CHICKASAW-CREEK WAR

CHICKASAW-CREEK WAR. On 13 February 1793, a Chickasaw national council declared war against the CREEKS, to avenge the murder of two Chickasaw hunters, and the next day Chief Tatholah and forty warriors set out against the Creek towns. Chief Piomingo attributed the murders to Creek resentment of the Chickasaw refusal to join an alliance against the Anglo-Americans. For almost a decade, Creek leaders such as Alexander McGillivray had been seeking support from Spanish Florida to help stem the westward advance of the new United States. Anglo-American settlers in western Georgia and the Cumberland Valley had suffered Creek depredations. Chickasaws who allied themselves with the Americans faced Creek resentment, and in the aftermath of the Creek attacks in 1793, Piomingo and others sought American aid. In a letter to the Americans, Chickasaw chiefs urged, "[L]et us join to let the Creeks know what war is." Governor William Blount, of the Southwest Territory, did not join the conflict, but in hopes that a Creek-Chickasaw war would reduce Creek attacks on the frontier, he sent the Chickasaw a large munitions shipment to support their effort.

Much talk, but little fighting, ensued; Spanish officials of Louisiana and West Florida held intertribal hostilities to a minimum as part of their efforts to negotiate a pan-tribal alliance of Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees against the Americans. On 28 October, at Fort Nogales, at the mouth of the Yazoo River, Spain engineered and joined a short-lived treaty of alliance among the southern tribes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Champagne, Duane. Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Elizabeth Howard West/A. R.

See also Cherokee; Choctaw; Pinckney's Treaty; Warfare, Indian.