Places: Fort Mitchell, Russell County, Alabama

Five Southeastern Tribes experienced the deportation of the Trail of Tears during the period of Indian Removal during the 1830's.  Among them were the Muscogee/Creek, who had once held vast hunting ranges in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  In 1836, faced with giving up their last portions of their ancient homelands many Creeks had enough and rose in revolt, echoing the Red Stick uprisings of the earlier Creek War in 1813-14.  Like that earlier conflict, this unrest was quickly put down and the government decided that the Creeks were moving to Oklahoma, like it or not.

As resistance by their distant cousins the Seminoles flared in Florida, the government instituted forcible removals of Creek families, going from home to home and ordering them out with whatever possessions they could snatch up at the last minute.  Where to put these people until they could begin the trek to Oklahoma?  Fort Mitchell in Russell County, Alabama had been built in 1813 as a response to the Creek War.  Beginning in 1817, the fort was also a trading post where the Creek could trade deer and other hides for supplies.  However, the fort soon became a haven for off-the-record smuggling and sales of black slaves.  Unscrupulous traders also sold whiskey to the soldiers and the Creek, though such was strictly forbidden to the latter.  The fort was a wooden palisade, with blockhouses on each corner and barracks, a hospital and storage rooms.

The palisade also made a convenient stockade into which hundreds of men, women and children were crowded to make camp as best they could until the trek to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, could begin.  Overcrowding, exposure, poor sanitation and insufficient rations led to disease and eventually death.  The tears of bereaved and dispossessed people began at Fort Mitchell even before they started their journey west.  The original wooden fort has long since disappeared and been replaced with a reconstruction.  It's on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark.  An informational plaque mentions the internment of the Creek here on their Trail of Tears.

The Treaty of Cusseta and the Creek War of 1836

The story of the removal of the Five Southeastern Tribes from their traditional homeland is one of broken promises, misunderstandings and outright betrayals.  In the case of the remaining Upper Creek of Alabama, it was also a case of fake war.

The Muscogee/Creek people had once controlled vast acres of hunting rang in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and northern Florida.  By 1832, they were struggling to hold onto remaining lands in Alabama.  Squatters continued to trespass on Native lands, even as land speculators had already claimed rights to it with state governments who were ready to see the Natives off to Indian Territory.  Opothleyahola and other Creek leaders had achieved some partial damage control under the Treaty of Washington of 1826, but were still forced to give up all Creek land in Georgia.  By 1832, authorities in Alabama were attempting to abolish tribal governance and extend state laws onto Creek territory.

In yet another attempt to salvage the situation, Creek leaders agreed to the Treaty of Cusseta of 1832, more cessions of Creek land in exchange for individual allotments of land for the remaining Upper Creek leaders and families remaining in Alabama.  One leader, Ladiga, sold land forming present-day Jacksonville, Alabama for $2,000 at the time.  The land speculators took advantage of Natives who did not understand American ideas of land ownership and induced them to sell their plots of land.  Squatters simply moved in on other portions of land.  Clashes broke out between squatters and Natives.  Opothleyahola appealed to the Jackson Administration for help in preserving what little land his people had left.  This was a last, desperate gasp, but one with some logic behind it.  Although Jackson had signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Creek warriors had served with him in 1812, often fighting against their own people.  They'd been promised annuities and land grants, which they never received.  Perhaps the President would make good on his word.

No.  The United States and Alabama authorities interpreted Creek attempts to dispossess squatters off their land as an act of war on the part of the Creek.  Jackson ordered General Winfield Scott to send troops to forcibly remove the remaining Creek families off their land.  Opothleyahola had no choice but to organize his people as best he could and lead them to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.   Opothleyahola would go on to honor and tragedy in Oklahoma, dying in 1863 after leading his people on the Trail of Blood and Ice trying to escape Confederate forces.  Ladiga disappeared from history, commemorated today by a bike trail in Alabama that bears his name.