Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838

Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540–1838

Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540–1838

AMOS J. WRIGHT JR.

FOREWORD BY VERNON J. KNIGHT JR.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2003

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface is AGaramond

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wright, Amos J., 1926–

   Historic Indian towns in Alabama, 1540–1838 / Amos J. Wright, Jr. ; foreword by Vernon J. Knight, Jr.

         p.   cm.

   ISBN 0-8173-1251-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8173-1252-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America—Alabama—History. 2. Indians of North America—Urban residence—Alabama. 3. Alabama—Historical geography. I. Title.

E78.A28 W75 2003

976.1′00497—dc21

2003000201

   ISBN 978-0-8173-1252-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

   ISBN 978-0-8173-8387-9 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

Maps Referenced

Abbreviations

Historic Indian Towns

Appendix

References

PREFACE

This book has been in progress for many years. I have found reading and studying the old colonial script to be maddening and yet very rewarding. Colonial writing is often very clear and legible, but sometimes it is little more than chicken scratch. The asides and anecdotes can be fascinating, though some are not related to the subject matter being researched.

An extensive search has been made to identify the Indian towns that were located in present-day Alabama from de Soto in 1540 to the removal of the Indians by 1838. Towns came and went; they moved around, they branched off, and some had the same names as others during the same time period. Town names were frequently spelled many different ways, and some spellings are almost unrecognizable. When available, I have preferred the anglicized version of a town name used by the Carolina and Georgia traders and government officials.

The towns are listed alphabetically and the text for each entry develops chronologically. The thrust of the book is the location of each town, which in many cases may be generalized; however, some history of the town is offered when such is known. If the location of a town is unclear or confusing, I may offer an opinion, but the location of some towns is unknown at this time.

Over some 300 years there have been a great number of Indian towns located in Alabama. This book does not contain them all, but it does have descriptions of 398 towns. After the name of each town, an alternate name may be given in parenthesis. Following the name is the general group the town belonged to (for example, Lower Creek, Choctaw). The terms town and village are used interchangeably.

Maps of the period were used extensively to obtain locations. Although some of these maps are not very reliable and contain obvious errors, most are fairly accurate. Various locations on different maps have been given to afford the reader maximum understanding of town location, even though some of these locations are incorrect. I have closely scrutinized some 214 maps with a magnifying glass. A list of the maps used is included herein, and copies are in my collection.

The grid coordinates given for many towns are probably accurate. They were probably made by Enoch Parsons, who coauthored the Creek census of 1832. The two lists used are dated 1832 and 1833 and reside in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Parsons would have noted the location as he traveled from town to town recording the census.

For nearly 50 years the town locations established in 1939 by the U.S. de Soto Commission, chaired by Dr. John R. Swanton of the Smithsonian, have gone unchallenged. Recently, however, Dr. Charles Hudson and others have questioned the commission's findings based primarily on archaeological work accomplished in the past twenty years. The primary focus was on the town of Coosa, which the commission located between Talladega and Tallaseehatchee Creeks on the east bank of the Coosa River in Talladega County. Hudson and others now locate Coosa on the Coosawattee River in northwest Georgia near Carters. This in turn pulled the other de Soto towns located below Coosa up the Coosa and Alabama Rivers, causing Hudson to locate the long-sought Mauvilla on the lower Cahaba River near its junction with the Alabama. This accounts for some of the wide disparity in the location of de Soto towns in 1540. However, none of the de Soto town locations are definitive.

Reference is frequently made to the Point on the Chattahoochee River. This is a sharp bend in the river a few miles south of Phenix City in Russell County. Reference is also made to the Big Bend on the Tallapoosa, which is located where the river flowing south turns west.

During research I became indebted to several people who have generously assisted me over many years. Their professional help and patience are greatly appreciated. I want to especially thank the following for their assistance: Edwin Bridges and his staff at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery; Yvonne Crumpler and her staff at the Linn Henley Research Library, Birmingham; Elizabeth Wells and her staff at the Samford University Library, Special Collections, Birmingham; Marion Hemperley and his staff at the Archives of the Georgia Surveyor General, Atlanta; and the staff of the Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta.

