In Alabama there is a large amount of history and more specifically Creek Indian history.
“Learning about Creek Indians is really learning about Alabama and learning about the place where you are here in Auburn,” said Maiben Beard, outreach assistant with the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities.
The Creek Indians owned all of Alabama at one time, including the place known in Auburn as Pebble Hill. When Nathaniel Scott and his wife Mary came to Alabama during the 1830s, they acquired this territory from the Creek Indians and eventually created what is now Auburn, Alabama. Pebble Hill has been under recent renovations that were finished just recently.
“That is what we are trying to do with this new version of the Pebble Hill and these new renovations,” Beard said. “So we have this house, and you can really tell the story of Auburn through the people who have lived on this land starting with the Creek Indians until the 1950s and 1960s.”
Kathryn Braund, Creek Indian history expert and Auburn’s Hollifield Professor of Southern History, has spent years studying Creek Indian history. She recently spoke to a group of about 80 people at Pebble Hill in Auburn as part of the 2016 Draughon Seminars in State and Local History. She explained Creek Indian history in Alabama using three periods.
The first period, in which the Indians made a trading alliance with the British colonies, is in Braund’s opinion “the most fun period to study.”
This alliance was formed when the Indians realized they could use the Europeans’ help in areas such as military defense, and the Europeans realized they could use the Indians’ help with farming and trade, mainly deerskin trade.
“The deerskin trade was economic and political,” Braund said. “It represented an economic, political, military and personal alliance between the Creek Indians and the European people.”
As the “great Tye that bound them together began to fray,” the next period, represented by civilization and war, came about.
Braund said the Creek Indians were engaged in a civil war, and since the Indians needed help from the Americans, there was a price to pay.
“Millions and millions of acres were paid to the Americans for helping the Creeks during the insurgency,” Braund said. “They lost almost over 22 million acres of their land.”
As time passed, the conflict between Creeks and Americans increased, bringing about the third period, removal, which was in essence the ethnic cleansing of the Southeast.
The Alabama state laws were extended over the Indian tribes in the state of Alabama. The Creeks’ laws were no longer viable in Alabama, and they were not allowed to become citizens.
“The Creeks made a bargain with the devil: They agreed to give up all of their land to the federal government,” Braund said. “In return, they were allowed to keep individual parcels for each family, but they had to abide by Alabama law. The Indians who did not want to abide by Alabama law had to move west of the Mississippi River.”
Although victims of war and relocation, the Creek Indians are still strong. Braund recently attended a conference hosted by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, where she saw a banner with the words “Meyuksv-seko Myskoke,” which means “no end, eternity forever, we are still here.”
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