Digital Alabama (https://digitalalabama.com/article/alabama-native-american-tribes/creek-indian-tribe)
The US policy of discrimination against Native Americans was made official with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. It was the first time the United States government resorted to coercion, mostly in the cases of two tribes, The Cherokee and the Seminole, as means of securing compliance. The Removal Act was not in itself coercive, since it would only allow the president to negotiate with tribes that were long the East side of the Mississippi on a basis of payment for their lands. It called for improvements in the East and more land West of the Mississippi River. In carrying out the law, resistance was met with military force.
When Alabama was first established as part of the Mississippi Territory in the early nineteenth century, the vast majority of the land belonged to the Creek Indian Confederacy, and most of the Native American towns in Alabama were inhabited by the Creeks. These towns were significant political and tribal centers, but they were much more important as places of personal identity for the Native Americans who were born in them.
The Creek Nation was divided among the group known as the Upper Creeks, who occupied territory along the Coosa, Alabama, and Tallapoosa rivers in central Alabama, and the Lower Creeks, who occupied the areas along the lower Chattahoochee, Ocmulgee, and Flint rivers in southwestern Georgia.
Both groups resided in those areas from the early seventeenth century until the Indian removal era of the 1830s.
Creek Indian towns and settlement patterns were recorded in the accounts of travelers who visited them. Some early writers, such as James Adair, David Taitt, William Bartram, and Benjamin Hawkins, provided detailed accounts of what they witnessed when traveling through Creek territory.
The US policy of discrimination against Native Americans was made official with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. It was the first time the United States government resorted to coercion, mostly in the cases of two tribes, The Cherokee and the Seminole, as means of securing compliance. The Removal Act was not in itself coercive, since it would only allow the president to negotiate with tribes that were along the East side of the Mississippi on a basis of payment for their lands. It called for improvements in the East and more land west of the Mississippi River. In carrying out the law, resistance was met with military force.
Despite the fact that they were able political and economic partners of the colonial and early U.S. government, the Creeks suffered the same fate as their fellow southeastern tribes, and many of them were forced from their lands in the 1830s. Creek culture is kept alive in Alabama among the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, based in Escambia County.
It was a miserable-looking place in Hawkins time, with about 43 warriors in 1766. The name is derived from the war-club (ă tăssa), and was written Autossee, Ottossee, Otasse, Ot-tis-se, etc. A post or column of pine, forty feet high, stood in the town of Autassee, on a low, circular, artificial hill.”
U.S. and Cherokee troops under Brigadier General James White, following the orders of Major General John Hartwell Cocke, massacred the Hillabee Creek towns along the Tallapoosa River in present-day Cherokee County, AL.
The Creek Confederacy was a loose coalition of ethnically and linguistically diverse Native American towns that slowly coalesced as a political entity in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Abikakutchee was another Upper Creek Indian town located in Talladega County. The site was first recorded on maps in 1733 and a census in 1760 listed 130 Indian warriors living there.
Fushatchee were a Muscogee sub-tribe. They were located were Alabama and Florida in the United States.
Atasi Tribe
A sub-tribe of the Muskgoee. The Muscogee, also known as the Muskogee, Muscogee Creek, Creek, Mvskokvlke, or the Muscogee Creek Confederacy (pronounced [məskógəlgi]) in the Muscogee language, are a related group of indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands. Their original homelands are in what now comprises southern Tennessee, all of Alabama, western Georgia and part of northern Florida. Atasi, in its later years, was on close terms of intimacy with Tukabahchee, of which it was said to be a branch. While this may have been the case, its independent history extends back to very early times.
Spanish documents of the seventeenth century are the earliest in which the name appears. It is there used both as the name of a town (as early as 1675) and, in an extended sense, for all of the Lower Creeks. This fact, Muskogee tradition, and the name Talwa Iako all show the early importance of the people.
Abihka was one of the four mother towns of the Muscogee Creek confederacy. It is now a ceremonial ground in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma. Abihka is also sometimes used to refer to all Upper Creek (or Muscogee) peoples.
In Hawkins’time it was in a state of decay, but in former times had been a white or peace town, called (even now) Talua ‘lako, ”large town,” and the principal community among the Lower Creek settlements.
The Hillabee complex, focused along the Hillabee and Enitachopco Creeks, dates back at least to the late 17th century. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries the complex lay in the approximate center of the Creek Confederacy’s territory. Its population probably peaked after the Creek War (1813–14), then declined. Creek settlement in the area ended with the forced removal of the Muscogee people during the 1830s.
No facts have been preserved of the early life of Opothleyaholo, except that he was considered a promising youth, nor is it known when he rose to the position of speaker of the councils of the Upper Creek towns. His residence was in Tuckabachee, near the great council house.
Neamathla and the Fowltown warriors, all Red Sticks, were defeated in the Battle of Uchee Creek (1813) by the “southern” Creeks. They might have won had they not run out of ammunition. When a supply party with ammunition was attacked on its return from Pensacola — a preemptive strike — by U.S. forces, the Red Sticks defeated them at the Battle of Burnt Corn.
He was born in Okchaiyi, belonged to the Bear clan, and became a prominent chief of his native town. He did his trading at Fort Toulouse, and during the French and Indian war was in the French interest.
