e, around which the warriors
should gather. The war clans were Bearers of the Red, or, Red Sticks.

The first visit by Tecumseh, in 1811, carrying his Great Spirit talk of
a union of all Indian nations, failed to make the Creeks erect their
red poles. Even the earthquake, that Tecumseh was supposed to have
brought about by the stamping of his foot, failed to do more than to
frighten the Creeks.

But they caught the prophet fad. Their pretended prophets began to
stir them up, and throw fear into them. In 1802 the United States had
bought from the Creeks a large tract of Georgia; the white people were
determined to move into it. Alarmed, the Creeks met in council, after
Tecumseh's visit, and voted to sell no more of their lands without the
consent of every tribe in the nation. Whoever privately signed to sell
land, should die. All land was to be held in common, lest the white
race over-run the red. That was a doctrine of the Shawnee Prophet
himself, as taught to him by the Great Spirit.

When Tecumseh came down from Canada, in the winter of 1812, on his
second visit, the Creeks were ripening for war. Their Red Sticks party
was very strong. The many prophets, some of whom were half negro, had
declared that the whites could be driven into the sea. The soil of the
Creek nation was to be sacred soil.

Traders had been at work, promising aid, and supplying ammunition, in
order to enlist the Creeks upon the British side.

So in the Red Towns the Red Sticks struck the painted poles; the peace
party sat still in the White Towns, and was despised by the Reds as
white in blood as well as in spirit.

The hope of the Creeks was to wipe the white man's settlements from the
face of Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee. Alabama, in the middle,
would then be safe, also. But the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the
Cherokees, refused to join. The White Sticks themselves listened to
the words of their old men, and of Head Chief William Macintosh; they
said that they had no feud with the United States.

Commencing with President Washington, the United States had treated the
Creeks honestly; the Creek nation had grown rich on its own lands.

The Red Sticks went to war--and a savage war they waged; the more
savage, because by this time, the spring of 1813, all the Creeks were
not of pure blood. They had lived so long in peace, in their towns,
that their men and women had married not only among the white people
but also among th