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  This book is dedicated to Makeda Wubneh—my assistant for twenty-seven years. There is no finer human being around.

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  Writing a book of history about Native Americans is an arduous task. There were literally thousands of tribes throughout North America, more than five hundred of which still exist. In this book, we use the terms Indians and Native Americans interchangeably, as has been done historically. We realize each tribe is unique and has its own culture. We are respectful of that and have tried to deal with it accurately.

  Prologue

  AUGUST 30, 1813

  FORT MIMS, ALABAMA

  11:00 A.M.

  The Creek nation is out for blood.

  The red-painted bodies of hundreds of warriors are pressed into the earth, awaiting the signal to attack. These men have hidden since sunrise, intending to kill every person they can. They conceal themselves in a valley four hundred yards outside the new log walls surrounding the sprawling plantation of Samuel Mims. More than six hundred men, women, and children live inside the month-old fort located thirty-five miles north of Mobile. They are comprised of white settlers, Negro slaves, and mixed-race Indians who have adopted white ways. Almost all of them have just hours to live.

  The Indian force numbers somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand. Some are not Native American at all but African slaves who have escaped and joined the Creek nation. The warriors are naked, save for a loincloth, to which a red-painted cow’s tail has been tied at the back.1 Some wear an owl feather, believing it will give them improved vision. Each warrior has forced himself to drink a strong emetic that has made him vomit—again, in the belief that this will prevent infection if he is stabbed or shot.

  Every fighter is armed with a flintlock rifle, as well as a bow and iron-tipped arrows. Their most lethal killing weapon is a two-foot-long war stick carved from dense wood. Almost every man carries one. They have trained countless hours with these war clubs and wield their cudgels with the same finesse shown by master swordsmen. Like the Indians’ torsos, each club is painted red.

  The Creek warriors have waited days and marched in complete stealth for miles, determined to remain unseen and attack with complete surprise. They know the precise moment at which they will attack. They have studied the routines of the fort and are aware that the settlers gather each day for a noon meal. A dinner bell is the signal to come together.

  On this morning, the dinner bell will also be the signal to attack.

  The Creeks struggle to remain motionless. Insects crawl over their prone bodies. Mosquitoes bite their hands and faces. Beads of sweat sting their eyes as the day grows warmer and the air more humid. The Creeks’ intent is murder. However, their ultimate goal is survival—for they believe that only a mass slaughter will prevent intruders from stealing the Creek ancestral homeland.

  Just one more hour until the lunch bell clangs.

  Inside Fort Mims, a slave belonging to Josiah Fletcher is being tied to the whipping post. He is stripped to the waist. There is no shade here in the center of the fort, and sweat runs down the man’s bare flesh. He hears the murmurs of the crowd gathering in a circle around the pole, eager to witness his suffering. The slave presses his body into the rough wood, his torso tensed to absorb one hundred lashes.

  Incredibly, the slave’s only crime is telling the truth. Yesterday, while working outside the walls, he saw some Creek warriors gathering in the forest. But when he raced back inside to sound a warning, the slave was accused of lying and spreading fear. In the eyes of Fort Mims’s military leadership, this is a crime that must be punished.

  Few men can survive a hundred lashes. The slave is sure he will die on this spot, bound helplessly to this pole.

  Major Daniel Beasley of the Mississippi Volunteers holds the whip, eager to administer the lash. Beasley is forty-five and just shy of six feet tall. Women normally consider him attractive, but this morning Beasley’s face is red and puffy, his eyes bloodshot. Even after a stiff drink of whiskey to start the day, Beasley’s head throbs from a long night of sucking down alcohol from the fresh barrel that arrived yesterday. It is the job of the major and his 170 militiamen to protect those seeking refuge in Fort Mims. There have been rumors of Indian sightings for more than two weeks. Major Beasley and his men responded immediately in the beginning, but as day after day passed without an attack, he came to no longer consider those warnings credible. The major is so sure the slave is lying about the Indians that he has not even bothered to send his men out into the forest to investigate.

  The Creek Indians massacring the inhabitants of Fort Mims, Alabama, 1813

  Yet even as the young black man is bound to the post, there is evidence he is telling the truth.

  Just an hour ago, a local farmer galloped his horse into the fort, also warning that Creek warriors were nearby. Jim Cornells specifically asked to speak with Major Beasley, then informed him that he had personally seen Indians in the forest.

  The twenty-five-year-old Cornells is himself of mixed race, the son of a young Indian woman and a British father. His farm was recently burned to the ground by a group of Creek warriors nicknamed the “Red Sticks”—so called for the brightly painted color of their war weapons. Cornells suffers from a disfigurement known as yaws, common to this humid climate. His condition leaves his face covered with lesions and the skin stretched back on his head, making it difficult for him to speak clearly. This combination of heritage and horrible disfigurement makes Cornells’s very presence a source of discomfort to Beasley.

