The Muskogee and the Southeastern Chiefdoms

The Muskogee and the Southeastern Chiefdoms. The Muskogee and the southeastern chiefdoms (c. AD 1000-1830) were the heirs of the mound-building world of the American Southeast. From about AD 1000 the Mississippian culture raised temple mounds and palisaded towns across the region: Etowah in Georgia, Moundville in Alabama, and dozens of lesser centers, ruled by chiefs who lived atop the mounds and controlled trade in copper, shell, and prestige goods stretching across the continent. Their people farmed maize, played the ballgame called chunkey, and honored their dead in rich burials.

European contact shattered this world. The expedition of Hernando de Soto, which marched through the Southeast in 1539-1542, met powerful chiefdoms and left behind devastation and disease; within a century the old mound centers had collapsed. Out of the survivors arose new peoples: the descendants of the Mississippian towns regrouped into confederacies of autonomous towns, the greatest of them the Muskogee, or Creek, whose towns stretched across what is now Alabama and Georgia.

The Creek Confederacy was a nation of towns rather than a state. Each town had its chief, its council fire, and its ball ground, and the confederacy met to treat of war and peace with the colonial powers around them. Creek diplomats played Britain, France, and Spain against one another for a century, until American expansion broke the balance. In 1813-14 the Red Stick war split the nation, and Andrew Jackson's victory at Horseshoe Bend forced the cession of millions of acres; by the 1830s the Creeks, like the other southeastern nations, had been driven west on the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory.

The descendants of the chiefdoms endure. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation is today one of the largest tribes in Oklahoma, the mounds of Etowah and Moundville are preserved as monuments of the Mississippian world, and the towns and traditions of the Southeast still shape the nations that carry their memory.

To read more about this topic:

Southeastern Archaeology: Origins of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy Encyclopedia.com: Creek Oklahoma Historical Society: Creek (Muscogee) New Georgia Encyclopedia: Late Prehistoric and Early Historic Chiefdoms