Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South

Notes

173 Notes abbreviations ADAH Alabama Department of Archives and History AYER Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library BRBL Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library CIL ‘‘Creek Indian Letters, Talks & Treaties,’’ Typescript, Louise Caroline Frederick Hays, compiler (1939), Parts I–III, GDAH DU Duke University, Special Collections EKP Ephraim Kirby Papers, DU GDAH Georgia Department of Archives and History HAR University of Georgia, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Athens, Georgia HTL Harry Toulmin Letters, 1813–1818, ADAH ICS Indian Claims and Spoliations 1-1-25, GDAH LBH Letters, Journals and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins, ed. C. L. Grant, Vol. 1: 1796–1801, Vol. 2: 1802–1816. Savannah: Beehive Press, 1980. NARA National Archives and Records Administration RBP Richard A. Blount Papers, 1792–1861, ADAH RG28 Record Group 28, Records of the Office of the Postmaster, Letters Sent, NARA RG75 Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, including Letters Received by the Office of the Secretary of War Relating to Indian Affairs, 1800–23 and Letters Sent by the Office of the Secretary of War Relating to Indian Affairs, 1800–24, NARA RG77 Record Group 77, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Records of the Board on Internal Improvements, including Letters Received, 1824–31, Civil Works Map File, 1800–1947, and Treasure File, NARA SENADD Southeastern Native American Documents Database, 1730–1840, Digital Library of Georgia [http://dlg.usg.galileo.edu] SHC University of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection TCC Telamon Cuyler Collection, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, presented in SENADD TSLA Tennessee State Library and Archives, presented in SENADD ULTB ‘‘Unpublished Letters of Timothy Barnard, 1784–1820,’’ Typescript, Louise Caroline Frederick Hays, compiler (1939), GDAH 174 notes to pages 1–2 introduction 1. ‘‘Talk from the Upper Creeks to John Stuart,’’ February 4, 1774, quoted in Braund, Deerskins and Duffels, 57. 2. Joshua A. Piker contends that internal Creek debates on various trading paths into the Nation should be viewed in the context of community or town-based histories that emphasize the importance of the local in Creek identity and histories. Piker, ‘‘ ‘White & Clean’ & Contested.’’ 3. On the Creek policy of neutrality, see Hahn, Invention of the Creek Nation. In constructing his argument on the invention of the Creek Nation as characterized by territorially bounded land and a centrally organized political structure devoted to pursuing neutrality with the Spanish, British, and French empires abroad, Hahn draws on Knight, ‘‘Formation of the Creeks.’’ Other scholars who have debated the timing and nature of Creek confederation include Braund, Deerskins and Duffels; Corkran, Creek Frontier; Crane, Southern Frontier; Gatschet, Migration Legend; Green, Politics of Indian Removal. 4. Historians Green and Hahn have most vigorously asserted the role of boundaries in nascent Creek nationalism. Green, Politics of Indian Removal; Hahn, Invention of the Creek Nation. 5. The terms ‘‘middle ground’’ and ‘‘new world’’ may or may not have had any salience for the peoples who experienced them. I refer here to Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 and James Merrell’s The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Both these works deploy spatial images of social relations across the Indian/European cultural divide—although they do so largely with divergent hypotheses and conclusions—and both of them have rightfully received accolades for their contributions to American Indian historiography. But the spatial terminology they each devised may or may not have had meaning for the Native peoples they studied and yet, as both James T. Carson and Nancy Shoemaker have observed, both concepts became incredibly influential within the field so that ‘‘middle grounds’’ and ‘‘new worlds’’ began appearing all over Native North America. Likewise, the so-called spatial turn in the humanities has resulted in surprisingly few studies that engage geographic categories on the terms that their subjects used them, producing instead a vast array of theoretical devices on the phenomenology of ‘‘space and place’’ without contributing meaningfully to the ethnohistory of spatiality. On White and Merrell, see Shoemaker, Clearing a Path, 63, and Carson, ‘‘Ethnogeography,’’ 769–88. For examples of the groundless use of geographic language in otherwise valuable recent cultural history, see Faery, Cartographies of Desire, and Stoler, Haunted by Empire. 6. Indeed, a wide variety of scholars have noted that historic Native North American societies (in contrast to their Western European counterparts) often organize their experiences according to a spatial, not...