks, perhaps from the "red" towns that supplied warriors and counted sticks to set the day of battle, perhaps from their war clubs.

Civil war becomes the Creek War

In 1813 the Upper and Lower Creek went to war with each other. After Red Sticks returning from a visit to Tecumseh killed seven settlers in Tennessee, the Creek council had the killers hunted down and executed, enraging the Red Sticks, who sought arms at the Spanish post of Pensacola but got only powder and shot. A Mississippi militia that included many Lower Creek attacked them at Burnt Corn Creek without result. The Red Sticks then struck Fort Mims in southern Alabama and killed 250 people, including women and children. Most were Lower Creek, but enough were European Americans to give state militias and the federal government a reason to declare war. Amid the War of 1812, many frontier settlers believed the British would soon be arming the Upper Creek. After feeble efforts by the Mississippi and Georgia militias, Andrew Jackson organized his Tennessee forces.

The battle

More than 1,000 Red Stick warriors, led by the chief Menawa and the prophet Monahee, held a barricade across the neck of the peninsula, with women and children sheltering in Tohopeka village at its tip. Red Eagle was not there. Jackson, a major general of the Tennessee Militia, arrived at 10:30 a.m. with 2,600 European American soldiers, 500 Cherokee and 100 Lower Creek. He lined up the 39th U.S. Infantry and East Tennessee militia before the barricade with a second line behind, placed two cannon on a rise about 250 yards away, and sent troops to the far bank to cut off retreat. The breastwork impressed him. He wrote the next day:

Jackson's map of the battleground, south at the top: the barricade (5) crosses the neck of the bend. Tennessee Historical Society.

The battlefield as drawn by Colonel John A. Cheatham, Jackson's topographical engineer. National Archives.

It is impossible to conceive a situation more eligible for defence than the one they had chosen and the skill which they manifested in their breastwork was really astonishing.

Two hours of cannon fire injured men behind it but did not break it. Then some of Jackson's Indian allies swam 120 yards across the river, took Red Stick canoes and ferried Cherokee, Creek and militia onto the peninsula, where they burned Tohopeka and captured the women and children. Seeing the smoke, Jackson ordered a direct assault at 12:30 p.m. The fighting at the barricade was "muzzle to muzzle through the port holes," he reported, and then hand to hand, until superior numbers and the attack from behind overwhelmed the defenders.

What followed was a slaughter that lasted until dark; the next morning 16 more Creek found hiding under the banks were killed. 557 warriors died on the battlefield and an estimated 250 to 300 more were drowned or shot crossing the river. The Tennessee militia lost 49 dead and 154 wounded, many mortally; fewer than a dozen allied Creek died. A 21-year-old ensign, Sam Houston, later recalled that the sun "set on the ruin of the Creek nation."

Consequences

The battle effectively ended the Creek War. In August 1814, defying orders from Washington, Jackson negotiated the Treaty of Fort Jackson on his own, forcing the Creek to cede almost 20 million acres — nearly half their territory — including many villages and hunting grounds of Creek who had fought on his side. (In the 1960s a court awarded compensation to the heirs of those whose land was taken unfairly.) Red Eagle, surrendering, won safe passage for sick and hungry Red Stick women and children and apparently kept his own farm.

Some Upper Creek fled to Florida and joined the Seminole, fighting on into the First Seminole War (1818–1819); Jackson's 1818 invasion of Spanish Florida made him more popular and led Spain to cede Florida. Alabama's non-Indian population soared from 9,000 in 1810 to 310,000 in 1830. The Creek council ordered the execution of William McIntosh for trying to sell nearly all the remaining Creek land, a sentence carried out by a party led by Menawa, recovered from terrible wounds.

In 1829 Jackson became president, helped by the fame of his victories over American Indians, and adopted the removal policy favored by land-hungry Southerners. Though the Five Tribes held treaties guaranteeing their lands, and the Supreme Court upheld Cherokee land titles in 1831, his administration forced them west to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, on what became known as the Trail of Tears. Perhaps as many as 25,000 Creek, Menawa among them, were removed. Others joined the Seminole in the Second Seminole War (1835–42), and some Red Sticks slipped into southwestern Alabama, where their descendants' community is known today as the Poarch Creek.

Sources

• Pictures from the lesson's archived PDF; its modern maps and barricade drawing (Alabama Archeological Society) are left out.
• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places: "The Battle of Horseshoe Bend: Collision of Cultures." The page on nps.gov is an introduction; its readings were recovered from the lesson's archived web pages (nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/54horseshoe). They draw on George C. Mackenzie's 1969 NPS study of the breastwork, Donald Hickey and J. Leitch Wright's histories, and period letters. Jackson, Jefferson and Houston are quoted; the 1811 speeches, known only from a 1935 retelling, are paraphrased. The lesson's questions and activities are left out.
• The introduction puts 350 women and children on the peninsula; the reading on the battle says 500. Neither figure is given here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.