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The Muscogee, also known as the Mvskoke, Muscogee Creek, and the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, are a group of related Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands in the United States of America. Their historical homelands are in what now comprises southern Tennessee, much of Alabama, western Georgia and parts of northern Florida.
The Seminole Wars were a series of three military conflicts between the United States and the Seminoles that took place in Florida between about 1816 and 1858. The Seminoles are a Native American nation which coalesced in northern Florida during the early 1700s, when the territory was still a Spanish colonial possession. Tensions grew between the Seminoles and settlers in the newly independent United States in the early 1800s, mainly because enslaved people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border. A series of cross-border skirmishes escalated into the First Seminole War in 1817, when General Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections. Jackson's forces destroyed several Seminole and Black Seminole towns and briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818. The U.S. and Spain soon negotiated the transfer of the territory with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.
The Creek War, was a regional conflict between opposing Native American factions, European powers, and the United States during the early 19th century. The Creek War began as a conflict within the tribes of the Muscogee, but the United States quickly became involved. British traders and Spanish colonial officials in Florida supplied the Red Sticks with weapons and equipment due to their shared interest in preventing the expansion of the United States into regions under their control.
Horseshoe Bend National Military Park is a 2,040-acre, U.S. national military park managed by the National Park Service that is the site of the penultimate battle of the Creek War on March 27, 1814.
Prospect Bluff Historic Sites is located in Franklin County, Florida, on the Apalachicola River, 6 miles (9.7 km) SW of Sumatra, Florida. The site contains the ruins of two forts.
Red Sticks —the name deriving from the red-painted war clubs of some Native American Creek—refers to an early 19th century traditionalist faction of Muscogee Creek people in the Southeastern United States. Made up mostly of Creek of the Upper Towns that supported traditional leadership and culture, as well as the preservation of communal land for cultivation and hunting, the Red Sticks arose at a time of increasing pressure on Creek territory by European American settlers. Creek of the Lower Towns were closer to the settlers, had more mixed-race families, and had already been forced to make land cessions to the Americans. In this context, the Red Sticks led a resistance movement against European American encroachment and assimilation, tensions that culminated in the outbreak of the Creek War in 1813. Initially a civil war among the Creek, the conflict drew in United States state forces while the nation was already engaged in the War of 1812 against the British.
John R. Coffee was an American planter of Irish descent, and a state militia brigadier general in Tennessee. He commanded troops under General Andrew Jackson during the Creek Wars (1813–14) and during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.
Hitchiti was a tribal town in what is now the Southeast United States. It was first known as part of the Apalachicola Province, an association of tribal towns along the Chattahoochee River. Shortly after 1690, the towns of Apalachicola Province moved to the central part of present-day Georgia, with Hitchiti joining most of those towns along Ochese Creek. In 1715, most of the towns on Ochese Creek, including Hitchiti, moved back to the Chattahoochee River, where the town remained until its people were forced to move to the Indian Territory as part of the Trail of Tears. Hitchiti was one of several towns whose people spoke the Hitchiti language.
The Cherokee–American wars, also known as the Chickamauga Wars, were a series of raids, campaigns, ambushes, minor skirmishes, and several full-scale frontier battles in the Old Southwest from 1776 to 1794 between the Cherokee and American settlers on the frontier. Most of the events took place in the Upper South region. While the fighting stretched across the entire period, there were extended periods with little or no action.
Negro Fort was a short-lived fortification built by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812, in a remote part of what was at the time Spanish Florida. It was intended to support a never-realized British attack on the U.S. via its southwest border, by means of which they could "free all these Southern Countries [states] from the Yoke of the Americans."
Fowltown Creek, near modern Albany, Georgia, was where "Neamathla's band of Tuttollossees had lived...before relocating down to modern Decatur and Seminole Counties."
Fort Scott was built in 1816 on the west bank of the Flint River, where it joins the Chattahoochee River to form the Apalachicola, in the southwest corner of Georgia. It was named for Lieutenant Richard W. Scott, who was killed in the Scott Massacre of 1817 and never known to have visited the fort. The need for a fort became evident during the War of 1812, when the British identified the undefended United States border and in 1814 built two forts on the Apalachicola River into which the Flint River flows: a strong fort at Prospect Bluff and a smaller one, Nicolls' Outpost, at the river juncture. This was in Spanish Florida, but Spain had neither the resources nor the inclination to do anything about the fort in a location that was remote.
Nicolls' Outpost was the smaller and more northern of two forts built by British Lt. Col. Edward Nicolls during the War of 1812. (The Americans referred to it as Fort Apalachicola. Built at the end of 1814, together with the larger "British post" or storage depot down the Apalachicola, it was "the northernmost post built by the British during their Gulf Coast Campaign". It was just below the Spanish Florida–Georgia border, where the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers meet to form the Apalachicola, in River Landing Park in modern Chattahoochee, Florida. Even though what was built was smaller than the much larger British post down the Apalachicola, it was intended to be the base, presumably enlarged, for an English invasion of the United States, and British post was to have been its supply depot. The 1815 end of the War of 1812 aborted this project.
The Treaty of Nicolls' Outpost is a little-known treaty between Great Britain and the Red Stick Creek and other refugee Native Americans. Under it, Britain was to recognize the Native Americans as subjects of the Crown, and defend them and their territory from the United States.
Neamathla (1750s–1841) was a leader of the Red Stick Creek. His name, in the Hitchiti language, means "fat next to warrior", "fat" being a reference to great courage. The Hitchiti language had no written form, but modern scholars agree that Eneah Emathla is the "proper" spelling of his name in English; however, there were two other men also named Eneah Emathla, so the modern convention is to use the spelling Neamathla for the leader.
The Scott Massacre, coming after the recent (1813) Fort Mims massacre, was a factor convincing the United States that the Creeks must be defeated, beginning the Seminole Wars. It took place at the end of November, 1817. Several hundred Creek warriors known as Red Sticks, led by Homathlimico, with Josiah Francis in the rear, attacked a vessel commanded by Lieutenant Richard W. Scott. The boat was heading up the Apalachicola River to supply Camp Crawford on the Flint River in southwest Georgia; the attack was at the confluence of the rivers. Besides the supplies, the boat carried 20 sick soldiers, seven women, four children, and a guard of 20 armed soldiers. After a bloody massacre and scalping, only seven survived, one woman, and six soldiers who escaped by jumping into the river and swimming to the opposite shore, where friendly Creeks helped them reach safety at Camp Crawford on December 2, 1817.
The Battle of Ocheesee took place on the Apalachicola River, in northwest Spanish Florida, beginning in December of 1817. The shooting part of the battle lasted almost a week, but the engagement lasted "weeks" and was "the longest sustained engagement of the Seminole Wars". The name comes from the bluffs that overlook the river, from which one party of marksmen waged their attack. Today the land is in Torreya State Park.
Fort Montgomery was a stockade fort built in August 1814 in present-day Baldwin County, Alabama, during the Creek War, which was part of the larger War of 1812. The fort was built by the United States military in response to attacks by Creek warriors on encroaching American settlers and in preparation for further military action in the War of 1812. Fort Montgomery continued to be used for military purposes but in less than a decade was abandoned. Nothing exists at the site today.