Death would follow where he led it.
Red Eagle, on a hot August day in 1813, rode through the swamp and cane fields toward Fort Mims. The battle would not last long, he reasoned. The fort was much too strong. His warriors would attack, then fall back, then go on home where they belonged.
Red Eagle was not a worried man.
He would bravely perform his duty.
The battle, he knew, was lost before the first shot had been fired.
From behind the walls, a drum roll signaled the noon hour. Red Eagle nodded. And his screaming, yelling Red Sticks, their faces black, their arms yellow, swarmed down upon the stockade fortress.
The prophets danced.
Gunfire exploded across the Alabama countryside.
Red Eagle was aghast. He saw that the front gates had been left open.
Mims burned. The fort lay in ashes.
No one escaped the sound and the fury. Soldiers and settlers, women and children, blacks and Indians lay where they fell.
The prophets danced.
The warriors howled.
And Red Eagle, in the shroud of an early-morning fog, began burying the dead, all five hundred and fifty-three of them, in the plowed dirt between the potato rows. In the faces of the dead, he saw his own.
Andrew Jackson lay in the bed of his Tennessee home, his left shoulder shattered by a bullet, the aftermath of an ill-fated duel. He was pale, ashen. But he could not forget the carnage at Fort Mims. He was a hard man. He did not forgive easily. Jackson swore: “By the Eternal, these people must be saved.”
During the moon of the roasting ears, Andrew Jackson turned his horse toward Alabama. He would not face Red Eagle alone. The Cherokees left their farms to join his mission of revenge. After all, they had become Americans too, and the peace was theirs to uphold.
Eight hundred marched with Jackson, including The Ridge, John Ross, Charles Hicks, and a half-breed who walked with a limp, a man they called Sequoyah. From the Creek Nation came Gen. William McIntosh and an army of warriors to fight against their own people and blow away the cloud of war that the Red Sticks had hung with blood above their heads. The Choctaws filed in from the west.
The chase was on.
The Red Sticks were on the run.
The troops of John Coffee, Jackson’s vanguard, cut down a hundred and eighty-six of them at Tallussahatchee. Coffee reported that the Creeks “met [death] with all its horrours, without shrinking or complaining. Not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit.”
Davy Crockett remembered. “We shot them like dogs.”
They left Tallussahatchee in burned ruins. The ashes spread with the winds. The ground stained with the blood of the Red Sticks would never be sacred again. Vengeance belonged to the man riding with a military sword. Vengeance belonged to Jackson. He would carry a grudge for a long time.
The Red Sticks fled beyond the sanctuary of the swamps as Jackson drove relentlessly toward them. His men broke ranks at Talladega, and Jackson snapped, “I’ll shoot dead the first man who makes a move to leave.”
The ranks closed.
At Horseshoe Bend, Red Eagle would make his stand.
He would run no farther. His fate would be decided on a March 27 morning in 1814. And one hundred acres of Alabama bottom land would soak up the blood of Andrew Jackson’s revenge. The Red Sticks stood behind their earthen ramparts, screaming and taunting, daring the militia to march across that open field, laughing at the troops that did not come.
From behind them, John Ross swam the river and quietly pulled away the Creek canoes. Six hundred of his Cherokee soldiers climbed inside and, slipping across the Tallapoosa, attacked the Red Sticks who did not see them until the rain of gunfire fell around their shoulders.
Major Lemuel P. Montgomery charged as the Creeks suddenly found themselves trapped in a deadly crossfire.
The laughter stopped.
Sam Houston battled his way across the field and fell with an arrow in his leg. A private jerked it out, and Houston fought on until a bullet slammed into his shoulder and, at last, he grew too weak to pull the trigger of his rifle.
Around him erupted the gunshots, the howling, the screams of three thousand men. Around him were the groans and the curses and the praying of the dying. Houston would recall, “Not a warrior offered to surrender, even while the sword was at his breast.”
Flames spit out of the thicket. The Red Sticks turned to the river to escape. But as Coffee wrote, “Few ever reached the bank, and that few was killed the instant they landed.”
Andrew Jackson himself reported, ‘The enemy was completely routed. Five hundred and fifty-seven were left dead on the peninsula.”
Red Eagle lived. He walked a broken man to Jackson’s tent and said solemnly, “I can oppose you no longer. I have done you much injury. I should have done you more, but my warriors are killed. I am in your power. Dispose of me as you please.”
“You are not in my power, “ Jackson barked. “If you think you can contend against me in battle, go and head your warriors.”
Red Eagle – only one-eighth Indian, a man called Bill Weatherford – paused and gazed for a moment out across the elysian fields of slaughter. “There was a time when I could have answered you,” he replied. “I could animate my fighters to battle, but I cannot animate the dead.” He paused again, then continued, “I have nothing to request for myself, but I beg of you to send for the women and children of the war party who have been driven to the woods without an ear of corn . . . Save the wives and children of the Creeks and I will persuade to peace any Red Sticks remaining in my nation.”
For Andrew Jackson, the war was at an end.
He shook Red Eagle’s hand and turned away. He would never forget the bend, shaped like a horseshoe, in the Tallapoosa River “The carnage,” he would say, “was dreadful.”
And so it was.
And the Creeks called him The Devil.
Chapter 7: Play Ball!
WHEN THE FRENCHMAN Bossu rode among the Choctaws in 1770, he discovered them playing ball – a recreational war practiced by most of the Five Civilized Tribes. His account may have been one of the first sports stories ever written on the North American continent:
The chactas are very active and very nimble. They have a game similar to our long racket game at which they are very skillful. The neighboring villages invite one another, inciting their opponents with a thousand words of defiance. Men and women gather in their finest costumes and pass the day singing and dancing . . . to the sound of the drum and rattle They agree upon a goal 60 paces distant and indicated by two large poles between which the ball must pass. Usually they play for 16 points. There are forty players on a side, each holding in his hand a racket two and a half feet long, of almost the same shape as ours, made of walnut or chestnut wood and covered with deer skin.
In the middle of the ball ground an old man throws up a ball made by rolling deer skin together. At once each player runs to try to catch the ball in his racket. It is a fine sight to observe the players with their bodies bare, painted in all sorts of colors, with a tiger tail fastened behind and feathers on their arms and heads which flutter as they run . . . They pus. They tumble over one another. He who is skillful enough to catch the ball sends it to the players on his side. Those on the opposite side run at the one who has seized it and return it to their own party, and they fight over it, party against party, with so much vigor that shoulders are sometime dislocated. The players never