David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [50]
While most of the major engagements between America and Britain occurred in the Northeast, along the Canadian border, or at sea, in Tennessee war was being waged against the bands of Creek Indians who allied with Britain. It was a war that thrust the state into the national spotlight, for when Madison called on Tennessee to help defend their land, thousands of Tennesseans anxious to get into the melee came forward as volunteers, helping to establish the moniker the “Volunteer State.”4 The nickname caught on but was not commonly used until after the Mexican War in the 1840s when, once again, tens of thousands of Tennessee men and boys rode off to battle.
There was no lack of volunteers from jingoistic Franklin County when the Creek Indian War broke out in 1813 and became intertwined with the War of 1812. One of the first local men to step forward was David Crockett. “I was living ten miles below Winchester when the Creek War commenced,”5 Crockett remembered. The call to arms that the twenty-seven-year-old Crockett answered in those last days of the summer of 1813 resulted from news that flashed across the frontier of the killing and scalping of more than four hundred settlers at Fort Mims, a stockade in what was then southern Mississippi Territory, about thirty miles north of the coastal town of Mobile.
The tragic Creek War that resulted was in reality a Creek civil war between opposing factions of the tribe. On one side were the Creeks from the lower towns of eastern Alabama and Georgia, who, as a means of survival, had turned away from most of their traditional beliefs and assimilated into the white culture. Many of them were of mixed blood and over time had adopted the white settlers’ religion, language, manner of dress, and lifestyle. They farmed and raised livestock like the whites, and some Creeks acquired their own black slaves to work the land, much as other southeastern tribes, particularly the Cherokees, also were doing.
The Creeks from the upper towns in south-central Alabama, however, were not about to give up the ways of their ancestors. They underwent a religious revitalization that inspired them to retain their culture and identity. These staunchly traditional Creeks despised their tribes-men in the lower towns. About the time that Crockett and his family moved westward out of east Tennessee, the hatred between the Creek factions intensified when the famous Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, a symbol of courage respected and revered by his followers and many of his enemies, traveled from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Tecumseh was seeking support for his vision of a vast Indian coalition that would fight to recover the many lands stolen from the tribes through the dubious treaties white men had crafted and broken ever since their arrival in North America.
The imposing Tecumseh had no success convincing the Choctaws and Chickasaws to join his confederacy against further white expansion, so he turned to the Creeks.6 In October 1811, he attended a Creek council meeting along with members of other southeastern tribes. The charismatic Tecumseh implored the gathering to unite and resist any further American aggression. His eloquence touched many there, especially younger warriors with a deep sense of pride for their people and land.
“Let the white race perish!” he bluntly told them, espousing the kind of bellicose language that spawned similar invective from the frontiersmen. “They seize your land; they corrupt your women; they trample on the bones of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back—aye, back to the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish. War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!