Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World [Paperback]

Robbie Ethridge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 26, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0807854956 | ISBN-13: 978-0807854952 | Edition: 2003

Reconstructing the human and natural environment of the Creek Indians in frontier Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, Robbie Ethridge sheds new light on a time of wrenching transition. Creek Country presents a compelling portrait of a culture in crisis, of its resiliency in the face of profound change, and of the forces that pushed it into decisive, destructive conflict.

Ethridge begins in 1796 with the arrival of U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins, whose tenure among the Creeks coincided with a period of increased federal intervention in tribal affairs, growing tension between Indians and non-Indians, and pronounced strife within the tribe. In a detailed description of Creek town life, the author reveals how social structures were stretched to accommodate increased engagement with whites and blacks. The Creek economy, long linked to the outside world through the deerskin trade, had begun to fail. Ethridge details the Creeks' efforts to diversify their economy, especially through experimental farming and ranching, and the ecological crisis that ensued. Disputes within the tribe culminated in the Red Stick War, a civil war among Creeks that quickly spilled over into conflict between Indians and white settlers and was ultimately used by U.S. authorities to justify their policy of Indian removal.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Important and engaging. A welcome addition to a burgeoning body of work."
— Mississippi Quarterly

"Paints a vivid portrait of Creek society and culture in the early nineteenth century. . . . Well-written, free from jargon, and accessible to readers who are not experts in the field. Consequently, Ethridge's examination of the Creek world will be of considerable value for anyone interested in Indian ethnohistory or the history of the American south."
— Journal of Southern History

"A fascinating perspective on cultural exchanges between southeastern Creeks and other Americans, emphasizing the ecological context in which the exchanges occurred."
— Journal of American History

"The creative use of an array of sources . . . makes this book a remarkable contribution."
— American Historical Review

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; 2003 edition (September 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807854956
• ISBN-13: 978-0807854952
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, April 8, 2008

By 

Dale R. Cozort (Midwest) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Paperback)

I was interested in this book mainly for the first couple of chapters, which cover the early development of the Creek Indians. Chapter Two is a very good brief summary of current thinking about how the Indian tribes of the US southeast developed in the years between first contact with Europeans and the time the frontier reached the major tribes. Some important conclusions:

"...the Indian polities most associated with the South--the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Seminoles, and the Catawbas--did not exist prehistorically. Rather, they came into existence sometime in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in response to the contact between the Old and New Worlds."

They developed from the debris of the old Mississippian chiefdoms destroyed by European diseases in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. "During this time the chiefdoms of the Mississippian Period suffered a crippling loss of life... The consequences of this population collapse are not hard to see in the archaeological record. Some populations declined sharply, and some areas were abandoned altogether. The people ceased building mounds and ceremonial centers, and the level of ritual and artistic production declined sharply. Also, the elaborate status goods seen in late prehistoric graves disappear from the archaeological record in later times, suggesting a leveling of social status. The people suffered an incalculable loss of knowledge and traditional practices."

Survivors eventually banded together to form "coalescent" societies--the historic tribes like the Creeks, Cherokees, etc. They took form as a fusion of traditional forms and an emerging European economic system.

"The new economic system was a capitalist market system, and it was ushered in by a trade in dressed deerskins, but even more by a trade in enslaved Indians that enmeshed all of the natives of the Southeast.(..)The Indian slave trade in the South worked like this: European traders would give guns to a group of Indians on credit and ask to be paid in Indian slaves. The armed group would then raid and unarmed rival Indian group for slaves. The unarmed group, now vulnerable to Indian slave raiders, would then need guns and ammunition for protection, because bow-and-arrow Indians were at a disadvantage militarily to slave raiders with English-made guns.(..) At this point, anyone needing guns had to become a slave raider. (..) The process snowballed until virtually all of the Indian groups in the Southeast both possessed firearms and owed enormous debts to English traders."

