Double Feature: Milly Francis of the Creek and Ethan Allen Hitchcock

Milly Francis, the daughter of Creek warrior and prophet Josiah Francis (Hillis Hadjo) is worthy of her own post as a Great Woman for one particular act of kindness on her part that occurred during the First Seminole War (1816-1818).  Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero had graduated West Point a year before and was posted elsewhere when the incident happened, but his story dovetails Milly's and that of her people in some key instances, so he's included here although he could get a separate honorable mention post on his own.

Ethan was born in 1798, just three years before his famous grandfather died.  Like two of his uncles before him, he graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point (1817) and was posted to an artillery unit.  Meanwhile, in 1803, Milly Francis was born in an Upper Creek town in Alabama.  Her father was an important religious leader whose teachings galvanized the Red Stick Creeks during the Creek War (1813-1814).  He was also a warrior capable of commanding large war parties, which he did several times during the War.  Following the defeat of the Red Stick Revolt, Francis and his family fled to the Seminoles in Florida.  He traveled to England to enlist British aid for the Creek cause.  Meanwhile, the First Seminole War (1816-1818) broke out in Florida.  After several initial successes by Creek and Seminole forces, the government turned to their secret weapon, Andrew Jackson.  By this time, Josiah Francis had returned home to Florida and was active in the fight.

Jackson set up camp and began erecting Fort Gadsen in present-day Franklin County, Florida in March, 1818.  Assigned to one of the Georgia militia units under his command was a young soldier by the name of Duncan McRimmon.  He wondered out of camp one day and was captured by a Creek patrol.  They planned to burn him at the stake in retaliation for Creek deaths in a recent raid by the Americans.  Milly couldn't stand idly by and watch, so she went to her father.  As with Pocahontas almost two hundred years earlier, the scene was dramatized in lithographs and drawings.  And, like Pocahontas, when Milly approached her father, she doubtless did it privately and without creating a dramatic scene that would potentially challenge his authority.  He refused to intervene, telling her that McRimmon's fate, per Creek law and custom, was in the hands of the warrior who captured him, who happened to have lost two sisters in the raid.  He then suggested that Milly speak to the warrior personally.  Milly approached him and again made her request, pleading and reasoning as best she could.  The warrior acceded to her and released McRimmon with a stern warning to get out of Florida and not be captured again.

As the story spread, newspapers took it up, hailing a new Pocahontas.  Unaware of her fame, Milly watched as her world collapsed around her.  Her father was captured and hung while she and her family watched.  Whether she tried to plead with anyone to spare him is unknown.  Jackson was conveniently elsewhere when the execution took place.  With their home burned and no male provider in their family, Milly, her mother and sister were in dire poverty.  Word of that reached sympathetic readers in several cities in the South.  They took up a collection and dispatched it at the hand of Duncan McRimmon, who had plans of his own.  Perhaps he'd heard or read of Pocahontas.  Maybe he wanted to be the true love of an "Indian Princess", or thought that she'd fallen for him as he stood bound to the stake, no one knows.  However, on delivering the money, he proposed marriage.  Milly refused, wanting to stay with her people and her family.  She said that she had simply acted from mercy and would have done the like for anyone in his position.  There was no romantic intention on her part. 

Milly and her family returned to Alabama.  She married a Creek warrior who served in the Second Seminole War, dying in 1836 as a member of Maj. David Moniac's command.  That left Milly to raise their three small children as her world collapsed again.  In 1838, she and her family were deported on the Trail of Tears.  As they arrived at the embarkation point in Little Rock, Arkansas, crowds gathered to see the New Pocahontas leaving her homeland forever.  She arrived in Oklahoma and settled into a dirt floor cabin with her children, desperately poor.  An attempt at help arrived in 1843, almost.  Ethan Allen Hitchcock had served through much of the Second Seminole War.  He was an avid diarist who kept his eyes and ears open.  What little we know of the Fort Payne treaty discussions, sans Osceola's dramatic role, comes from his diary.  Included in what he found out was that there had been everything Osceola suspected in connection with that treaty, including coercion, mistranslation and the forging of some of the Seminole leaders' marks.


In 1841, Ethan was sent to Oklahoma to investigate allegations of graft and corruption among officials and contractors assigned to the Five Southeastern Tribes.  He found wrongdoing on a staggering scale and his report was so scathing that it was suppressed by the War Department and never presented to Congress.  Nevertheless, he kept his diary and made a meticulous record of the Native peoples he met, including their history, life and customs, earning some credit to himself as an early ethnographer.  He visited Milly Francis and heard her story directly from her.  Impressed by her kindness and moved by the poverty of her family, he petitioned Congress to provide her a pension.  The bill stalled in D.C. for two years before a pension was assigned to, "Milly, a Creek woman".  The bill also authorized that a gold medal be struck in honor, which was done.  Unfortunately, her name is not listed on the rolls of those who have been honored with a Congressional Medal.  Worse yet, she died of tuberculosis before the pension or the medal ever reached her.  She was buried near her cabin, on the site of today's Bacone College, Muscogee, Oklahoma.  Students erected a monument to her in the 1930's.

Ethan Hitchcock would go one to see service in the Mexican War and the Civil War.  His reports and his diaries, with their valuable information on Native life in this period, would have to wait another century to see the light of day.