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English Indians feign war for Oglethorpe

Source: Invention of the Creek Nation #95

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Moreover, the Creeks who came to Florida to assist Oglethorpe regarded his sieges merely as opportunities to acquire scalps, slaves, or a bit of plunder from the Spanish presidios. In the wake of the first attacks on Forts Picolata and Pupo in January 1740, Governor Montiano observed that the Uchise warriors spent most of their time in search of Indian slaves, the primary source of which were to be found on the Florida coast south of St. Augustine. Other shreds of evidence suggest that the Creeks spent much time pursuing the horses and cattle that roamed northern Florida. Furthermore, during the siege of St. Augustine, Thomas Jones reported that his party of Creeks were loath to participate in the siege and did little more than scout the territory. In the course of his military duty, Jones had warned his superiors that his warriors would not abide by Oglethorpe’s war plans, stating that “they would soon be tired with that way of Proceeding, for that they loved to go and do their business at once and return home again.” Predictably, Jones’s warriors departed after a mere three weeks of service.
One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence indicating that the Creeks may have been feigning war rather than fighting it comes from the pen of Edward Kimber. Kimber, an Englishman who participated in the aborted March 1743 siege of St. Augustine, later composed a romanticized narrative of the event, giving a somewhat contradictory account of Oglethorpe’s Indian allies’ martial prowess. Kimber was at first impressed by the religious solemnity with which the Indians pursued warfare. On one occasion he noted that Britain’s Indian allies often absented themselves to a remote part of the forest to perform “physick” rituals, undoubtedly a reference to war purification rituals common among Southern Indians. Kimber likewise appeared impressed when it was reported that the Indians had set numerous fires in the vicinity of St. Augustine that “had spread near a mile, destroying all before it.” The fires, Kimber presumed, had been set by the Indians to intimidate the Spanish.
Britain’s Indian allies, Kimber revealed in contrast, at the same time exhibited tepid passion for combat. Kimber noted not only their tendency toward drunkenness but also the ease with which Spain’s Indian allies repulsed them. Kimber explained how on March 28 a war party had set out against St. Augustine but had “advanced no farther than the Grove, where they were repuls’d by the Yamasees, who, it seems, were out and one of them wounded.” “They appeared,” Kimber added, “prodigiously jaded and fatigued” as a result of this brief engagement.
Though we might attribute this kind of behavior to the Indian method of warfare, a more plausible explanation is that the Creeks purposefully chose to fight this way. By doing so they could avoid costly casualties and at the same time receive presents and a cut in trade prices from the English for “services rendered.” Oglethorpe himself appears to have believed that such was the case, complaining to his superiors that his Indian allies would not fight unless he continually distributed presents, food, and alcohol.
Oglethorpe, it appears, was correct in his assessment. After the war, Spanish officials learned from a Christian Yamasee Indian named Francisco Luis that much of the Creek war effort, particularly the aborted 1743 siege of St. Augustine, had been staged. Luis, who served as an interpreter at St. Augustine, had several close acquaintances in the Creek nation who divulged to him the Creeks’ true war aims. Though not necessarily fond of either the Spanish or the English, Luis explained that the Creeks went to war in order to milk the English of their gifts. During the recent siege of St. Augustine, he argued, most of the Creeks who participated did so only to steal horses; for this reason they resisted British attempts to subordinate them under British commanders. Furthermore, the bonfires Kimber described were little more than a lie designed “to prove [to the English] that they had taken some action against the Spanish.” Their goal, he concluded, was not necessarily to do the Spanish harm but merely to give the English an apparent proof of their fidelity.
The Creeks’ lukewarm effort in the War of Jenkins’s Ear stands in stark contrast to the confident pronouncements of loyalty that Tomochichi made to King George scarcely a decade before. While ambitious British officials, not to mention a few conspicuously complicit Indians, strove at times to create a loyal Creek Nation, the Creeks’ fluid, kin-based political system virtually guaranteed that James Oglethorpe would find among the Creeks as many enemies as he did friends. Moreover, Tomochichi and Oglethorpe tended to draw their allies specifically from the Lower Creek point towns, a pattern that indicates that the Lower Creek confederation, like the “Creek Nation” itself, was still a work in progress.
By enhancing Tomochichi’s authority and by pressing the Creeks to cede land, British imperialists forced the Creeks to look inward and ponder the state of their own nation. In effect, the establishment of Georgia in 1733 prompted the Creeks to assume ultimate authority over most of the territory claimed by the state of Georgia, and thereby define “the nation” in reference to its recent conquests. Likewise, Tomochichi’s rise in influence prompted chiefs such as Chigelly to assume authority as the principal mouths of the entire Upper and Lower Creek nation. These events, while important in their own right, set important precedents for a future generation of Creek leaders caught between the peril of subjugation and the opportunities for personal aggrandizement that British imperialism offered. One figure who would soon find himself caught in this dilemma of leadership was a young man from Coweta named Malatchi, a kinsman of Brims, who sought to navigate these new political waters and to further define the Creeks as a nation in the process.