Reflections on "Shee Coocys" and the Motherless Child: Creek Women in a Time of War

Reflections on “Shee Coocys” and the Motherless Child: Creek Women in a Time of War In late November 1813 Cherokee Indians caught a Creek man who had been spying on them and their Tennessee allies at Fort Armstrong, high on the Coosa River. They took the captured man to Gen. John Cocke, who suggested that the Cherokees “punish” the captive according to their own customs. Capt. Jacob Hartsell of Washington County, Tennessee, described the scene in his journal, noting that the Cherokees beat the man until he fell to the ground. At that point, “one of the Indians Stepd up and Scalped him and twock the scalp in his hand and jumped about and hol[ow]ed, ‘aleway , aleway,’ and Seemd much rejoiced.” The scalped man was then stripped naked. The Cherokees put a rope around their captive’s neck and pulled him erect and began to stab him with their knives. The Creek man “drawed him self up,” Hartsell marveled, and the Cherokees “hollowed worse . . . the[y] twock him In to the tents whar the Shee Coocys and Children was and all the women . . . crayed and made Everrey kind of noice.”1 Hartsell looked on “amaised” as the Cherokees finished the work of killing the man slowly and unpleasantly over the course of an hour. Hartsell’s friend Abram Fine, mesmerized by the gory proceedings, turned to him and pronounced that he would not have missed the sight “for five hundred Dollars.”2 The spectacle of torture that so entertained Captain Hartsell and Private Fine would not have been strange to the “Shee Coocys” (Coosa Kathryn E. Holland Braund Kathryn Braund, a native of Hartford, Alabama, is the Hollifield Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. She gives special thanks to Gregory A. Waselkov, Susan Abram, T. R. Henderson, and Ove Jensen, who served as readers for the paper. This presidential address was read at the annual meeting of the Alabama Historical Association held in Spanish Fort, April 14–16, 2011. 1 This occurred November 21, 1813. Americans attacked the Creek town of Hillabee on November 18. Mary Hardin McCown, ed., “The ‘J. Hartsell Memora’: The Journal of a Tennessee Captain in the War of 1812,” East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 11 (1939): 110. 2 Ibid. the alabama review 256 women), Hartsell’s term for these captive Hillabee Creek women. No doubt they expected to see their men tortured if captured. What might have concerned them more was the knowledge that they too were dead, after a fashion. The civil war that had brought a foreign invasion of their country destroyed their towns, homes, and families. It took their freedom and even their identity as human beings and made them slaves, dispossessed of everything in life that mattered. As Hartsell recorded for posterity, “the Coocy wiming and children the Cherokees twock home with them.”3 These nameless, faceless women have fascinated me as I have studied the Creek War. Like their captors—who failed to leave even an accurate count of their number, record their names, or track their fate—historians have largely ignored Creek women in their examination of the war.4 Indeed, when they do appear, it is usually as a mother or wife of an important man. Creek women from both sides of the civil conflict, along with their children, bore the brunt of war and were involved in the upheaval from the beginning. Some lived through fierce battles, others witnessed torture and death of family members, many endured humiliating captivity, and when the fog of war lifted, Creek women were instrumental in rebuilding their devastated country. My goal in this article is to examine the Creek War from the inside out: through the experiences of Creek women. Although the Tennesseans failed to comment on their prisoners, the petite and strong-willed women of the Creek towns often fascinated visitors. William Bartram, in his Travels, provided the most evocative description: 3 Ibid. In her notes, McCown seems to imply that the prisoner was tortured by Cherokee women. Under traditional practice this would have been the case, but there were no Cherokee women with the army. Hartsell’s “Shee Coocys” were captive “Coosa” or Hillabee women. 4...