Tecumseh and Brock (27 page)

Jackson led his troops east from Littafuchee to launch an attack on
the small Muscogee town of Tallushatchee, located not far from pres
ent-day Jacksonville, Alabama. Having learned that a large number of Red Stick warriors were positioned in the town, Jackson ordered Coffee to attack it with nine hundred members of his mounted force. The troops were shown the way to the town by a party of Cherokee warriors and two Muscogees who had sided with the Americans.

As Davy Crockett described the attack, the soldiers approached the town in two columns and “then closed up at both ends, so as to surround it completely.” When the Red Sticks saw one of the soldiers approaching, “they raised the yell, and came running at him like so many red devils.” With the Americans surrounding the town and pouring volleys of fire into it, some of the natives surrendered. Others were chased into the dwellings. Crockett recounted an attack on forty-six warriors he saw taking cover in a house. When Crockett and his fellow soldiers got near the house, “We saw a squaw sitting in the door, and she placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand, and then took an arrow, and raising her feet, she drew with all her might, and let fly at us, and she killed a man . . . His death so enraged all of us, that she was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her.” Then the soldiers dealt with the warriors: “We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it. I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house. His arm and thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him . . . He was still trying to crawl along; but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old. So sullen is the Indian, when his dander is up, that he had sooner die than make a noise or ask for quarters [
sic
].”
14

To finish off the Red Sticks, the soldiers torched the remaining houses. The warriors trapped inside burned to death and those who tried to flee were gunned down when they tried to make their escape.

Coffee's force killed and captured 186 warriors, and 5 members of the Tennessee contingent were killed. Following their destruction of the town, Coffee's men rejoined Jackson's force and discovered that no new food supplies had arrived. The next day, some of the men who had been involved in the attack returned to the burnt-out ruins of Tallushatchee to scavenge for something to eat. Despite the stench of the corpses and the appalling sight of the dead, one of the men uncovered a potato cellar beneath one of the burnt dwellings, and the soldiers helped themselves to its contents. “For we were all hungry as wolves,” Crockett recorded.
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In the midst of the ruins, soldiers heard the crying of a small infant, who was found near the body of his dead mother. They picked up the baby and took him back to Jackson's camp. When Jackson saw the baby he asked some of the Muscogee women who had been taken prisoner if they would look after the infant. They refused, telling the general that all the baby's relatives were dead and that the soldiers should kill him too.
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Jackson felt a surge of compassion for the baby, who was about ten months old, about the same age as his own adopted son, Andrew Jr. The general decided he would adopt the boy, and send him back to the Hermitage in Tennessee to live with his family there. To make sure he could be cared for, Jackson took a Muscogee woman as a slave.
17

Whatever the range of emotions he experienced during his campaign, Jackson was developing a taste for war and for the glory it could win him.

Jackson's next target was Talladega, a Muscogee trading post east of the Coosa River that was outfitted with a stockade. The Tennesseans tried to use the same tactics that had worked so well for them in their previous engagement. They advanced on the town and attempted to surround it. The resourceful Red Eagle, however, knew the enemy was coming. He had moved his warriors to the nearby woods, where he waited to launch a surprise attack of his own.

From their concealed position, the Red Sticks rushed forth at a portion of the Tennessee force. In Crockett's lurid account of the attack, the Red Sticks were “all painted as red as scarlet, and were just as naked as they were born.” He described them as “being like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose.”
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Many of the mounted militiamen fell from their horses in their rush to make it to the relative safety of the fort. Militiamen in the woods opened fire on the Red Sticks, who turned in their direction and attempted a charge that was broken by a further volley of fire. Trapped by militiamen on both sides, the Red Sticks fought a desperate twenty-minute battle, deploying muskets and bows and arrows against their foes. At last, the native warriors found a gap in Jackson's line and rushed through into the nearby woods. Coffee's mounted militiamen took up a hot pursuit and inflicted more casualties on the Red Sticks. The native allies of the Americans, who had been holed up in the fort, came out to slake their thirst at a nearby spring. The Red Sticks had been besieging them for days.

