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

During the early national period of the United States, Americans formulated an ideology of expansion and mobility that directed government resources to displacing Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River. Although the political, legal, and military contests that shaped the ideas and methods of early national expansion into American Indian territories have attracted considerable scholarly attention, much of it has focused on the legal designs and schemes that operated in quick succession during the 1830s to effectively railroad the main bodies of southeastern Indian nations, especially the Cherokees, into submission. In Creek Paths and Federal Roads, Angela Pulley Hudson sheds new light on this familiar story of expansion by thoroughly grounding her study in Creek country. In a careful examination of written documents of American officials and settlers as well as Creek peoples, Hudson reveals the important and evolving ways in which different orientations to spatiality—in particular, among settlers, Indians, and slaves—collided on the roads through Creek territory from the early national period leading up to the Removal Acts of the 1830s. By situating her study in this manner, Hudson not only reveals the way in which United States expansion and Native American displacement was conditioned by how settlers, Indians, and slaves operated on Creek paths and Federal roads, but she also reveals how these events affected America's ideology of expansion as well as an emerging Creek national consciousness.

Before launching into an interpretation of traditional Creek orientations to space, Hudson sets the stage for her study by first sketching the political geography of Creek country. Here, in the northern regions of present-day Alabama and Georgia, Creek peoples were principally organized within villages—in tribal (talwas) or daughter (talofas) towns—which dotted the river tributaries in these Upper and Lower Creek regions. By emphasizing the loose political connections that existed among the main villages toward the end of the nineteenth century, the book reveals how and why a national political consciousness began to emerge during the early national period. Moreover, Hudson reveals that this consciousness among the Creeks was conducted through and imagined by the paths that connected them—the paths through which their nation would be invaded by non-Creeks.

As reflected in their customs of trade, warfare, ceremony, and folklore, Creeks understood that their survival and prosperity were predicated upon mobility. For instance, the people came to be Creeks, according to their creation story, when their distant ancestors first migrated to Creek country. Thus Creeks felt a strong obligation to protect and defend potential sites of intrusion—boundaries and pathways alike—into the territory that defined them. Building on the theme of mobility, Hudson explains that the political bonds that enabled economic and military cooperation among various Creek villages were achieved and maintained by regular meetings between Creeks and Creek travelers. This included everything from chance meetings between hunters and traders operating outside their respective villages (often along Creek paths) to the formal visitations of distant Creek envoys to host villages. Special social protocols, often with religious significance, applied to all of these occasions. Indeed, formal visitations often coincided with important religious ceremonies—such as the annual Green Corn ceremony—where members of the different villages enlivened a common social connection through the exchange of gifts and courtesies. Likewise, as vital arteries and potentially dangerous sites of conflict and intrusion of the Creek body, the Creek paths themselves were encoded with symbolic markers that represented this ominous existential reality.

The book makes it clear that it was during the early national period of the United states—when the emergence of a consolidated and centralized United States federal government coincided with the dissolution, for Native American nations, of diplomatic "playoff" opportunities with the British, Spanish, and other American...