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Content Enable editor Use plain text Code entry Montiano’s correspondence during the siege of St. Augustine that summer tells a similar tale. Though Montiano believed that British forces had numerous Indian allies scouring across Florida territory, evidence indicates that relatively few Creek warriors actually fought. Spies revealed that Oglethorpe’s army during the summer siege was comprised of approximately 130 Indian warriors, an estimate far shy of the most boastful British accounts, which claimed that 500 Indians had assisted them in the siege. In addition, another 35 Indians may have participated in the attack on Fort Mose and, in the wake of the fort’s capture, stayed there as a part of the garrison. One Spanish soldier who took part in the Battle of Bloody Marsh estimated that Oglethorpe had no more than 100 Indian allies, only 50 of whom appear to have played an active role in the skirmishes. Numbers, however, tell only part of the story. A second strain of evidence indicating that the Creeks may have been lukewarm to the Georgia cause can be found in the composition of the war parties that actually fought. The British, it appears, drew a substantial portion of their auxiliaries not from the Creek nation proper but from among the small dependent Indian nations established near the English settlements. Both the Yuchis, who lived near Fort Palachicola on the Savannah River, and the eastern Chickasaws, who had recently taken up residence near Augusta, appear to have constituted the bulk of his Indian army. The Indians who helpedand failedto guard Fort Mose, for example, were described by Montiano as a party of “Yuches and Uchises, with a white man for a chief.”105 Another telling piece of evidence comes from the pen of Oglethorpe himself, who reported that 20 to 30 Yuchis lost their lives during the siege of St. Augustine, an indication that many of the most active warriors had come from that nation. Evidence also indicates that many of the Indians who fought at Bloody Marsh were Chickasaws and Tomohetans, a migrant people that had resided from time to time among both the Creeks and the Cherokees. Britain’s staunchest Creek allies came not from the nation proper but were drawn from among the Yamacraws and lesser-known coastal Indian settlements. The pro-English Creeks were led by Tomochichi’s heir Tooanaway and the Cowkeeper, a so-called island chief who lived on the Georgia coast. Tooanaway, for instance, first volunteered to lead 200 Creek warriors in the fall of 1739 and eventually suffered a fatal wound in the Battle of Bloody Marsh in 1742. His presence and ultimate sacrifice suggests that many of the Creeks who fought were Yamacraws. The Cowkeeper, a Lower Creek chief who lived on one of Georgia’s barrier islands, reported to duty in the midst of the siege on St. Augustine with 45 warriors, indicating that he too had cultivated a pro-English following. The Creeks, as one scholar of Spanish Florida has noted, may have made useful raiders and scouts, “but they were not decisive in turning the balance of power overwhelmingly to the English” and were therefore not “the key to victory” in the War of Jenkins’s Ear. The question that remains is, why not? Understanding why the Creeks appear hesitant to help Oglethorpe raise the Union Jack over St. Augustine demands that we consider the War of Jenkins’s Ear as the Creeks might have seen it. Undoubtedly, a number of Creeks held grievances against the Spanish and their mission Indians and proved willing to engage in small-scale raids for scalps and plunder. To escalate this activity into an imperial war would not only have required the Creeks to sustain great numbers of casualties but also demanded that they abandon the wisdom articulated in the Coweta Resolution, which held that Creek security was best guaranteed by maintaining peaceful relationships with all three European powers.

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