I also want to thank my dear wife, Carolyn Shores Wright, for her encouragement and patience over these many years. Also, thanks to my two sons, Amos J. Wright III, of Birmingham, and Richard A. Wright, of Mobile, for their encouragement and support. My deepest appreciation goes to Nan Hall of Huntsville for her patience and advice. I especially want to thank Vernon J. Knight Jr. and Marvin T. Smith for their helpful review and suggestions.

FOREWORD

In this work Amos J. Wright Jr. gives an extraordinarily informative and useful compilation of historic Indian towns lying within the present limits of the state of Alabama. In preparing this work, Wright builds on a foundation laid down by a number of distinguished scholars.

Among these previous scholars, we should first name Albert S. Gatschet, the Swiss-born linguist who spent much of his career with the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. As a by-product of Gatschet's research on southeastern Indian languages for the bureau, he compiled a list of the towns of the Creek Confederacy and published the list as a part of his 1884 book, A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians. This list included not merely names and ethnological notes on each town but also their locations, many in Alabama, as ascertained from early maps and historical accounts. Toward the end of his career in 1901, Gatschet produced a far more complete, alphabetically arranged catalog as Towns and Villages of the Creek Confederacy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. This latter work was published in volume 1 of the Report of the Alabama History Commission. It may be definitely considered the prototype for the current volume, although, as far as Alabama is concerned, it omits the Choctaw settlements of the western part of the state, the Mobilians, Tohomes, and other small tribes of the Gulf area, and many of the Cherokee settlements of northern Alabama.

The first compilation to treat the historic Indian towns of Alabama per se was that of Thomas M. Owen, an eminent historian and first director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Owen's town list was published in 1921 within his much larger work, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography. Naturally, Owen cites Gatschet's earlier publications frequently. Owen's compilation, entitled Indian Tribes and Towns in Alabama, was twice reprinted in issues of the Alabama Historical Quarterly, first in 1950 and again in 1968.

At about the same time that Owen's Indian Tribes and Towns of Alabama first came into print, there also appeared John R. Swanton's exhaustive compilation, Early History of the Creek Indians and their Neighbors, published as Bulletin 73 of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Like Gatschet before him, Swanton was a prominent ethnologist employed by the bureau, and to this day he is considered the twentieth century's foremost expert on the Indians of the Southeast. Unlike the other works being discussed, Swanton's Early History of 1922 was not arranged alphabetically as a town list, but its pages nonetheless contain a mine of previously unavailable information concerning Indian towns in Alabama, particularly containing lengthy quotations from original documentary sources and the inclusion of copies of several important early maps. Similar information on Indian towns in Alabama outside of the Creek Confederacy may be found in Swanton's other publications on the Gulf Coast tribes and the Choctaws.

Peter A. Brannon of the Alabama Department of Archives and History was, along with Thomas M. Owen, one of the founders of the Alabama Anthropological Society early in the twentieth century. That society, and Brannon in particular, was much involved in the collection of information on Alabama's historic Indian towns. Accordingly, Brannon published yet another compilation of Alabama's Indian towns, arranged by county, in two consecutive issues of the Alabama Historical Quarterly in 1952 and 1953. Brannon's compilation is comparatively sketchy and is inferior to the ones already mentioned.

It is probably no surprise, given their dates of publication, that all but one of these foundational sources on Alabama's Indian towns are currently out of print (the exception: a recent reprint of Swanton's Early History by the University Press of Florida). While that is regrettable, it is all the more fitting that Amos Wright's Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, which follows in the same tradition, appears now for the use of scholars and laypersons interested in Alabama's rich Native American past.

In keeping with the author's interests, a central theme of the present work is the location of each Indian town. For this purpose, some 214 historic maps of the period from 1544 to 1846 were systematically combed for locational data. Such an effort represents exceptionally thorough coverage of the available cartographic source materials. One can safely say that no previous study of Alabama's Indian towns can claim such an exhaustive harvest of historic map information. The map data are combined with a keen awareness on the part of the author of both previously published information and archival sources bearing on Alabama's Indian town sites, such as colonial town lists, census information, and travel narratives. The result is not so much a detailed history of each town as it is an encyclopedic listing of 398 towns, containing basic references to each town's ethnic affiliation, time period, geographic location, and, if any, movements. As such, it will be an enduring reference for many years to come.

