Isaacs, Captain of Tourcoula: Coosada Chief

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Isaacs, Captain of  Tourcoula
Coosada Chief

Coosada chief, born conjecturally about 1765. He received his English name from an Indian trader, who died at an advanced age in Lincoln county, Tennessee. No facts are preserved of his life, until 1792, when he was one of the Creek chiefs that were in the habit of making raids upon the Cumberland settlers in Tennessee. On August 21, 1793, he and his party murdered a Mrs. Baker, a widow, and all her family except a daughter, named Elizabeth. They brought her to Coosada, where she was forced to be an eye-witness of the dance around the scalps of her family. But she was soon fortunate in finding a friend in the noted trader, Charles Weatherford, who lived on the east side of the Alabama River, opposite Coosada. He ransomed her, placed her in charge of his wife, where she remained until restored to her friends. After the treaty of Coleraine, made in 1796, Captain Isaacs became a friend to the United States. He was the only chief at the great Council held at Tuckabatchee in the fall of 1811, that refused to take the talk of Tecumseh. General Woodward very erroneously states that Captain Isaacs went north with Tecumseh and that, on his way back home, he was associated with Little Warrior in the murders committed in Feb- ruary, 1813, near the mouth of the Ohio. Official records show that Captain Isaacs never went north with Tecumseh, nor after- wards to Tecumseh. and that he had noth- ing to do with those murders, living in all those times at his home in the Nation. Fur- thermore, from his persistent loyalty to the whites, he was one of the seven prominent chiefs whose deaths had been decreed by the hostile faction in the early summer of 1813. Captain Isaacs met his fate in June, himself, a nephew and three of his warriors, being killed at the same time by the Red Sticks. His wife was a daughter of General McGillivray, but apart from this, there is no further record of his family.

References. — Pickett’s History of Alabama (Owen’s Edition, 1900), pp. 425, 512, 519; American State Papers, Indian Affairs, vol. i, p. 487; Woodward’s Reminiscences of the Creek or Muscogee Indians (1859), pp. 36, 37.