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Chapter 7 Cries of ‘‘Euchee!’’: Imperial Trade in a Creek Southeast [John Sharp] in the meantime made no resistance but asked them to Smoke tobacco and entreated them not to use him after that rude manner telling them that the White people and they were friends and a great many friendly Arguments he used to them in English but all availed him nothing, neither would any of them Speak a Word of English, Or if they could they would not let him know it, but whenever he spoke to them only laughed at him. One would come up to him and Shake him by the hand and tell him he was a Tallepoosa, and take off his Coat another would Cry out Euchee, and take off his Shirt and others two Egellahs Cowealahs and Yomahitahs till they had Stripped him out of all his Clothes leaving him nothing but his breeches on, they carried away all his Slaves except one which was his Slave man, who made his escape from them. In short they left him not a thread of Clothes to Cover him nor victuals to eat except a little Corn and Pumpkins which they could not carry off. —William Hatton, 17241 On November 9, 1724, John Sharp suffered for the empire he served. In the dark hour just before dawn, the English trader awoke to the sound of gunfire. The sound was familiar. Since 1716, Sharp’s neighbors in the Cherokee towns of Tugaloo and Noyouwee had been at war with the Creeks. This time, however, Creeks were taking aim at his home rather than those of his Cherokee neighbors. Amid the pop and whine of flying bullets, Sharp was wounded in the leg. Moments later, his two hundred assailants stormed the house, overwhelming the hapless trader and his three slaves and stripping the house and store of nearly everything. The shivering and bewildered Carolinian took refuge among the nearby Cherokees, who, as he reported to his dismay, had ‘‘kept themselves Secure in their Forts’’ while the ‘‘Savage dogs’’ (as he called the Creeks) ‘‘went about their business.’’ Rushing to Sharp’s assistance a day after the attack, Sharp’s fellow trader, William Hatton, wondered, ‘‘If the Creeks demolish our Stores, and rob us of Our Goods by the Indian 146 Chapter 7 town Sides, what may we expect from their hands when they meet us in the Woods with a Number capable to Over power us?’’2 The answer was neither as simple nor as dark as Hatton imagined. Without a doubt, many Creeks harbored a deep resentment of the British , and the leader of Sharp’s assailants, a Tallapoosa named Sleyamaseechee or Steyamasiechie and whom the British called Goggle Eyes, apparently exhorted his companions before the raid that if ‘‘they mett with white men they should use them as Cherokeys’’ because ‘‘the white men always gave the Cherokeys an account of their Setting out to war against them.’’ So deep was the resentment against the Carolinians that Hoboyhatchee, a Carolinian ally who was ‘‘king’’ of the Abeca town of Abikudji, later acknowledged, ‘‘I Expected Nothing Less then a War.’’ Hatton was even more pessimistic, conjuring the ghosts of the Yamasee War when he observed, ‘‘For my Part among all the destructions I beheld in the late War (which was a great deal of it) I saw none worse than this. . . . [Sharp’s] House was like a Colander So full of Shot holes and the Yard perfectly plowed up wth bullets.’’ But Steyamasiechie’s anger and the destruction it wrought did not lead to war, and some of the reasons may have lain in what Hatton considered the ‘‘Miracle’’ that Sharp, inside a newly ventilated house, had received only a leg wound.3 Creeks probably deliberately spared Sharp, for had they intended to ‘‘use [a white man] as Cherokeys,’’ Sharp would have been dead.4 By leaving Sharp alive, his Tallapoosa, Yuchi, Egellah, Cowealah, and Yomahitah assailants asserted their understandings of trade and its meaning. The discussions were as old as Zamumo, but this contribution was punctuated with smoke and noise and sent via a messenger humiliated by his nakedness.5 One root of the attackers’ protest lay in the fact that at least five peoples humiliated Sharp, but he and his superiors saw—indeed, needed to see—only one. Creeks, a unitary people closely attached to Charles Town’s trade, were a fundamental piece of British dreams of a secure Southeast. United in their friendship...

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