  “You’ve only seen a gang of red cattle,” the major insists, his speech so thick that Cornells will later insist Beasley is drunk.

  “Those red cattle will give you one hell of a kick before night,” Cornells responds, still astride his horse.

  An enraged Beasley orders his men to arrest the farmer, but Cornells is too fast. He quickly gallops from the fort, straight into the waiting Creek army.

  Watching from a hiding place in the woods, the Creek leader, William Weatherford, sees Cornells race away from the fort. Weatherford is in his mid-thirties. He is six foot two and known for his handsome looks, extreme bravery, and dark black eyes. Killing the farmer would spoil the element of surprise, so the warrior leader lets him pass. Yet as the rider goes by, Weatherford notices that no one has bothered to close the east gate to Fort Mims. He is stunned at this incredible lapse in security.

  William Weatherford’s mother is from a prominent branch of the Creek nation known as the Wind Clan, while his father was a Scottish plantation owner named Charles Weatherford who had a reputation for debauchery. However, the Creeks believe that the line of descent goes through the maternal side. Thus, Weatherford’s loyalty belongs not to his European ancestors but to his Native American brothers and sisters. This devotion is so strong that the fair-skinned Weatherford, who is j
ust one-eighth Creek, with light brown hair, likes to proclaim that he has no white blood at all in his veins.

  General Andrew Jackson and Creek chief Red Eagle after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, March 27, 1814

  Inside the fort, another mixed-blood Creek named Richard Dixon Bailey is actually in charge of security. Like Weatherford’s, Bailey’s mother also hails from the Wind Clan. Just a few weeks ago, at a conflict known as the Battle of Burnt Corn, a group of warriors smuggling arms north from Florida was ambushed by a contingent of Mississippi Militia. The Creek rallied after the initial surprise and the battle ended in a draw. But spotted among the militia was Dixon Bailey, leading the attack against his own flesh and blood. In his youth, the squat and thickset Bailey was sent off to Philadelphia to be educated and has completely absorbed the life of the white man. He now owns a prospering plantation a few miles from the Mims property, where he lives with his wife and many children. Unlike Weatherford, who can pass for white, Bailey is dark-skinned but considers the whites to be his true people.

  In the mind of William Weatherford, the betrayal by Bailey—who now wears the U.S. military rank of captain—is just another reason for attacking Fort Mims. If Weatherford is sure of anything on this day, it is that Captain Richard Dixon Bailey will pay a dear price for his lack of loyalty to his Indian heritage.

  * * *

  William Weatherford and Dixon Bailey exemplify all that is wrong in the Creek nation right now. For three centuries, the Creek have endured the advance of white settlers onto their lands. It was in 1536 when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led his army north from the Gulf of Mexico, systematically looting villages and enslaving the Native American population in his relentless search for gold. At the time, there was no such thing as the Creek nation. Tribes in the areas that would come to be known as Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia were separate and independent but bonded by a complex political alliance that prevented warfare with one another. It was only when the British arrived in the region in the early 1700s that the name “Creek” was given to the population of ten thousand Indians living in the Deep South. The name is a shortened version of “the Indians living on Ochese Creek” and soon caught on.

  At the time, the bond between the British settlers and the Creek was economic. In exchange for goods such as cloth and guns, the Indians provided deerskins that were shipped to England for the manufacture of gloves and riding breeches.

  The Creek coexisted peacefully with the British, but they regularly raided other Indian tribes in Florida to capture slaves. Most were women and children, who were then sold to the French, Dutch, and British for use on the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the coastal tobacco farms of Virginia and South Carolina. But just as the sale of deer hides came to an end when the forests were depleted from overhunting, so the Indian slave trade ended as tribes either moved to distant locations or were simply wiped out.

  In the southern part of North America, it was the Spanish who came first to steal the land from Indigenous peoples. In the east, the British and French did it. It was soldiers of those nations who first navigated the new territories. Fur traders then opened up commerce. Farmers came last, with their hoes and cattle, felling trees to open up acreage for planting and grazing. For the last two hundred and more years, this desire for land has created unabated conflict between white European settlers and Native American tribes—and with every clash have come massacres and atrocities. In 1622, the Powhatan tribe murdered 347 settlers in the colony of Virginia. Fifteen years later, on the shores of what is now Long Island Sound, British loyalists surrounded a village of the Pequot tribe and murdered seven hundred men, women, and children with muskets, swords, and flames.

  At the end of the War of Independence, a new people simply known as “Americans” continued to push westward, not caring that the land they required for farms and homes was not their own. American expansion was a result of either making peace or subduing Indian tribes through armed conflict. The process was often decades in the making, but the Native Americans almost always lost. In this way, the Americans advanced slowly westward across the continent, building cities, roads, and military outposts, even as the Indians retreated.

