The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810 (review)

This volume is one of the most important collections of published primary source material on the southern frontier, the late eighteenth-century Creek Indians, and the social and physical geography of the area that once comprised the Creek Confederacy. Benjamin Hawkins was U.S. Indian Agent to the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama from 1796 until his death in 1816. The volume editor, Thomas Foster, notes in his introduction that much of Hawkins's writings have been available through various earlier publications, but all of these are now out of print. Foster's volume contains facsimile reprints of two of these publications (both of which were originally published in the Collections of the Georgia Historical Society): "A Sketch of the Creek Country, in the Years 1798 and 1799" and the "Letters of Benjamin Hawkins." The volume also contains two previously unpublished "viatories" written by Hawkins.

A viatory (or "journal of distances") is the eighteenth-century equivalent of a field notebook. When Hawkins took trips around Creek country, he kept notebooks recording distances traveled and landscape features, both social and natural. Since he considered these only as field notebooks, Hawkins recorded the data in shorthand. In his introduction, Foster gives readers the necessary instructions on how to decipher Hawkins's shorthand. He also reconstructs the routes of the various trips, which is necessary for understanding location in the viatories.

The viatories are staggering in their detail. Hawkins recorded geographical features, place names, environmental features, and towns along the routes that he traveled. The remarkable thing about the viatories, however, is that Hawkins, using eighteenth-century measuring conventions, located all of these features. For instance, when Hawkins noted a stand of longleaf pines on a stony ridge made of "curiously variegated- rock, flowered or spotted, of lead colour, white flint stone and dingy red, the red seems to have been spattered on" (9), he also gave a location for this feature. Using Foster's instructions, one can plot this ridge on a modern topographic map. Being able to reconstruct the historical landscape at this local level is very unusual. Even the most detailed historical sources usually do not give enough detail or are not accurate enough to allow one to pinpoint locations of environmental and social features. Yet, as ecologists make clear, to understand a landscape, one must understand the mosaic of local-level systems and their connectedness. Hawkins's viatories, then, may allow us, for the first time, to reconstruct the micro-level intricacies of the late eighteenth-century landscape and geography of what was once Creek country.

The viatories are followed by a reprint of the "Sketch of the Creek Country." Anthropologists and ethnohistorians regard Hawkins's "Sketch" as a reliable account of Creek life. Based on his field notes, Hawkins's "Sketch" contains detailed descriptions of all the Creek towns, local landscapes, people, and tidbits of town histories, followed by discussions of various cultural elements under headings such as "Government," "War," "Marriage," and so on. Hawkins's description of the Green Corn Ceremony, under the headings of "Boos-ke-tau," has long been considered one of the most detailed and important accounts of the late eighteenth-century Creek version of this important Southeastern Indian ceremony.

The "Sketch" is followed by Hawkins's letters from 1796 to 1805. Hawkins kept regular communications with federal, state, and local leaders, both American and Creek. These letters, then, describe episodes, problems, solutions, and plans, both big and small, in which Hawkins had some role. He also recorded several "talks" of Creek leaders—a valuable source, since Indian voices are rare in the historical documents. Hawkins's writings also contain many "journals," diaries of his visits with Creek men and women that contain wonderful ethnographic descriptions of Creek towns and daily life.

The Georgia Historical Society publications only contain letters through 1805, yet Hawkins remained in Creek country another ten or so years...