(63.) John Reed Swanton, Social Organization and Social Usages of the Indians of the
Creek Confederacy, Bureau of American Ethnography Annual Report 42 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 54.
The author attempts in just nine pages to provide a historical overview of Creek country and trace the development of the Creek confederacy. The chaos and calamities of the eighteenth century require much fuller attention to understand better the way things were by the time Hawkins arrived.
A map plots the location of each of the eighty-plus towns in the Creek confederacy, and Ethridge gives detailed descriptions of town life and social structure.
Increasing pressure from the federal government to turn Creeks into American-style farmers and increasing pressure to turn Creek homelands into American real estate produced escalating tensions, not only between Creeks and outsiders, but also within the Creek confederacy. The Creek civil war in turn provided the occasion, some would say the excuse, for Americans to invade Creek country, destroy Creek military power, and confiscate the bulk of Creek territory, a task ruthlessly executed by Andrew Jackson in the so-called Creek War of 1813-1814 and the Treaty of Fort Jackson.
Older texts allude to him in passing, but in recent years historians have paid more attention to him because of the increased interest in the Colonial South and in Native American studies, especially the Creek confederacy. These modern works call into question the role played by this Native polity during the Colonial era and help destroy the myth that Indians were merely passive victims of European imperialism.
The term "banished" shows up most often in the account of the British-Creek treaty negotiation of May 1733 in which several headmen from the Creek confederacy traveled to Savannah to meet Oglethorpe and used this word to define Tomochichi's place within the larger sovereignty.
Modern studies with their emphasis on the fluidity of the Creek confederacy offer a convincing explanation as to how Tomochichi could separate and form his own town but later reconnect with the older towns and the larger polity.
This new title by the University of North Carolina Press follows the usual history about the
Creek Confederacy of Alabama and Georgia from colonial times, Trail of Tears, Creek Na-| tion, Oklahoma civil wars and the aftermath.
In fact, Alabama is either a Muskogean language or a dialect of a Muskogean language; in any case the nineteenth century Alabamas spoke both Alabama and Muskogee, the lingua franca of the Creek Confederacy.
136 ff.), but he never mentions that each of the towns of the Creek Confederacy belonged to one of two mutually antagonistic divisions and had virtually no ties with any of the towns of the other division.
In the last decades of the 18th century the internal organization of the
Creek Confederacy was revolutionized by Alexander McGillivray, the son of a Scottish trader.
