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On August 30, 1813, Red Stick Creek warriors attacked Fort Mims, a stockaded dwelling on the southwestern edge of the Creek Nation in what is now southwestern Alabama. They killed most of the soldiers from the Mississippi Territory and several male residents of nearby Tensaw who garrisoned the fort. The "Fort Mims Massacre," as the attack came to be known, fulfilled the worst expectations of the citizens of Georgia and Mississippi Territory and triggered a United States invasion of Creek country. Scholars have interpreted this event as the catalyst for an epic struggle between the proponents of war and peace, conservatism and change, "millennialists" and secularists, "nativists" and "accommodationists," and pivotal in the catastrophe of the Creek War. Placed in the broader context of the War of 1812 and the prophetic movement of the Shawnees, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, the attack on Fort Mims seems to be merely opportunistic: the Red Sticks' chance to strike a blow against highly acculturated Creeks, intermarried whites, and the territorial militia.
A closer look at the Tensaw residents who sought refuge at Fort Mims, however, suggests that the Red Sticks chose their target carefully and that the American response to the "massacre" obscured its real causes. Tensaw's origins separated it from core Creek values as well as from the traditional towns of the Creek Nation, and its development generated conflict long before the arrival of Tecumseh. Thus, the attack on Fort Mims was primarily a punitive expedition against a few errant Tensaw Creeks who had become too closely associated with the interests of the United States and who had rejected a sole commercial association with the Spanish. By narrowing the analysis to this key community, the tensions within the Creek Nation as a whole become more palpable.1
Previous scholars either ignored Tensaw (at least until the incident at Fort Mims), considered the settlers there to be non-Indian or fully acculturated "metis," or focused on broader themes involving divisions among Creeks such as "nativism" and spiritual renewal, or "accommodation" and economic disparity. At one time, scholars tended to see Creeks in terms of Euro-American social and economic categories rather than focusing on what the Creeks considered important. Claudio Saunt provided the most recent interpretation of the massacre and argued that the...