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Apalachicola was considered the head town of the entire Creek nation

Source: Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors #121

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Replying to a speech of John Stuart, the British Indian agent, delivered in the Chiaha Square, September 18, 1768, a Lower Creek speaker says: "There are four head men of us have signed our Names in the presence of the whole lower Creeks as you will see: Two of us out of the Pallachicolas which is reckoned the Head Town of upper & lower Creeks and two out of the Cussitaw Town, which are friend Towns, which two towns stand for in behalf of the upper and lower Creeks."
It is probable that this speaker wishes to exaggerate the representative character of the chiefs of these two towns, but the important position assigned to Apalachicola was not a mere invention on his part. Ten years later we find John Stuart writing, without the same bias as that which the speaker quoted above may be supposed to have had, that this town "is considered as the Mother & Governing Town of the whole Nation." '

It is quite probable, as we shall see later, that it was a tribe of considerable size, often scattered among several settlements. In spite of the resemblance which its name bears to that of the Apalachee I am inclined to think that there was only a remote relationship between the two peoples, although the meanings of the two words may have been something alike. The ending of the name resembles okli, the Hitchiti word for "people."

Judge G. W. Stidham told Dr. Gatschet that he had heard the name was derived from the ridge of earth around the edge of the square ground made in sweeping it.3

In recent times Apalachicola has always been classed by the Creeks as a Hitchiti-speaking town, while the fragment of Apalachee that has come down to us shows that language to have been an independent dialect.

According to Creek legend the Apalachicola were found in possession of southwestern Georgia when the Muskogee invaded that section.2