Inhaltsangabe
A comprehensive collection of the most important sources on the late historic Creek Indians and their environment.
In 1795 Benjamin Hawkins, a former U.S. senator and advisor to George Washington, was appointed U.S. Indian agent and superintendent of all the tribes south of the Ohio River. Unlike most other agents, he lived among the Creek Indians for his entire tenure, from 1796 to 1816. Journeying forth from his home on the Flint River in Georgia, he served southeastern Indians as government intermediary during one of the longest eras of peace in the historic period.
Hawkins's journals provide detailed information about European-Indian relations in the 18th-century frontier of the South. His descriptions of the natural and cultural environment are considered among the best sources for the ethnohistory of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and, especially, the Creek Indians and the natural history of their territory.
Two previously published bodies of work by Benjamin Hawkins are included here-A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799 and The Letters of Benjamin Hawkins 1796-1806. A third body of work that has never been published, "A Viatory or Journal of Distances" (describing routes and distances of a 3,578-mile journey through parts of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi), has been added. Together, these documents make up the known body of Hawkins' work&;his talks, treaties, correspondence, aboriginal vocabularies, travel journals, and records of the manners, customs, rites, and civil polity of the tribes. Hawkins' work provides an invaluable record of the time period.
Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
H. Thomas Foster II is a senior archaeologist with Panamerican Consultants, Inc., in Columbus, Georgia, and Research Associate at Auburn University Montgomery.
Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810
By Thomas FosterThe University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1367-8All rights reserved.
Contents
Introduction,
A Viatory or Journal of Distances and Observations,
A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799,
Letters of Benjamin Hawkins,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
The Viatories
Few other eighteenth-century sources provide the environmental and geographical detail as these journals by Benjamin Hawkins. When Hawkins first entered the Creek country, he traveled among the major towns in order to acquaint himself with the populations and the geography. These journeys were compiled and edited into the "Sketch of the Creek Country" described above. The viatories edited in this volume contain the field notes that Hawkins apparently used to construct the "Sketch." They contain his original data regarding cultural and physical geography and the distances between those features.
The viatories start in 1797 and end approximately in 1810. A generalization of his journeys described in the viatories is illustrated in Figures 1 and 2. These figures show each journey's starting point and ending point; a dotted line connects the two points. The figures are not topographically accurate because a detailed mapping of each journey is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter. (Mark Fretwell [1954] accomplished this type of detailed mapping in his publication of a portion of the viatory routes.) Rather, this introduction is intended to provide a brief summary of Hawkins's route as detailed in the viatories.
Before discussing Hawkins's journal entries, I need to address the issue of inconsistent spelling. The spellings of place names and common words used in this introduction are sometimes inconsistent. Furthermore, many of the words are English translations of Native American words, which can also result in inconsistent spellings. For consistency—and for the sake of preserving the journal's original text—I used Hawkins's original spellings. Hawkins was relatively consistent in his spelling and the justification behind his methodology is useful. He spelled Muscogee and other Native American words phonetically and separated syllables with commas. Since there are multiple spellings for almost every proper name and there is little, if any, consistent justification for each variation, I used Hawkins's phonetic spelling. Furthermore, I prefer to leave the interpretation of place-name identification to the reader. It is possible that two independent place names have similar spellings, and I did not want to erroneously label them as one location by giving them a common spelling. In the interest of clarity, I have included a table that compares the spelling variants of proper names used in the viatories and in my introductory chapter to the spellings John Swanton (1922) used in his book on the Creek and some common variants (Table 1).