Three hundred Red Sticks died in the encounter, while only fifteen militiamen were killed and eighty-five wounded. Two more soldiers died later of their wounds. But seven hundred Red Sticks had made it through the gap to safety, prepared to fight another day. Jackson's troops had managed to kill or wound about one thousand warriors in the Battles of Tallushatchee and Talladega.

After the latter battle, Jackson ruefully concluded, “Had I not been compelled by the faux pas of the militia in the onset of the battle, to dismount my reserves, I believe not a man of them would have escaped.”
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With insufficient provisions to feed his troops, and worried about the security of his base and supply lines, Jackson decided that he could not continue his pursuit of the remaining Red Stick warriors, and pulled back to the Coosa River. Meanwhile, another Tennessee force, commanded by Major General John Cocke, with whom Jackson had been attempting to coordinate, was experiencing its own supply problems.

Cocke determined that he and his men would carry on their own campaign against other Red Stick power centres. What he did not know was that the chiefs of the Hillabee towns (Muscogee settlements located on creeks and rivers not far from the Tallapoosa River in what is now northeastern Alabama) had decided they wanted to end their support for the Red Sticks and make peace with the Americans. In return for surrendering any Red Stick leaders among them and handing back property taken from white settlers, especially their slaves, the warriors in the Hillabee towns had secured a truce with Jackson.

The militiamen under Cocke's direction, along with their Cherokee allies — who had been won over to the American cause with the promise that they would be recognized as a people
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— surrounded the settlement of Hillabee Creek in the pre-dawn hours. Among those in the town were sixty-five wounded warriors who had survived the attack at Talledega, along with their women and children. At dawn, the attack was unleashed on the unsuspecting men and women, who thought they were protected by the truce. The Cherokee warriors went in first, followed by the troops. Guns and bayonets cut down those in the cabins. In less than fifteen minutes, the slaughter was complete. Two hundred and fifty-six prisoners, most of them women and children, were taken, and the town was burnt to the ground. The prisoners were dispatched to the Hiwassee Garrison of the Cherokee Nation, located in southeastern Tennessee, a post where federal U.S. troops were stationed.

The massacre at Hillabee Creek extinguished any hope of a quick end to the Creek War. The Hillabee Muscogees held Jackson responsible for what they saw as a betrayal. In the struggles to come, they aligned themselves fiercely on the side of the Red Sticks, holding out until the end.
¶¶¶
21

While Cocke was launching the ill-fated assault on the Hillabee settlement, Jackson faced a problem within his own ranks. The supply issues had not been resolved, and in mid-November 1813, a large faction of the Tennessee Militia decided they had had enough and that they were going to head home. The crisis came to a head on November 10, at Fort Strother, when the rations for Jackson's soldiers ran out. Over the previous five days, his men had eaten less than two meals. Not only were the soldiers on the verge of starvation, the nights were growing longer and colder as autumn advanced, and many of them did not have proper clothing to cope with the rapidly dropping temperatures.

Jackson was determined to carry on the war against the Red Sticks until victory was achieved. His quest for glory or triumph was so strong that it overcame his personal ills. He suffered from persistent diarrhea and from the bullet that remained in his shoulder as a result of the brawl he had been involved in just prior to the expedition. The militiamen under his command were in an increasingly mutinous state. A number of his officers presented him with a petition urging him to march to Fort Deposit, eighty kilometres over mountainous country north of Fort Strother. There, the men would find food. But that would lead Jackson's force away from the heartland of the Red Sticks. He urged the officers to wait a little longer for a relief column carrying provisions.

