(Worth SGC) REFERENCES Swanton, John R. 1922. Early history of the Creek Indians and their neighbors. Bur. of Am. Ethnology Bull. 73. Washington, DC: Gov. Printing Office. Reprint, Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970. "The Creek Nation is a relatively young political entity. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, no such nation existed. At that time most Southeastern natives lived in centralized mound-building societies, Modern-day steps lead to the summit of one of the Indian mounds at the Etowah site. Etowah Indian Mounds whose architectural achievements are still visible today in such places as the Etowah Mounds at Cartersville and the Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon. About A.D. 1400, for reasons still debated, some of these large chiefdoms collapsed and reorganized themselves into smaller chiefdoms spread about in Georgia's river valleys, including the Ocmulgee and the Chattahoochee. The Spanish incursions into the Southeast in the sixteenth century devastated these peoples. European diseases such as smallpox may have killed 90 percent or more of the native population. But by the end of the 1600s Southeastern Indians began to recover. They built a complex political alliance, which united native peoples from the Ocmulgee River west to the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers in Alabama. Although they spoke a variety of languages, including Muskogee, Alabama, and Hitchiti, the Indians were united in their wish to remain at peace with one another. By 1715 English newcomers from South Carolina were calling these allied peoples "Creeks." The term was shorthand for "Indians living on Ochese Creek" near Macon, but traders began applying it to every native resident of the Deep South. They numbered about 10,000 at this time." (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/creek-indians)