Hawkins's Route
On December 6, 1797, Hawkins began his viatory entries with a trip from "Cussetuh," a Lower Creek town located at the present-day site of Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia, (Willey and Sears 1952), to Fort Wilkinson, near the present-day site of Milledgeville, Georgia (Figure 1). He passed "No,chil,lehatchee" and "Ecun,hut,coo,chee" creeks along the way. Next, Hawkins traveled from "Etowau" to "Hillaubee" (Figure 2). Etowau was at or near the location of present-day Etowah, near Cartersville, Georgia; Hawkins's descriptions of the area's residents and geographical features are consistent with this interpretation. He wrote that the Cherokee who were living at "Etow,woh" had "increased their stock of hogs and cattle ... [and] appear well clothed and industrious." The Hillaubee town was situated among the Upper Creek Indian towns in east-central Alabama. On the way to Hillaubee, he passed the "remains of a hurricane" and a "conic mount." Since Hawkins noted the cardinal direction of the supposed hurricane's movement, he may have been observing the effects of a tornado instead.
Hawkins constantly noted the location and quality of reeds along the routes of his travels. For example, he noted during the trip from Etow,who to Hillaubee that at one point he crossed "a large bed of reeds on the left margin. on the right a flat, and between it and the high lands a thick bed of reeds." Hawkins departed from the Upper Creek town of "Newyaucau" on November 25, 1797, which is upstream from what is now Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, on the Tallapoosa River. From Newyaucau he traveled to "Cowetuh," the principal war town of the Lower Creek Indians. Cowetuh was situated south of Phenix City, Alabama, on the Chattahoochee River, upstream from Cussetuh (Figures 1 and 2). Along the way, he observed "6 houses on [the] right belonging to Eufau,lau,hatchee. They are well situated, the flats on the creek are rich and well cultivated." He also passed "the dividing ridge between Chat,to,ho,che and Tal,la,poo,sau," which marked the hydrological drainage units in east-central Alabama.
In 1798, Hawkins left the home of Timothy Barnard, a longtime trader and friend to Hawkins who lived on the Flint River near present-day Montezuma, Georgia (Figure 1). Hawkins traveled to the village of the Tussokiah Micco, who lived in the town of Upatoi near present-day Upatoi, Georgia, in Muscogee County (Elliot et al. 1996). Along the way he "saw the Buffaloegrass So,we,nah" and passed the town of Buzzard Roost, or "Soo,le,no juh." The route was "gravelly in places, small oak blackjack, hickory saplins and grubs shortleaf pine. [S]ome of the lands appear[ed] pretty good."
Previous to 1803, Hawkins had lived in various Creek towns, and his travels usually departed from them. However, in 1803, Hawkins settled permanently near the Flint River, not far from his friend Barnard's house (Figure 1). This house became the Creek Indian Agency (Hawkins Agency). Hawkins traveled from this location to "Ocmulgee old fields" (Figure 1), an abandoned town and agricultural field near present-day Macon, Georgia, and probably at the Ocmulgee National Park (Mason 1963; Waselkov 1994). There, Hawkins observed that, "the lands rise into high waving land, the growth mostly oak, the Ocmulgee old fields are below adjoining the creek and river ... the reserve should be 2 1/2 miles above the creek and three back, the creek affords water for a saw mill, and there is a convenient situation for one and the last mile includes some Longleaf pine." After his stop there, Hawkins continued on to Fort Wilkinson.
His next entry, in 1798, picked up in the middle of a journey to "Etauwah." Although he did not specify his origin, he was probably coming from "Coweta Tallahassee," near present-day Phenix City, Alabama. He "pass[ed] on the back of the Cowetuh Town on flat lands ... the buildings extend up for this distance on our right [east]." During this journey he passed by "We,at,lo,tuc,kee" settlements, an old square ground, and had breakfast at an isolated settlement where he was fed "venison, ground peas, potatoes, and O sauf kee." After continuing through a "neighborhood ... devoted to hurricanes," he passed through "Ocfuskoochee Talauhassee" and "Ocfuskenena." This last town was burned by Georgian settlers just five years before Hawkins passed through it. He noted "the remains of houses [and] many peach trees which look well, some plum and Locust trees and some cascine yupon of which their black drink was...
„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