  One Indian chief, Tecumseh, whose headquarters were located in a small northern border town known as Detroit, tried to halt the white man’s intrusion. He attempted to organize all of the Indian nations from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, traveling thousands of miles on horseback to forge alliances. The attack on Fort Mims is taking place in 1813, but its genesis was two years before, in the summer of 1811, when the charismatic Shawnee chief traveled south from Detroit to meet with the Creek leadership—among them William Weatherford.

  Lending a celestial aura to Tecumseh’s arrival was a mighty comet that shone in the nighttime sky. The chief preached that the Indians should turn their backs on farming and return to hunting and other traditional ways of life. His primary goal, however, was to form an Indian alliance that would stem the westward advance of whites.2

  Tecumseh rebukes General Henry Procter for retreating during the Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown.

  True to his word, Tecumseh soon returned to a place known as the Indiana Territory to wage war on the United States. Utilizing an alliance of tribes from the Great Lakes region, he battled to stop the whites’ migration. But inevitably, the growing power of the new nation overwhelmed the Indian chief.

  Under President James Madison, General William Henry Harrison was ordered to destroy Tecumseh’s forces in Indiana. Harrison was successful, defeating Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.

  Yet Tecumseh’s dream of stopping the whites’ westward advance lives on. William Weatherford and the fierce warriors surrounding Fort Mims are vivid proof.

  * * *

  In the Deep South, white settlers and some blacks who had successfully fled slavery actually began living among the Creeks. Some even intermarried with the Indians. This diluted not just the bloodline but also such simple traditions as personal identity. This is why the Creek attack on this sweltering August morning is led by a warrior with the given name William Weatherford, who not only speaks fluent English but has also been a regular visitor to the house of Samuel Mims—the same plantation home that will burn to the ground in just a few short hours.

  To Weatherford’s dismay, a segment of the tribe known as the Lower Creek is in favor of continued assimilation with the whites. They want to be farmers, speaking English, living in towns similar to the Americans’, and wearing the same clothing. One prime example of this group is the mixed-race militia captain Dixon Bailey.

  The Upper Creek, of which Weatherford is a member, seek a return to traditional ways and actively attempt to expel whites from their lands. Their strategy is simple: kill any Creek who is friendly to the Americans and follow up that violence by slaughtering all the white people they can. Rather than the ungainly term “Upper Creek,” they prefer to be known as “Red Stick.”

  The result is civil war within the Creek nation.

  Caught in the conflict are all nearby inhabitants. In the summer of 1813, it becomes necessary to build a series of forts in which settlers can shelter until the Creek War ends. American soldiers are also ordered into southern Mississippi and Alabama. Rather than the regular army, which is currently busy fighting the British in what will become known as the War of 1812, a volunteer force is assembled. Each man signs a twelve-month commitment before marching off to stop the Red Stick aggression.

  Construction of Fort Mims, as the protective barrier around the plantation is now known, began one month ago, in July 1813. From all around the region, scores of families fled their farms and homes and traveled to the fort in search of protection. Five acres in size, it is situated on a high plain overlooking the Alabama River. Those sheltered are hard people. Driven by poverty and ambition, they have chosen to make their living in an unremitting land full of poisonous snakes, where the rivers are filled with alligators and the d
istinction between friend and foe has grown vague. All of this, so that they can live on a plot of land they can call their own.

  So as they come together at Fort Mims in an attempt to preserve their way of life, these families work as a team to chop down acres of longleaf pine trees, erect walls, and construct their new homes within the fort. All labor side by side. It is hard work by day but dancing, drinking, and merriment by night. They have brought with them their cows, pigs, and sheep, which are left to roam free in the pines and canebrake beyond the walls. Dozens of small children play in the midst of the construction. A well within the fort provides fresh water, though, unlike the Creek Indians, who bathe each morning in the local streams and rivers, these settlers do not practice daily hygiene and are largely unwashed. So many hundreds of people have come to Fort Mims seeking refuge that there is little room for personal space. This claustrophobia is made worse by the shortage of outhouses for private routines and a growing rate of disease borne by the thick clouds of mosquitoes. In this way, the fortress has the feel of a small, doomed city.

  Now, as the hoofbeats of Jim Cornells’s galloping horse fade into the distance, William Weatherford and his warriors lie in wait. Though his bravery is undisputed, Weatherford’s fair skin and close ties with the whites have some doubting whether or not he truly believes in the Red Stick cause. Weatherford is charismatic and courageous, and possesses a deep knowledge of the terrain around Fort Mims. But the doubts about his true loyalties still bring forth suspicion. Thus, he is allowed to lead men into battle but has not yet been named a chief. The coming attack, however, offers Weatherford the perfect opportunity to prove his allegiance. He continues staring at the gate to Fort Mims, which still remains open.