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2 Formation of the Tensaw Community Gregory A.Waselkov Several hundred people living within a few miles’ radius of the historic site of Fort Mims,at the northeast corner of the Mobile-­ Tensaw delta,comprise the modern,unincorporated,rural community of Tensaw,Alabama.A considerable number of today’s Tensaw residents trace their descent back to families that had settled here by the early years of the nineteenth century, just before or soon after the 1813 battle and massacre at the old fort.Tensaw at that time, however, referred to a much larger area, encompassing settlements lining the entire east side of the delta and for miles up the Alabama River.1 The name Tensaw derives from the Taensa people, an Ameri­ can Indian society, originally from the lower Mississippi valley, that relocated to this vicinity around 1725 at the request of French colonial officials in Mobile. Their village occupied a high bluff overlooking the delta at a spot west of the present-­ day town of Stockton,and their extensive agricultural fields reached south along both banks of the river that would carry their name.When the Taensas abandoned the region and moved back to Louisiana in 1764, following the withdrawal of their French colonial allies at the end of the Seven Years War, the broad clearings known as “Taensa Old Fields” soon attracted interest from several quarters. Newly arrived British colonists, eager to acquire rich farmland already wrested from the forest,had first to contend with the Upper Creek Indians, who took credit for chasing off the Taensas and claimed this territory by right of conquest. Eventually, British and Creek leaders reached a compromise.The Creeks reserved an option to settle north of “the forks,” at the head of the delta, and permitted colonists to settle the banks of the Tensaw River to the south. By 1771 a dozen British and ethnic French families occupied a string of plantations worked by enslaved Africans (Waselkov 2006:16–19;David Taitt n.d.). Britain’s loss of its Atlantic seaboard colonies in the Ameri­ can Revolution and the simultaneous Spanish conquest of Mobile and the rest of the colony of West Florida caused the dislocation of thousands of colonists who Formation of the Tensaw Community / 37 had supported the losing side. As quickly as British planters fled their homes along the Tensaw,Loyalist refugees fromVirginia,the Carolinas,and Georgia took their places at the invitation of Spanish colonial officials anxious to bolster population along the Gulf of Mexico and forestall south­ ern expansion of the young United States. Many of these newly arrived Loyalists, like Samuel Mims, had lived and worked as traders in the Creek Nation during the Ameri­ can Revolution and they maintained close ties with Creek friends and relations in succeeding years. The Creeks finally exercised their right to settle along the lower Alabama River, north of the forks, in 1783 when Alexander McGillivray and his sister Sophia Durant drove a herd of cattle south from their plantations on the lower Coosa River (north of modern-­ day Montgomery, Alabama). Mc­Gillivray, a métis (son of a Creek mother and a Scots father) was the most influential and wealthiest Creek of his era. Even so, his efforts to centralize Creek po­ liti­ cal power and to accumulate wealth were constrained by strong native traditions of consensus ­building and community welfare and the abiding importance of clans in the Creek legal system.With a determination to circumvent the control of Creek talwa elders and gain direct access to the markets of Pensacola and Mobile, McGillivray and his matrilineal relatives established cow pens and additional plantations around the mouth of Little River, where it enters the lower Alabama River at the forks, immediately north of the boundary with Spanish Florida and the southwesternmost point in the Creek Nation (Waselkov 2006:20–23;Caughey 1938:62).2 The prosperity of the initial Little River plantations soon attracted other Creeks who sought economic advantage and relief from talwa sanctions. Upon the death of Alexander McGillivray in 1793,his lineage demonstrated the resilience of traditional social customs even in this most remote part of the Creek Nation. By ignoring patrilineal inheritance claims of ­ Alexander’s son, claims backed by powerful Scots traders in colonial Pensacola, Mc­ Gil­ livray’s sisters reinforced their status as Creeks and their rightful roles as guardians of matrilineage interests (Waselkov 2006:27;Braund 1990). McGillivray’s lineage belonged to the town of Coosada, which was located at the...

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