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Lower Creeks agree to Articles of Peace and Commerce with Georgia

Source: Invention of the Creek Nation #95

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The Invention of the Creek Empire
The three following days of talks between the Lower Creeks and the Georgia colonists concluded with the ratification of seven Articles of Peace and Commerce. In some respects the 1733 articles mimicked earlier treaties between the Creeks and South Carolinians, most of which were primarily concerned with the issues of commerce, peace, and dispute resolution.31 The 1733 treaty differed in its reflection of the desire of Georgia and British officials to secure title to the “debatable” Georgia territory. Article three, for example, introduced the “chain of friendship” metaphor that British officials consciously exploited to claim Indian territory. The metaphor had first been used in the South three years earlier in the Cherokee Treaty of 1730, as well as the Creek Treaty of 1732, and was an attempt on the part of the British to link the southern Indian nations to the Iroquois whom they considered subjects of the British crown.
Linked to the chain of friendship metaphor found in article three was article four, which later proved to be a source of contention between the English and the Creeks. In article four the Creek chiefs appear to have granted the Georgia trustees and their successors and assigns the right to “make use of and possess all those Lands which our [the Creek] Nation hath not occasion to use.”33 The problem inherent to article four was its ambiguity, which left “the lands which our Nation hath not occasion to use” as vague and undefined. 
At first glance it may appear that the Creeks had conceded much to Georgia and to the British Empire. By granting Oglethorpe the lands that they had no occasion to use, however, the Lower Creeks committed an imperial act of their own by defining what specifically constituted their territory. While most historians have portrayed the struggle for the debatable Georgia territory as a two-way contest between the British and Spanish empires, the 1733 treaty proceedings illustrate that the contest involved not two but three competing nations. Though it is justifiable to assume that the South’s indigenous peoples should naturally have a prior claim to Georgia territory, an argument can be made that the Lower Creeks’ claims were also in some sense debatable.
According to records of the treaty proceedings, the Lower Creeks at that time claimed all the lands “from the Savannah River, as far as St. Augustine, and up to the Flint River, which falls into the bay of Mexico,” including “all the islands in between said rivers. The Creeks also appear to have considered the territory from the “Bay of Apalachee” to “the Mountains” to be their own, a swath of land that necessarily encompassed the Apalachee old fields.
The Lower Creeks proudly boasted that this expanse of territory, roughly approximating and even exceeding the current boundaries of the state of Georgia, was theirs by ancient right. A critical examination of recent history to 1733, however, indicates that the definition of ancient was in the eye of the beholder. For example, Spanish documents from the mission period suggest that prior to 1680 the peoples of the Chattahoochee River may have had little or no contact with the original inhabitants of the Georgia coastthe Escamacus, the Guales, and the Mocamas. Thus it is likely that very few persons from the Chattahoochee River even saw the Georgia coast before that date. Moreover, recall that north Florida remained largely in the hands of missionized Indian groups such as the Timucuans and Apalachees until the first decade of the eighteenth century. How, then, could the Lower Creeks claim to have an ancient right to territories far beyond the middle course of the Chattahoochee River? Because the Lower Creeks were a diverse people who harbored remnants of nations that once lived in the Georgia interior, such as the Ocheses and Ocutis, it is reasonable to suggest that certain elements within the Creek nation remembered their historic link to this territory and believed it was their right to defend it.