In Coweta on March 10, Mackey ordered all the Lower Creek traders to return to their trading houses, forbidding them “to stir from their habitations” and effectively placing an embargo on the Lower Creek trade. The following month Mackey began confiscating trade goods and expelling traders at the Upper Creek town of Oakfuskee, subsequently granting a trade monopoly to a company of eleven men, many of whom were believed to have formed a partnership with the feisty agent. Later that summer Mackey expelled two Lower Creek traders and in September three of his deputies began seizing more trade goods and expelling the traders to whom the goods belonged… …Regardless of how greatly Mackey’s efforts to monopolize the Indian trade for Georgia had offended the Creeks, his naked ambition to secure Creek military assistance against Spain and France drove certain Creek chiefs, many of whom were predisposed to favor the Spanish, to seek succor in Florida. Once again problems stemmed from Mackey’s first confrontational encounter in Coweta on March 10, 1735. According to a deposition taken several months after the event, Mackey interpreted Oglethorpe’s vague instructions to “presume that there is a war with France or Spain” literally rather than conditionally, and began to pressure the chiefs to declare “whether they were willing and would go to war with him?” To placate Mackey, the Creek chiefs assented to his request, replying in unison that “they would stand by him with their lives.” Mackey must have believed that he had gained some influence, because a few weeks later he stated that, “the chief men of the Indians behave with greater civility and seem to respect us... more within these [past] twenty days than they did before.” Still, even the boastful Mackey at his most optimistic moments could not have failed to notice undercurrents of hostility among the Lower Creeks. “It is incredible,” he wrote, “how much they are overawed by that silly place in possession of the French called Fort Toulouse and by Saint Marks [San Marcos].” Such awe, Mackey deduced in a moment of Machiavellian epiphany, indicated that “the Indians are governed more by the principles of fear [than] as love.” This awe of the French and Spanish led Mackey to find them to be “a sullen, morose people of few words, very ambiguous in answering questions, mighty deceitful and covetous.” Covetous enough of their own autonomy, that is, to go to the Spanish for assistance.