Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South

by Christopher D. Haveman

2017 James F. Sulzby Book Award from the Alabama Historical Association 

At its height the Creek Nation comprised a collection of multiethnic towns and villages with a domain stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson administration unwilling to aid the Creeks, while at the same time demanding their emigration to Indian territory, the Creek people suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness.

Between the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the arrival of detachment six in the West in late 1837, nearly twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were moved—voluntarily or involuntarily—to Indian territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by capturing the full breadth and depth of the Creeks’ collective tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and during the first years of resettlement.

Unlike the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was conducted largely at the end of a bayonet, most Creeks were relocated through a combination of coercion and negotiation. Hopelessly outnumbered military personnel were forced to make concessions in order to gain the compliance of the headmen and their people. Christopher D. Haveman’s meticulous study uses previously unexamined documents to weave narratives of resistance and survival, making Rivers of Sand an essential addition to the ethnohistory of American Indian removal.
 

Genres: Native American, Race

438 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2016

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without knowing a lot of specifics, just living in this country should make anyone realize how poorly (that's not nearly strong enough a word) the Native Americans have been treated.

But when an author starts out by describing how he has to differentiate between "emigration" (when the Creeks grudgingly moved west of their own accord because they felt they had little choice), removal (when the Creeks were moved west in shackles), and relocation (when the last Creeks grudgingly moved west because they were being forced out) - well, then, you know you know it's going to get bad pretty quick.

Is there a word for when you know something is really, really bad, but when you find out the details, it turns out to be much, much worse?

This book describes primarily the disintegration of the Creek nation. How we, as Americans, can move forward and forget about this is an amazing example of cognitive dissonance. How we can own property that was stolen from the Native Americans then sold as if owned by colonizing Americans is difficult to come to terms with. It makes you realize how fucked up colonialization is. (Sorry for the strong language; I tried to come up with a substitute that reflected how horrible it was, and "messed up" just didn't make the cut.)

And I didn't realize the politics that played into it. And really how underhanded our government handled it. The presidents who were included among the guilty for having a hand in this include John Quincy Adams, and to a great extent, Andrew Jackson.

Treaties were signed and laws were enacted to make it impossible, or at least extremely unattractive to live on their own land, to get Native Americans to move west. And the white man stooped to outright fraud when that didn’t work.

To force the Creeks out during emigration (prior to 1836), the US passed laws that would make the Creeks' lifestyle impossible. Like laws against hunting, fishing, and trapping.

The US government convinced some Native Americans who didn't have the power or right to do it, to sign treaties. It didn't matter that they didn’t have the authority to do so. If the government makes the laws, then by definition, is everything it does legal? Definitely not ethical, moral, or "right." But legal?

By 1830, Andrew Jackson was president, the federal government made a more focused effort to push the Creeks west, and white men were settling on Creek land, ignoring the fact that it wasn't theirs to take.

“The most important tool Jackson possessed in his arsenal were the Alabama extension laws passed between 1827 and 1829, which asserted legal jurisdiction over the Creek Nation. Within weeks of taking office, Jackson wrote the Creeks and declared that “my white children in Alabama have extended their law over your country. If you remain in it, you must be subject to that law.” Another Jackson-supported extension law was passed by the Alabama General Assembly in 1831, which forbade “all laws, usages and customs” of the Creek and Cherokee Indians that contradicted state law. Moreover, the Creeks could only hold councils with U.S. officials employed in paying annuities or engaged in the duties of emigration. Punishment was imprisonment. Remaining meant cultural and political annihilation. Only removal prevented such a fate, Jackson declared.”

In response to protests against this kind of thing, President Jackson wrote, “when they find that they cannot live under the laws of Alabama, they must find, at their own expence [sic], and by their own means, a country, and a home. . . . [I] now leave the poor deluded Creeks and Cherokees to their fate, and their anihilation [sic].”

They legalized theft. When a white man settled on a Creek's land in Alabama, if the Creek touched that land, they would be prosecuted. For being on their own land! I guess 'persecuted' is just as good or better a word.

