Atchina-Algi: A Small Upper Creek Town

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Atchina-Algi: A Small Upper Creek Town

A small Upper Creek town, on one of the numerous tributaries of the Tallapoosa River from the west, near the Hillabee-Etowah trail, 40 miles above Niuyaxa, and probably in Randolph County. “This settlement is the farthest north of all the Creek; the land is very broken in the neighborhood.”—Hawkins. It was settled from Lutchapoga (q. v.). The name signifies “cedar grove people”-atchina, cedar, and algi, people; and is sometimes spelled “Genalga.” This town and Little Okfuski were destroyed, November 13, 1813, by Gen. James White in command of Tennessee troops.

Albert Samuel Gatschet (October 3, 1832, Beatenberg, Canton of Bern – March 16, 1907) was a Swiss-American ethnologist who trained as a linguist in the universities of Bern and Berlin. He later moved to the United States and settled there in order to study Native American languages, in which field he was a pioneer.

REFERENCES.-Gatschet, in Alabama History Commission, Report (1901), p. 393; Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country (1848), p. 47; Pickett, Alabama (Owen’s ed., 1900), p. 557; and Handbook of the American Indians (1907), vol. 1, p. 107.