It must be added that this book has important implications for several areas of interest that are ripe for future study. One such area is the cultural geography of Alabama's Indian groups in the historic period. Much indeed remains to be learned about Native American patterns of settlement across varied landscapes in relation to rivers, creeks, trails, tracts of easily tilled soil, forest resources, and mineral resources. Trade with Europeans also affected the locations of settlement in ways that need to be better understood. We need to know more about the frequency with which towns moved or split up and about why this so often happened.

A related concern has to do with locating these town sites precisely on the ground. This is a matter for archaeology, for it takes an archaeologist's detailed knowledge of such commonly found items as pottery, glass beads, bottle glass, gun flints, and pipes to accurately match traces from the earth with the Indian towns known from historic documents and maps. Many times in past decades historic town names have been assigned incorrectly to archaeological sites, usually because those making the identifications lacked a precise knowledge of the dating of the artifacts. If one were interested, for example, in identifying the exact location of Great Eufaula in the eighteenth century, one would need to know precisely what types of pottery, glass beads, and so forth are associated with that time period, so as not to mistakenly assign the name to some earlier or later Native American site. Such identifications should be made not merely for curiosity's sake but also to preserve these sites and to enrich our knowledge of the character of the Native settlements. Once a site is identified, limited archaeological excavation can reveal such information as the number and kind of houses, the location of ceremonial structures, and many other matters of importance to the history of the former occupants. There is much footwork left to do. The reader might be surprised to learn that only a paltry few of the towns listed in this volume have been definitely identified with on-the-ground locations. Some of the more prominent town sites have been excavated to some degree, such as eighteenth-century Coosa, Clewalla, and Tuckabatchee, but these are very few indeed.

Another area of study, historic cartography, is very much in need of future attention. As is noted in the preface to this volume, historic maps can be inaccurate in many ways and, in that respect, misleading. With maps there are many other critical issues besides. Most historic maps clearly borrow some of their information from earlier maps. If there are errors, these errors may be compounded over time. Because of this copying, much historic map information is inherently out of date, contributing to anachronisms that are not always obvious to a researcher. Some early maps were so often used as sources by later cartographers that they are called mother maps. Only by having better knowledge of what information on which maps was copied by whom can we factor out these problems and more accurately assign dates and locations to historic towns.

Finally, there is the thorny problem of place-names and spellings. Early maps use a tremendous variety of spellings for Native American towns, as the names pronounced in the unwritten Indian languages were heard and transcribed very differently by English, Spanish, and French mapmakers. It is often quite difficult to tell whether different spellings that look somewhat alike refer to the same town or to different towns. In this book, the author has patiently sorted through the variant spellings and has done a very credible job of deciding what is what, but it is no criticism to say that the result should not be thought of as definitive. This is where trained linguists who have studied the sounds, word forms, and meanings of southeastern Indian languages can be of tremendous help—and so can remaining Native speakers of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Alabama, Koasati, Muskogee, Hitichiti, Yuchi, Shawnee, and Cherokee languages, all formerly spoken in Alabama. Some of the old Alabama town names—for example, Kailigee, Thloblocco, Luchipoga, and Tuckabatchee—are still in use in modern Oklahoma, and it is very instructive to hear a Native speaker correctly pronounce these names. For that matter, to those not fluent in Spanish or French, it is often of interest to ask speakers of these European languages to read aloud the names they see written on early Spanish and French maps, to attempt to hear again the sounds as they were originally heard.

Scholarly expertise in southeastern Indian linguistics is, unfortunately, hard to come by. Consequently, errors abound concerning the meaning of Indian town names, even among those opinions published by experts. A good example drawn from this book is the meaning of the name Sylacauga, my own hometown. In the 1930s William Read, assuming the name was Creek (Muskogee), guessed that it meant buzzard's roost, since the Muskogee word for buzzard is suli, and kakita means to sit. Read's translation is widely accepted today and is often cited. But it is almost certainly in error. As the present volume shows, the original Indian town was Shawnee, not Muskogee. One of the five main divisions of the Shawnee is Chalakaatha, so it is much more likely that Sylacauga (Chalakagy in colonial times) is merely a variant of that common Shawnee name. Another spelling of the same name is Chillicothe, the modern town in southern Ohio and the home of famous prehistoric Hopewellian mounds. Residents of present-day Sylacauga and Chillicothe might be interested to know that they are sister cities in regard to their names.