And as the government pushed them onto smaller and smaller plots of land, whites still continued to encroach on even that land.

But not content to use unethical and immoral laws to take land from the Creeks, some white speculators stooped to outright fraud. Then, many of them lied about the Native Americans committing crimes to force the Feds to push them west before they could identify people who took their land.

And then, of course, they were moved to substandard land with much less the timber and fresh water than they were used to.

Holy shit. We just moved in and said, um, you can stay here but you have to live by these laws we're making up. What the fuck is that? It's insane is what it is. And when the indigenous people rebelled, they were the villain. If we were to rebel against people coming in here and forcing us to follow their laws, we'd be the heroes.

And so, basically, we get pissed off when someone wants to move here and live by their laws and customs, but that's what we did to the Native Americans.

For the white man, might makes right. Or maybe, white makes right. I don't know. And of course, with these original Americans dispossessed, naked, and starving (in some cases, literally) the whites still take advantage of them by cheating them or by price-gouging.

Interestingly, moving west, in November of 1827, the Creeks actually passed through Tuscumbia, AL - which is part of our Shoals area. The people in Tuscumbia were kind to them. A second group that journeyed by water "included a trip through the treacherous Muscle Shoals, where the Tennessee River dropped more than 160 feet between the eastern shoals and Florence, Alabama."

Of course when the Creeks finally fought back (The Second Creek War, 1836), President Jackson finally had his excuse to remove the entire nation without the pretense of a treaty. This was done through coercion and negotiation.

And any attempt at defiance met with an indiscriminate murder, rape, arrest, and theft of property by white men of Creeks who may or may not have been fighting back. (See chapter 9.)

Apprehending the Creek refugees was complicated by the violence committed against them by whites. In late May 1837 a group of soldiers massacred a party of Indians hiding in the swamps near Alaqua Creek in Florida. The attack occurred on the edge of a large swamp in a space “of about fifteen or twenty feet in diameter” where “poor women with children upon their backs,” according to reports, “were inhumanly butchered the cries of the children were distinctly heard, at a house distant a quarter of a mile, after their mothers were shot down the children’s brains were deliberately knocked out—the women’s Ears cut off, for the purpose of obtaining their Ear rings and in several instances scalped.”

Wow. What can you add to that?

And even years later, we were still taking from them. As a punishment to the small percentage of Creeks that fought with the Confederacy in the Civil War, in 1866, the federal government took half of the Creek’s land. I’m sure they were thinking, “Will this never end?”

Genocide, indeed.

This is an exhaustingly researched academic text. It does read a bit slow at times, but the information contained within needed to be recorded and shared. Kudos to the author who is at least keeping the memory of these people alive and recording the injustices perpetrated on them by our people. This text is well-organized and easy to follow, if the subject matter is difficult to get through. So I give this 5 stars - not because I loved it was a simple or enjoyable read, but because it’s an extremely important work that was well-written, well-researched, and well-organized.

Thanks to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for a copy in return for an honest review.

[David Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meeting with Georgia state officials on the subject of the troublesome Cherokee Nation, Andrew Jackson allegedly told his audience that they could easily drive the Cherokees from Georgia through legal pressure: “Light a fire under them, they’ll move.” “Lighting fires” became an apt metaphor for the Jackson administration’s use of legal coercion, threats, and malign neglect to uproot 90,000 Native Americans and move them to Indian Territory. Indian Removal - the euphemism for this campaign of ethnic cleansing - was by law supposed to be a voluntary process, not one imposed on Indians by military force. Jackson and his supporters used every coercive means they could to ensure that Native American leaders made the “correct” decisions. These means included bayonets and bribes, but often merely extended to the federal government’s refusal to defend Indian peoples from predation, legal or otherwise, by their numerous white neighbors.