But many of the men could endure no more. Jackson had to mobilize his volunteers to stop some of the militiamen from leaving, but the following day, the volunteers decided they too could take it no more. Jackson urged them to wait two more days for the supplies. Then the men in his three brigades voted on what to do. One brigade voted to remain with the general; a second voted to remain for two more days; and the third, the volunteers, voted to depart. This time Jackson did not try to stop them. He did get them to agree to return to Fort Strother as soon as they could and to bring provisions with them. Davy Crockett was among the volunteers who left, and after going home to obtain a new horse, he returned once more to take up the fight against the Red Sticks. Most of the volunteers did not come back.
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Two days passed, but the relief column did not arrive. Forced to march north, Jackson convinced just over 100 men to remain behind and safeguard Fort Strother. Twenty miles into their march, Jackson's soldiers ran into a supply column heading south from Fort Deposit with a herd of 150 cattle and 9 wagons laden with flour. The ravenous troops slaughtered the cattle at once and ate decently for the first time in days.

Jackson was now determined to lead his force back to Fort Strother, but one company resumed the march north. The general confronted the men and threatened to open fire on them if they did not follow his order and return to camp. Reluctantly, they did so. The mutinous mood had not passed, however. Another brigade began preparations to depart for the North. The general wielded a musket with his good arm and aimed it at the disobedient troops. “You say you will march,” he declared. “I say by the Eternal God you shall not march while a cartridge can sound fire.” The standoff continued for some moments, until several officers and loyal soldiers joined the general, their weapons bristling. The rebellious soldiers backed down.
23

While Jackson had spent much time and energy keeping his own force in the field, other American units were carrying on the fight against the Red Sticks. In late November, a force of about 950 Georgia militiamen and 400 Cherokee warriors, under the command of General John Floyd, launched an attack on the Red Stick stronghold of Autossee, located on the eastern bank of the Tallapoosa River.
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On a cold morning, with frost covering the country around the town, the Georgians attacked Autossee and a small settlement a few hundred yards away. The fight was long and fierce. In the end, the Georgians prevailed, their artillery particularly effective in smashing the homes where their foes were holed up. Many of the Red Stick warriors died in the flames, while others carried on the fight from the brush surrounding the town. Two hundred Red Stick warriors were killed, according to the count carried out by the Georgians, who lost eleven men and had fifty-three wounded. Among the Muscogee dead was the venerable chieftain Big Warrior.
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As had been the case at Talladega, despite their victory and the destruction of Autossee, the Georgians failed to prevent most of the Red Stick warriors from escaping. Short of supplies, Floyd decided to lead his Georgians east to Fort Mitchell, their supply base on the Chattahoochee River, on the border of Georgia. As they set out on their march, the Red Sticks launched their own surprise attack. Four or five Georgians died, but Floyd's men repelled the assault and continued to Fort Mitchell.
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The fighting between the Americans and the Red Sticks continued into 1814. Reinforced with eight hundred new recruits, Jackson decided to launch an assault on a key Red Stick position called Tohepeka, or Horseshoe Bend. The Red Sticks did not wait for Jackson's troops to reach their base. They struck the Tennessee force, attacking the Americans in three places simultaneously, the very tactic the U.S. troops had been using against them. Jackson's soldiers just managed to hold their ground against the attack, and the general concluded that he needed more men to win at Horseshoe Bend. He led his troops in a retreat back toward Fort Strother and was once again struck by a Red Stick attack, which he fended off.
27

A few weeks after the American troops were driven back to Fort Strother, volunteers from eastern Tennessee and the 39th Regiment of U.S. Infantry reached the fort. This infusion of fresh blood brought the general's numbers back up to make good the loss of those who had left when their enlistment times were up. On March 14, 1814, Jackson led the bulk of his troops south while leaving a covering force behind at the fort. The general's army numbered about four thousand men, including Cherokee and Choctaw warriors and Muscogees who had sided with the United States. Their target was Horseshoe Bend, about 160 kilometres to the south, on a loop in the Tallapoosa River. Here the Red Stick warriors numbered about one thousand, and about three hundred women and children were at the site. The Red Sticks had chosen a defensive position on a peninsula and had constructed breastworks made of logs to shield them against attack. In the breastworks were portholes through which the warriors could fire.