The Muscogee, also known as the Mvskoke, Muscogee Creek or just Creek, and the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, are a group of related Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands in the United States. 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 American General Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections. Jackson's forces destroyed several Seminole and Black Seminole towns, as well as the 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 Seminole are a Native American people who developed in Florida in the 18th century. Today, they live in Oklahoma and Florida, and comprise three federally recognized tribes: the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, as well as independent groups. The Seminole people emerged in a process of ethnogenesis from various Native American groups who settled in Spanish Florida beginning in the early 1700s, most significantly northern Muscogee Creeks from what are now Georgia and Alabama.
Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park in Macon, Georgia, United States preserves traces of over ten millennia of culture from the Native Americans in the Southeastern Woodlands. Its chief remains are major earthworks built before 1000 CE by the South Appalachian Mississippian culture These include the Great Temple and other ceremonial mounds, a burial mound, and defensive trenches. They represented highly skilled engineering techniques and soil knowledge, and the organization of many laborers. The site has evidence of "12,000 years of continuous human habitation." The 3,336-acre (13.50 km2) park is located on the east bank of the Ocmulgee River. Macon, Georgia developed around the site after the United States built Fort Benjamin Hawkins nearby in 1806 to support trading with Native Americans.
Alexander McGillivray, also known as Hoboi-Hili-Miko, was a Muscogee (Creek) leader. The son of a Muscogee mother and a Scottish father, he was literate and educated, and understood the "white" European world and merchandise trading well. These gave him prestige, especially with European Americans, who were glad to finally find a Creek leader they could talk to and deal with. He used his role as link between the two worlds to his advantage, not always fairly, and became the richest Creek of his time.
The siege of Pensacola, fought from March 9 to May 10, 1781, was the culmination of Spain's conquest of West Florida during the Gulf Coast Campaign of the American Revolutionary War.
The Treaty of New York was a treaty signed in 1790 between leaders of the Muscogee and U.S. Secretary of War Henry Knox, who served in the presidential administration of George Washington.
William Augustus Bowles was an American-born military officer and adventurer. Born in Frederick County, Maryland, Bowles was commissioned into the Maryland Loyalists Battalion at the rank of ensign, seeing action during the American Revolutionary War, including the 1781 siege of Pensacola. He subsequently established an alliance with the Muscogee and founded the State of Muskogee. In 1803, Bowles was betrayed and handed over to the Spanish, who imprisoned him in Morro Castle, where he died two years later.
Kinache was a Seminole chieftain who commanded Seminole forces against the United States during the American Revolution and later during the First Seminole War. He is also known as Kinhega, Kinheja, Kinhija, Opie Mico, Kapitca Mico, Capichee Mico, Tom Perryman and Lye Drop Mico.
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.
Panton, Leslie & Company was a company of Scottish merchants active in trading in the Bahamas and with the Native Americans of what is now the Southeastern United States during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Ahaya was the first recorded chief of the Alachua band of the Seminole tribe. European-Americans called him Cowkeeper, as he held a very large herd of cattle. Ahaya was the chief of a town of Oconee people near the Chattahoochee River. Around 1750 he led his people into Florida where they settled around Payne's Prairie, part of what the Spanish called tierras de la chua, "Alachua Country" in English. The Spanish called Ahaya's people cimarones, which eventually became "Seminoles" in English. Ahaya fought the Spanish, and sought friendship with the British, allying with them after Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, and staying loyal to them through the American Revolutionary War. He died shortly after Britain returned Florida to Spain in 1783.
William Panton was the head of a group of five Scottish merchants who in 1783 founded the powerful and influential trading firm of Panton, Leslie & Company at St. Augustine, then the capital of British East Florida. They formed a partnership to trade with the Indians of Florida and the Spanish borderlands on the southern frontier of the British colonies. By 1795 the company had established a monopoly on trade with the Indian tribes of what is now the southeastern United States, sanctioned by successive governors of Spanish Florida.
Antonia Paula de la Resurreccion Bonelly (1786-1870), was a colonial woman of Spanish East Florida who was captured by Miccosukee Indians in 1802 and held captive for twenty-two months. Her rescue and ransom involved many of the major power players that defined relations in this period between the Florida tribes and the nations of Britain, Spain, and the United States.
John Forbes (1767–1823) and his elder brother Thomas Forbes (d.1808) were Scottish traders who operated in East Florida, West Florida, Spanish Florida and the southeastern borderlands during the tail end of the eighteenth century. John Forbes & Company took control of the assets of its precursor trading firm, Panton, Leslie & Company, after William Panton died in 1801, followed by John Leslie in 1803.
Josiah Francis, also called Francis the Prophet, native name Hillis Hadjo, was "a charismatic religious leader" of the Red Stick Creek Indians. According to the historian Frank Owsley, he became "the most ardent advocate of war against the white man, as he believed in the supremacy of the Creek culture over that of the whites". He traveled to London as a representative of several related tribal groups, unsuccessfully seeking British support against the expansionism of the United States, then was captured and hanged by General Andrew Jackson shortly after his return to Spanish Florida.
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.
Thomas Perryman was a Creek Indian leader, eventually the ”patriarch" of the lower Creek. He was from the town of Tocktoethla, on the east side of the Chattahoochee River in what is today Seminole County, Georgia. His father was Theophilus Perryman, an English trader, and his mother was a Creek woman from the town of Eufaula, also on the Chattahoochee. As was customary among the matrilineal Creeks, he was accepted as a genuine member of the tribe.
Sophia Durant was a Koasati Native American plantation owner, who served as the speaker, interpreter, and translator for her brother, Alexander McGillivray, a leader in the Muscogee Confederacy.
The Apalachicola band consisted of several Native Americans towns, primarily speakers of the Muscogee language, living along the Apalachicola River in northern Florida in the early 19th century. The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek assigned the Apalachicola band several small reservations along the Apalachicola River, separate from the main reservation created in central and southern Florida for the people collectively called Seminole. The Apalachicola band was allowed to stay on their reservations for only a decade, before being moved to the Indian Territory.
