David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [52]
Seeking revenge, the Red Sticks turned their attention to Fort Mims, located at the junction of the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers, just north of Mobile. This was the stockade where the militia who had been humiliated at Burnt Corn took refuge, along with many other white and mixed blood families fearful of Red Stick retaliatory strikes sure to follow. Their fear was well founded. The Red Stick attack on the flimsy fortification built around the home of wealthy mixed-blood merchant Samuel Mims came August 30, 1813.18
The assault was led by the son of a Scot trader and Creek mother, who had been born William Weatherford but took the name Red Eagle. He had been greatly influenced by the inspiring message of Tecumseh when the Shawnee chieftain said:
The Muscogee [the name for the Creek tribe] was once a mighty people…. Now your blood is white; your tomahawks have no edge; your bows and arrows were buried with your fathers. Oh, Muscogees, brush from your eyelids the sleep of slavery. Once more strike for vengeance, once more for your country. The spirits of the mighty dead complain. The tears drop from the weeping skies.19
Tecumseh proved unsuccessful in his effort to form a united Indian coalition. He died in Canada on October 5, 1813, fighting on the British side against his old adversary William Henry Harrison in the Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh did, however, die knowing of the events that transpired at Fort Mims.
On that sweltering August day, Red Eagle carried the words of Tecumseh in his heart as a war party of a thousand Red Sticks descended on Fort Mims. After easily gaining entry into the ramshackle stockade, the Red Sticks systematically slaughtered as many as five hundred men, women, and children. “Every Indian was provided with a gun, war club, and a bow and arrow pointed with iron spikes,” recalled Dr. Thomas Holmes, who was able to escape by chopping a hole through the stockade wall from inside a cabin during a lull in the slaughter. “With few exceptions they were naked; around the waist was drawn a girdle from which was tied a cow’s tail running down the back and almost dragging the ground. It is impossible to imagine people so horribly painted. Some were painted half red and half black. Some were adorned with feathers. Their faces were painted so as to show their terrible contortions.”20
So horrific was the carnage that even Red Eagle tried to rein in the massacre, but to no avail. The avenging Red Sticks were overwhelmed by too many memories of mistreatment at the hands of the white Americans. This meant that no quarter could be given to anyone except for some of the black slaves taken as part of the spoils of war.
An American army officer who led the detachment dispatched to bury the dead was sickened by what they found. “Indians, negroes, white men, women and children lay in one promiscuous ruin. All were scalped, and the females of every age were butchered in a manner which neither decency nor language will permit me to describe. The main building was burned to ashes, which were filled with bones. The plains and woods were covered with dead bodies.”21
The premeditated Fort Mims massacre spread fear and panic across the frontier and left the entire nation in shock. Yet for the hawkish Tennesseans and their white neighbors in Mississippi Territory, particularly the land speculators, this horrific event was seen as just the impetus needed to escalate an all-out war of attrition against the Creeks. The vivid accounts from Fort Mims survivors, some of which described pregnant women who