White frontiersmen formed the principal weapons in the arsenal Jackson used against the Creek Indians, the largest indigenous nation in the nineteenth-century southeast. An 1826 treaty ceded the last buffer zone between the Creek homeland and the state of Georgia, and the ceded zone became a gateway to Creek country for whiskey peddlers, cattle rustlers, squatters, and counterfeiters. By 1830 the Creeks found themselves defrauded of much of their property by white interlopers, with few means of redress short of violence. Some (2,500) Creeks tried to avoid predation by moving, voluntarily, to Indian Territory, but Jackson stopped supporting such migrants in 1830; he wanted to seal the safety valves that might prevent collective Creek immiseration from reaching a boil.

The administration and its white settler allies turned up the heat again in 1832. A new treaty allotted the Creeks’ remaining eastern lands among 6,000 Creek heads of household. The treaty removed another protective layer between Creek families and white conmen, namely the ownership of land by the nation rather than the individual. White intruders moved quickly to capitalize on the new vulnerability. Some purloined individuals’ allotments through illegal impersonation, others took land by using it to collateralize debts they encouraged Creeks to run up. Those who weren’t robbed often found that their allotments weren’t suitable for agriculture, or that the War Department hadn’t properly recorded the transfer.

1834 and ‘35 saw an increase in suicides and hunger in Creek country, and 1836 saw the political explosion that the Jackson administration should have expected, insofar as it had engineered it: the Second Creek War. Creek warriors attacked travelers, stagecoaches, and plantations in their homeland and in their old domain in western Georgia. The U.S Army responded quickly and with overwhelming force. It arrested the insurgents’ leaders and, over the next year, deported 6,000 people to Indian Territory. (These included the families of 700 Creek men who were fighting FOR the United States In the Second Seminole War. Apparently the Americans didn’t trust their military allies.) The war then gave the United States the pretext to make the remaining Creeks remove “voluntarily.” In 1836-37 over 12,600 emigrants, organized into five parties, made the long, hot, dangerous overland trek to Oklahoma.

Both the emigration and conditions in the new national territory proved deadly. Disease and accidents, like the sinking of the steamship Monmouth, killed several hundred emigrants on the trail. Many more succumbed to hunger, exposure, and cholera in Indian Territory. Haveman estimated that 3,500 people during during or within one year of the forced migration of 1836. This death toll does not include fatalilies from the 1820s migrations, or the 150 people last in a voluntary 1834 removal, or losses suffered by the 1,500 people who took refuge with the Chickasaws and Cherokees and then moved west with them. We may safely assumed that the Creeks lost as many people to Removal (4,000) as their Cherokee neighbors.

The Creek Nation survived. The emigrants built new towns, with their distinctive busk houses and chunky yards. Wealthier Creeks rebuilt their plantations and produced enough by the 1840s that they could sell “thousands of bushels of surplus corn to Ireland in the midst of their potato famine” (280). The Creeks took decades, however, to recover from the demographic blow of Removal, and one suspects it left a legacy of trauma that took even longer to dissipate. “The love the Indians have for their ancestral ground is indescribable,” Clara Gerstner wrote of the Creeks in 1839 (264) - so too the sorrow when they gave it up. Andrew Jackson and his white allies had achieved this much, at least: they had made life so awful for the Creeks in Alabama that not even their ancestral ties and their love for the land could make staying there endurable.

[Polly Krize · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Mistreatment is a word that doesn't even come close to what was perpetrated on the native peoples of North America, especially the Creek people. The involvement of the government was shameful, basically enacting laws that made it impossible for these native people to be anywhere! Highly researched, this book is a powerful account of what was done in the past to the First Nation people of the North American continent. I believe it should be required reading for all Americans!

[Jeffrey Wade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book highlights an era of history absolutely essential to understanding the American South -- the expulsion of the Creeks set the stage for everything that followed and in many ways exemplified the mentality that became Southern culture. That said, I gave four stars because at times I found the various facts a bit confusing and had to go back and reread a few times, but it's a lot to take in and having not ever really studied much on this subject before, I lacked a lot of context.