Horseshoe Bend National Military Park

Horseshoe Bend

"This bend which resembles in its curvature that of a horse-shoe, includes, I conjecture, eighty or a hundred acres. The River immediately around it, is deep, & somewhat upwards of a hundred yards wide. As a situation for defense it was selected with judgment, & improved with great industry and art."

The Creek Nation and the Red Sticks

Tribal beliefs place the Creeks’ origin in the American Southwest. They migrated eastward, eventually occupying much of today’s Alabama and Georgia. Their name derives from "Ochese Creek Indians," after the branch of the Ocmulgee River the Creeks lived along when the British first encounter them.

By displacing or incorporating other tribes, they built a loose but broad confederacy divided geographically by the Chattahoochee River into Upper Towns and Lower Towns.

For over 100 years Spain, France and Britain vied for Creek favor, chiefly using trade for negotiation. As Creek dependence on European luxuries grew, the impact on their way of life was tremendous.

After the American Revolution, the tribe opened relations with the United States and in 1790 signed the Treaty of New York, which defined Creek land boundaries and guaranteed American friendship. For nearly 20 years, many Creeks followed U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins’s program for improving their agriculture and living standards, a program that was designed to foster peaceful relations between the Creeks and the United States. Because they lived closer to settlers in Georgia, the Lower Creeks fell under the influence of Hawkins more than Alabama’s Upper Creeks did.

The growing divide between the Lower and Upper Creeks over Hawkins’s "civilization" program intensified as the Lower Creeks were drawn into close contact with their Georgian neighbors. Fueling the situation were squatters on Creek lands, tribal punishments for Creek attacks on settlers, and Indian nationalism, as set forth by Shawnee Chief Tecumseh.

Most Lower Creeks ignored Tecumseh’s eloquent pleas to rise up and to drive the "white man" from Indian lands, but many Upper Creeks, eventually called Red Sticks because they painted their war clubs red – listened attentively and agreed. This divide led to the Creek War.

The Creek War, 1813-14

The split between the Creeks widened in February 1813 when an Upper Creek war party murdered seven frontier families after being misinformed that war had broken out between the Creeks and the United States. Pressed by the federal government, a Creek tribal council tried and executed those responsible for the killings. In retaliation, Red Stick leaders tried to eliminate everyone connected with the executions and all evidence of Hawkins’s hated civilization program.

In July 1813 conflict worsened when Mississippi Territory militia ambushed Red Sticks, who were returning from Pensacola with ammunition, at Burnt Corn Creek in Alabama. Retaliating in August, the Red Sticks attacked and killed 250 settlers at Fort Mims, 409 miles north of Mobile. U.S. response was immediate. The governors of Mississippi Territory, Georgia, and Tennessee mobilized militias and launched a full-scale campaign to crush the Red Stick towns.

Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee Militia organized his force and struck southward into the heart of Red Stick country between the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. Early victories in November at the Upper Creek towns of Tallushatchee and Talladega raised hopes for the war’s speedy end, but supply delays, enlistment expirations, threat of starvation, and mutiny slowed Jackson’s advance from Fort Strother on the upper Coosa. He began his second campaign in January 1814. After two bloody encounters with Emuckfau and Enitachopco Creek he withdrew to Fort Strother.

Despite Jackson’s retreat, the outlook for the Red Sticks was grim. During the preceding autumn and winter, warriors and their families built the village of Tohopeka inside the horseshoe bend of the Tallapoosa. The Creeks called the bend Cholocco Litabixee, "horse’s flat foot." There they hoped for protection by the encircling river, their Prophet’s magic, and a log barricade across the neck of the peninsula and for direction by Chief Menawa, also called the Great Warrior. With their numbers and their weapons reduced by previous defeats, the Red Sticks subsisted on wild game – and waited.

The Battle at Horseshoe Bend

In March 1814 General Jackson left Fort Strother and built a new fort, Fort Williams, farther south on the Coosa. Reinforced by Lower Creek and Cherokee allies and a regiment of U.S. infantry, Jackson’s army marched out of Fort Williams, cutting a 52-mile trail through the forest in three days. On March 26, the army made camp six miles north of Horseshoe Bend. In the morning Jackson sent Brig. Gen. John Coffee and 700 mounted infantry plus 600 Cherokee and Lower Creek allies three miles downstream to cross the Tallapoosa and surround the bend. He took the rest of the army, 2,000 men from the East and West Tennessee militia and the Thirty-ninth U.S. infantry, into the peninsula. At 10:30 a.m. their artillery bombarded the Red Sticks’ log barricade for two hours without effect.

At noon some of Coffee’s Cherokees crossed the river and attacked the Red Sticks from the rear. Once aware of the attack, Jackson quickly ordered a frontal assault that poured over the barricade. Fighting ranged over the peninsula’s south end through the afternoon. By dark at least 800 of Chief Menawa’s 1,000 Red Sticks were dead. Menawa was severely wounded but managed to escape. Jackson’s losses were 49 killed and 154 wounded, many of them mortally.

The Red Sticks suffered defeat at Tohopeka but many refused to surrender and joined the Seminoles in Florida. In August 1814 a delegation of Creek chiefs surrendered to Jackson at Fort Jackson, near today’s Wetumpka, Ala. In the Treaty of Fort Jackson ending the conflict, Creeks ceded 23 million acres – nearly half their ancestral territory – to the United States. The state of Alabama, created from this land, joined the Union in 1819.

In 1828, partly for his fame from the battles of Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States. Two years later he signed the Indian Removal Bill requiring southeastern tribes to move west of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), a journey the Cherokees called the "Trail of Tears."