By the late 18th century, the largest American Indian confederacy in present-day
Georgia and
Alabama was the
Muscogee (known during the colonial and federal periods as the
Creek Indians), part of the Muskogean-speaking peoples. They considered the ancient Mississippian mounds at Ocmulgee to be sacred and made pilgrimages there. According to Muscogee oral tradition, the mounds area was "the place where we first sat down," after their ancestors ended their migration journey from the West.
[12]
In 1690,
Scottish fur traders from
Carolina built a
trading post on Ochese Creek (Ocmulgee River), near the Macon Plateau mounds. Some Muscogee created a village along the
Chattahoochee River near the post, where they could easily acquire trade goods. They defied efforts by
Spanish Florida to bring them into the
mission province of
Apalachee.
[13]
The traders referred to both the river and the peoples living along it as Ochese Creek. Later usage shortened the term to Creek, which traders and colonists applied to all
Muskogean-speaking peoples.
[13] The Muscogee called their village near the trading-post
Ocmulgee (bubbling waters) in the local
Hitchiti language. The British colonists called it Ocmulgee Town, later the basis of their naming the river.
The Muscogee traded pelts of
white tailed deer and Indian slaves captured in raids against other tribes. They received West Indian
rum, cloth, glass beads, axes, swords, and
flintlocks. Carolinian
fur traders, who were men of capital, took Muscogee wives, often the daughters of
chiefs. It was a practice common also among the British fur traders in Canada; both the fur traders and American Indians saw such marriages as a way to increase the alliances among the elite of both cultures. The fur traders encouraged the Muscogee slaving raids against Spanish "
Mission Indians." British colonists were so few in number that they depended on Indian alliances for security and survival.
In 1702 South Carolina Governor Col.
James Moore raised a
militia of 50 colonists and 1,000
Yamasee and Ochese Creek warriors. From 1704 to 1706, they
attacked and destroyed a significant number of
Spanish missions of coastal Georgia and Florida. They captured numerous Mission Indians: the
Timucua and
Apalachee, some of whom the colonists and their Indian allies sold into
slavery. Together with extensive fatalities from
infectious disease epidemics, the warfare caused Florida's indigenous population to fall from about 16,000 in 1685 to 3,700 by 1715.
[14]
As Florida was depopulated, the English-allied tribes grew indebted to
slave traders. They paid other tribes to attack and enslave Indians, raids that were a catalyst for the
Yamasee War in 1715. In an effort to drive the colonists out, the Ochese Creek joined the rebellion and burned the Ocmulgee trading post. In retaliation, South Carolina began arming the
Cherokee, whose attacks forced the Ochese Creek to abandon the
Ocmulgee and
Oconee rivers, and move west to the
Chattahoochee. The Yamasee took refuge in
Spanish Florida.
