The Creek War of 1813 and 1814

Editor's Introduction to the 1995 Edition

xiv EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. Bureau of American Ethnology, which is an edition of Cyrus Byington's dictionary of the Choctaw language.8 It was during the period of his work with the Choctaws that Halbert made his contribution to The Creek War, the work that must be counted his most significant endeavor . In addition, he wrote a history of the Choctaw Indians which was never published. Halbert's scholarly activity cannot be fully assessed in terms of his own publications, since he was quite willing to help other historians and ethnologists in their work. Thus, for example, he supplied a large amount of information concerning the Creek War and the Choctaw Indians to the famous frontier historian Lyman Draper, and there are numerous Halbert letters in the Draper Collection.9 During the last twelve years of his life Halbert was a clerk in the State Department of Archives and History at Montgomery, Alabama. Still a bachelor, he died of tuberculosis on May 9, 1916.10 The other author, Timothy Horton Ball, was born at Agawam, Hampden County, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1826. He came from a fairly well-to-do New England family and received a good education, including baccalaureate and master's degrees from Franklin College (in 1850 and 1853, respectively), and a divinity degree from Newton Theological Institution (in 1863). As a teacher and Baptist preacher Ball lived in a number of places, but his many years' residence in Clarke County, Alabama were of some special significance , for it was during those years that he wrote A Glance into the Great Southwest or Clarke County Alabama, and its Surroundings from 1540 to 1877 and, still more importantly, obtained much of the material he would later use in The Creek War.ll Ball, like Hal- EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. xv bert, was an extremely active collector of all manner of historical information. During his Oarke County years he was reputed to have the largest library in the county, the contents of which he generously shared with the area's young students. He had the reputation of spending much of his time walking through the region and of passing many hours in conversation with old settlers. He kept careM notes of the settlers' reminiscences, pressing them for details and constantly cross-checking the facts one against the other for accuracy. In this way Ball collected large quantities of primary historical data.12 The similarity of information found in his earlier History of Clarke County shows that he made a significant contribution to the factual material contained in his joint effort with Halbert.13 Ball was an extremely prolific writer, and sixteen different titles by him are listed by the Library of Congress . Some of these are short pamphlets, to be sure, but many are books of 300 to 500 pages. The range of interests covered by these publications is quite wide, including poetry, music, county and regional histories, genealogy, and numerous religious subjects.14 In addition to those catalogued by the Library of Congress, the titles of several other works by Ball are listed in Thomas M. Owen's Dictionary of Alabama Biography. He married Martha Caroline Creighton of Oarke County , Alabama, and they had two children. Ball died November 8, 1913, at CroWD, Point, Indiana.15 The editor has been unable to discover precisely how Halbert and Ball became acquainted or how they went about writing The Creek War. However, they were both active Baptists and both extremely interested in work with the Indians, and it is possible that they be- xvi EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. came acquainted as a result of one or the other of these common concerns. As for their respective contributions to The Creek War, one must again rely largely on conjecture, but it is fair to suppose that both men furnished in about equal parts the information used in the volume. Ball was almost certainly the editor of the book, however, and very likely wrote and organized most, if not all, of the final version; he was, after all, an extremely prolific writer whereas Halbert never published a book-length work of his own. At all events, the final product is a very useful study of white and Indian conflict and remains, after seventy-five years, the best history of the Creek War to be published to date. Auburn, Alabama June 1, 1969 FRANK LAWRENCE OWSLEY, JR. FOOTNOTES lAlbert J. Pickett, History of Alabama...