The slave raiding completed the destruction of traditional political structures that had been started by the European diseases. "Indian slave raiders captured Indian slaves by the thousands, mostly women and children, and sold them to English, French, and Dutch slavers who shipped them to the sugar plantations in the West Indies, although some (..) went to the new coastal plantations of Virginia, South Carolina, and French Louisiana as well as to New England, (..) many Indian groups moved to get away from slave raiders; some groups joined others in an effort to bolster their numbers and present a stronger defense; some groups became extinct when their numbers dwindled to nothing because of disease and slave raiding; and all those left became engaged in the slave trade."

Enough of the Southeastern Indians became convinced of the destructiveness of the slave trade that many of them united against the settlers in the Yamassee War of 1715. That rebellion and the fact that it was more profitable to import African slaves led to a diminishing of the slave trade and an emphasis on the deer skin trade.

The Creeks, like most of the coalescent tribes, kept much of the day-to-day lifestyle and structure of their Mississippian ancestors. The top of the social pyramid was gone, but the rest of the society knitted itself back together as best it could, with leadership usually going to people with privileged access to European trade goods.

The old mound-building ways were not just abandoned. They were forgotten "...less than 100 years after their formation into coalescent societies, the descendents of Mississippian peoples could not remember who built some of the mounds, and they had little memory of the former significance of the mounds."

The book has a good summary of what is known about how the coalescent societies formed. "The Catawbas, who coalesced in the territory of the old Cofitachequi, absorbed people from shattered societies in present-day North Carolina, South Carolina, and Piedmont Virginia. The Chickasaws coalesced near Tupelo, Mississppi, just north of the territory of the Mississippian Period province on Chicaza.(...)The Choctaws coalesced in the great bend of the upper Pearl River, in Mississippi, in an area that previously had very little population, absorbing peoples from the Yazoo Basin and the east."

The formation of the Creeks was fairly complex. They were formed primarily from three proto-historic provinces, Abihka province, Tallapoosa province, and Apalachicola province. Those provinces can very tentatively be tied back to chiefdoms and cultures that were around when DeSoto went through the southeast. Abihka was apparently formed mostly by descendents of the Coosa chiefdom that DeSoto encountered. They moved to the fringes of their territory, joined a group known only from their archaeological remains, and drew in refugees from surrounding societies, including people as diverse as Shawnees and Natchez. The other Creek provinces came from similar complex mixes of survivors of various chiefdoms and refugees.

I'm interested in this period primarily from an alternate history point of view. The significance of all of this is that if you want to be historically accurate you can't just look at a map of major Indian tribes and say things like, "Oh, if X group of Europeans settled here they would have run into the Creeks, Chickasaws, or Choctaws." If you have a different timing or a different placement of European settlements, or a different emphasis coming out of those European settlements, none of those tribes would have existed as political/military entities. This book does a good job of pointing that out.

Dale Cozort (Author of American Indian Victories)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great look at Indian life, April 15, 2008

By 

Lehigh History Student (Bethlehem, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Paperback)

This book provides an intimate an unique look into how the Creek Indians lived throughout the time of the new republic. It begins with the establishment of the US Indian agent and how life changed through acculturation, accommodation, and resistance. Trade patterns, gender roles, and political structure all changed with the redeployment of American citizens. Although much of the land was taken up by illegal means the creeks were still forced to contend with the way that new societies emerged. The primary source for the book is the letters and diary of Benjamin Hawkins who was the United States government representative and former north Carolina senator to take up the process of reforming the Creeks. Hawkins dictated a great deal of life and his notes are very through. Combined with enthonhistorical techniques the reader gets a very interesting view of Creek Society from the inside. Very easy to read and a great start to understanding how the Indians lived in the colonial world.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning the truth about history, July 5, 2009

By 

James Akins Jr. - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Paperback)

We have been taught too much fiction in our schools. Here is an excellent sample of the truth about the Native Americans.