The Muscogee were a divided people. Beginning in earnest under the administration of American Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Muscogee, especially the Lower Creek, adopted agriculture and Western culture. A reaction against these changes was fanned by the arrival among the Muscogee of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and the omens of the Great Comet of 1811 and the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes. The traditionalists came to be known as Red Sticks. In February 1813, a band of Red Sticks returning from Detroit, where they served alongside the United Kingdom and Tecumseh's Confederacy in the Siege of Detroit, killed two families of American settlers along the Duck River near Nashville, Tennessee. Hawkins demanded that the Muscogee turn over the murderers. Instead the chiefs executed them, sparking a civil war, the Creek War, between the Red Sticks and the predominantly Lower Creek pro-American Muscogee. The Red Sticks were crushed in the decisive Battle of Horseshoe Bend of March 27, 1814 by a coalition including American, Choctaw and Cherokee forces.