at the opportunity of placing the American eagle on
the ramparts of Pensacola, Mobile, and Fort St. Augustine."

Where the fiery Andrew Jackson led, there was neither delay nor
hesitation. At once he sent his backwoods infantry down river in boats,
while the mounted men rode overland. Four weeks later the information
overtook him at Natchez that Congress had refused to sanction the
expedition. When the Secretary of War curtly told him that his corps was
"dismissed from public service," Andrew Jackson in a furious temper
ignored the order and marched his men back to Nashville instead of
disbanding them. He was not long idle, however, for the powerful
confederacy of the Creek Indians had been aroused by a visit of the
great Tecumseh, and the drums of the war dance were sounding in sympathy
with the tribes of the Canadian frontier. In Georgia and Alabama the
painted prophets and medicine men were spreading tales of Indian
victories over the white men at the river Raisin and Detroit. British
officials, moreover, got wind of a threatened uprising in the South and
secretly encouraged it.

The Alabama settlers took alarm and left their log houses and clearings
to seek shelter in the nearest blockhouses and stockades. One of these
belonged to Samuel Mims, a half-breed farmer, who had prudently
fortified his farm on a bend of the Alabama River. A square stockade
enclosed an acre of ground around his house and to this refuge hastened
several hundred pioneers and their families, with their negro slaves,
and a few officers and soldiers. Here they were surprised and massacred
by a thousand naked Indians who called themselves Red Sticks because of
the wands carried by their fanatical prophets. Two hundred and fifty
scalps were carried away on poles, and when troops arrived they found
nothing but heaps of ashes, mutilated bodies, and buzzards feeding on
the carrion.

From Fort Mims the Indians overran the country like a frightful scourge,
murdering and burning, until a vast region was emptied of its people.
First to respond to the pitiful calls for help was Tennessee, and within
a few weeks twenty-five hundred infantry and a thousand cavalry were
marching into Alabama, led by Andrew Jackson, who had not yet recovered
from a wound received in a brawl with Thomas H. Benton. Among Jackson's
soldiers were two young men after his own heart, David Crockett and
Samuel Houston. The villages of the fighting Creeks, at the Hickory
Ground, la