The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier

3. Commodifying the Creek Domain

97 Officials in Washington expected that most of the Creeks would sell their allotments as soon as they received them and move to the Western Territory. Consequently, the secretary of war appointed four officials to oversee the process of Creek land sales, instructing each to witness every transaction and see to it that the Natives received fair prices for their land. Leonard Tarrant and James Bright assumed the task of certifying sales among the Upper Creeks in the northern portion of New Alabama, including the counties of Coosa, Tallapoosa, Talladega, Randolph, and Benton. Robert McHenry became certifying agent for the middle portion of New Alabama—Chambers and Macon counties. Both Upper and Lower Creeks lived in these middle counties, which contained some of the most fertile lands in the state. And some of these tracts were all the more valuable because they bordered on Federal Road, the main thoroughfare through New Alabama. Finally, John W. A. Sanford, a prominent Georgia politician and militia commander, took charge of the supervision of Creek land sales in Russell and Barbour counties at the southern end of New Alabama. These counties also contained an abundance of good farmland, as well as the majority of the Lower Creek population and the very worst of the intruders from Georgia. The secretary of war sent out a few regulations regarding the land sales but, for the most part, allowed each agent to devise his own procedures for assuring fair transactions. Cass did, however, order each man to 3. Commodifying the Creek Domain commodifying the creek domain 98 send his certified contracts along to Washington for review and final approval by the president. In addition, Cass assigned John Abert, one of the commissioners charged with issuing the Creeks their reserves, the task of reviewing all contracts for Creek land made before the government sales offices actually opened. Once these old contracts were approved, along with the new, the government would send deeds to all the legitimate purchasers, and the Indians, their money in hand, could set out for their new homes in the West.1 Looking back on that time, it is almost impossible to believe that Cass’s agents did not know they were about to jump into a cesspool of fraud and corruption. After all, Cass did not send them in from Washington; they were not naive foreigners; they were residents of Alabama and Georgia who had firsthand knowledge of the nasty resource competition set off by the Cusseta Treaty and the government’s failure to keep intruders out of the Creek Nation. They should have known that the process of stealing Creek land allotments had already begun and the business would only get worse now that the government had officially thrown open all the Indian reserves for sale to all comers. Surely the certifying agents knew Indian landowners would be assailed and cheated by land speculators, traitorous Creeks, and the same rough and lawless element who first intruded on the Creek domain. How could they not know they would be asked to preside over one of the dirtiest land grabs in U.S. history? Or, perhaps they did know. Perhaps they were not at all naive. Perhaps they understood on some level that the system required dirty land grabs from time to time and they would simply do what they could to tidy up around the edges. Unfortunately, though, turning the land into a marketable commodity rather than a living, breathing part of themselves as most Creeks believed was only part of the problem. Following close on the land grab, the colonizers would seek to commodify every other resource in the Creek domain, including the Natives themselves. And therein lay the worst crime, as well as the key reason for the Second Creek War. Naive or not, McHenry began certifying the sale of Indian reserves in his district in January 1834, setting up headquarters at old Fort Hull in Macon County. Not surprisingly, his office, located as it was in the heart commodifying the creek domain 99 of the richest part of the Creek land domain, did the most business. But McHenry immediately noted a problem. Along with several other regulations designed to ensure fair sales, the War Department required that if at all possible purchasers of Indian land pay for that property in the presence of the certifying agent. But McHenry observed that local store owners...