These matters are mentioned here merely to illustrate how stimulating a basic reference work such as this one can be, simultaneously in many different directions. One can look forward to seeing the many uses to which it will be put.

Vernon J. Knight Jr.

The University of Alabama

MAPS REFERENCED

1544 de Soto

1562 Gutierrez

1569 Mercator

1570 Ortelius

1584 Ortelius

1588 Hondius

1593 Borealis

1593 Jode

1597 Wytfliet

1600 Tatton

1616 Tatton

1626 Speed

1631 Hondius

1634 Blaeu

1635 Blaeu

1650 Sanson

1656 Sanson

1657 Homann

1673 Marquette

1679 Duval

1682 Anonymous

1687 Homanncher

1689 Visscher

1690 Homann

1692 Jaillot

1693 Albarell

1695 Albarell

1695 Jaillot

1697 Anonymous

1698 Anonymous

1698 Hennepin

1700 Delisle

1700 Vander and Leide

1702 DeFer

1702 Delisle

1703 Delisle

1706 Aa

1706 Lamhatty

1709 Schenk

1710 Senex

1711 Nairne

1715 Anonymous

1715 DeFer

1715 Moll

1715 Southeast

1717 DeFer

1717 Homann

1717 Vermale

1718 DeFer

1718 Delisle

1719 Chatelain

1719 New France

1720 Moll

1721 Law

1721 Senex

1722 Coxe

1722 Delisle

1722 Wells

1728 Moll

1729 Moll

1732 D'Anville

1732 Moll

1733 DeCrenay

1733 Moll

1733 Popple

1736 Evia

1736 Moll

1741 Kitchin

1741 Seutter

1742 Arredondo

1742 Seale

1744 Bowen

1744 Celi

1744 Herbert

1744 Ottens

1745 Anonymous

1745 Delisle

1745 Ottens

1746 D'Anville

1747 Bowen

1748 Bowen

1749 Vaugondy

1750 Anonymous

1750 Bellin

1750 Delisle

1752 Bowen

1754 Bowen

1755 Anti-Gallican

1755 Baldwin

1755 Bellin

1755 D'Anville

1755 Mitchell

1755 Tirion

1757 Bellin

1757 Bonar

1757 DeBrahm

1758 Delisle

1760 Berlin

1760 Bowen

1760 Jefferys

1760 Lotter

1760 Ottens

1763 Coltellini

1763 Gentleman's Magazine

1763 Homann

1763 Sayer

1763 Wright

1763 Zatta

1764 Bellin

1764 Stuart

1765 Kitchin

1766 DeBrahm

1770 Purcell

1775 Bowen

1775 D'Anville

1775 Purcell

1776 Dunn

1776 Mitchell

1776 Romans

1777 Faden

1777 Kitchin

1778 Zatta

1779 Phelippeax

1780 Bonne

1780 Nolin

1780 Roberts

1783 Carey

1783 Laurie

1783 Nolin

1783 Russell

1784 Homann

1784 Laurie and Whittle

1784 Russell

1785 Delamarche

1788 D'Anville

1788 Christian

1793 Carondelet

1794 Jefferys

1794 Laurie

1795 Barker

1795 Russell

1795 Scott

1796 Barker

1796 Faden

1796 Tanner

1796 Thomas and Andrews

1796 Winterbotham

1797 Bradley

1799 Arrowsmith

1799 Scoles

1800 Russell

1801 Russell

1803 Poirson

1804 Anonymous

1804 Bradley

1804 Lewis

1806 Cary

1808 Smith

1809 Pinkerton

1810 Anonymous

1811 Cary

1812 Lewis

1812 Tardieu

1813 Lucas

1813–14 Anonymous

1814 Anonymous

1814 Gridley

1814 Jackson

1814 Melish

1814 Reid and Eaton

1814 Shallus

1814 U.S. Engineers

1815 Moravian

1815 Sturgis

1816 Coffee

1816 Hutchings

1817 Arrowsmith

1817 Gardner

1817 Menzies

1817 Peel and Sannover

1817 Thomson

1818 Early

1818 Shirges

1819 Cary

1819 Melish

1820 Melish

1822 Bradley

1823 Daniels

1823 Lucas

1823 Tanner

1824 Finley

1825 Cary

1826 Bright

1826 Finley

1827 Drayton

1828 Cary

1828 Hall

1829 Finley

1829 Wyld

1830 Tanner

1831 Fenner

1832 Abert

1832 Bright

1832 Tanner

1832 Turner

1833 LaTourette

1834 Burr

1835 Bradford

1835 Burr

1835 Mitchell

1842 Morse and Breeze

1845 Smith

1846 Mitchell

Copies of maps were obtained from the following:

Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery

William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor

Huntsville Public Library, Huntsville

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Linn Henley Research Library, Birmingham

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Pensacola Historical Society, Pensacola

Samford University Library, Birmingham

Surveyor General of Georgia, Atlanta

ABBREVIATIONS

Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540–1838

A

ABOCOOCHEE (Little Abiehka) (Upper Creek)

This Upper Creek town was first listed in the narratives in a 1725 census taken by the South Carolina trader Charlesworth Glover. Abccoocky was one of eight towns in the Abiehka district and had a population of 120. The Abiehka district was the northernmost group of the Upper Creeks (Salley 1931, 32:241–42).

William Bartram ([1791] 1928:366) wrote in 1776 that the Abacooche spoke a Chickasaw dialect and were located on the upper Coosa River. The Chickasaw village of Breed Camp was located nearby.

Hawkins ([1848] 1982:41–42) in 1799 described the town: Aubecooche is on Nauche Creek [Tallaseehatchee Creek] five miles from the river [Coosa] on the north bank of the creek on a flat one mile wide. The town spreads out and is scattered on both sides of the creek. There is a large limestone spring above and below the town, one of the oldest towns in the nation. This town is one of the oldest in the nation; and sometimes among the oldest chiefs, it gives name to the nation, Aubecuch. Here some of the oldest customs had their origin. The law against adultery was passed here, and that to regulate marriages. To constitute legal marriage, a man must build a house, make his crop, and gather it in, then make his hunt and bring home the meat; putting all this in the possession of his wife, ends the ceremony and they are married, or as the Indians express it, ‘the woman is bound.’

Hawkins (GAH, Hays 1939c:238) wrote in August 1813 that the Aube-coochee, along with the Coosa and Natchez, had fled to Little Turkey's town among the Cherokee. This was in present-day Cherokee County.

From early times to near removal, the town was located on Tallaseehatchee Creek in Talladega County or nearby. Some forty-eight maps from 1687 Homann to 1828 Cary place the town at this location. However, several other maps place the location farther up the Coosa near Terrapin Creek and Chattooga River.

Following Knight, Lolley (1994:89–90) also placed the site on the north bank of Tallaseehatchee Creek just west of Sycamore. Enoch Parsons, a removal agent, in 1832 located Abiccoche at T17 R11 on the upper Tallapoosa in Cleburne County near its present namesake Arbacoochee. In order to avoid removal, the town had relocated to Cherokee country in Cleburne County. The population was 379 (NA M234 R241; NA T275 R1).

The town from early times to about 1830 was located on Tallaseehatchee Creek in Talladega County. By 1832 Abocoochee had relocated to the Tallapoosa in Cleburne County. The town was still there in 1836 but had removed west by 1838.

Little Abiehka implies a descendancy from a mother town named Abiehka. Smith in Milanich and Milbrath (1989:142) identifies the de Luna 1560 town of Apica as located near Rome, Georgia, but by the early eighteenth century it was located near Childersburg in Talladega County. However, numerous early accounts of Abiehka, including maps, identify them as a group or district of ten to sixteen towns among the Upper Creeks.

ACHEAUBOFAU (Upper Creek)

Cotterill (1963:138) wrote that the principal chief of the Upper Creeks, Mad Dog, turned his position over to Foosehatchee Mico of Acheaubofau in 1802. Foosehatchee Mico was also known as Opoie Mico.

Henri (1986:236) mentions the arrival of Hopoie Mico of Acheaubofau at a Creek council. He had been named the new speaker of the nation.

Town location unknown.

ACOSTE (Coosada)

The location of Acoste, Coste, or Costehe is elusive. The 1584 Ortelius map places the town south of the Tennessee River on what appears to be the upper Coosa, although the location is too far west. The 1597 Wytfliet map places Coste south of what appears to be the Tennessee. The 1600 Tatton and 1616 Tatton maps agree with Wytfliet.