The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-10-10
THE PocAHoNTAs OF THE
 SOUTH.

The following is the introduction to ar
 article in the Southern Biv0Hae of un
 usual historical and romantic interest
 by General Alpheus Baker:
 Itrequired an earthquake to decide the
 Creek Indians to take part with England
 in the war of 1872. That powerful tribe
 was composed of the "Upper Creeks,
 who lived upon the waters of the Coosa
 Tallapoosa and Alabama, and the Low.
 CT Creeks" who lived upon the Chatta-
 hoochee and the Flint. They numbered
 about thirty thousand souls, and could
 bring five thousand gun-nen into the
 field. Like all Indians, they loved their
 country only SO long as II rem lined a
 wilderness. Like all Indians, they hated
 civiliz stion, and their history is illustrated
 by the imprudence, the sufferings, and
 the valor with which they attempted to
 destroy it. But the Revolutionary war
 had taught them to dread the power of
 the Americans, and hostile as they were
 to them, they hesitated before becoming, Tn a second war, the allies of a power
 which had been so unsuccessful against the Americans when they were far weaker than in 1872.
 la the spring of that year they held a great council at Tuckabatchee, their csp- ital, on the Tallapoosa river. Colonel Benjamin Hawkins tells us how Tecum- sch, unex xpectedly to the whites, presented himself at that council, how he appeared there each morning, day after day, with his face painted black, walked solemnly round the square before the assembled chiefs and seated himself always on the bare earth, refusing any higher seat, and saying that the Indian had only two friends, the Greet Spirit above him, which was his father, and the earth beneath him, which was his mother, and that he would rest on the bosom of his mother. Now, except these words, he did not open his lips in the council (waitng, as Haw- kins conjectures, till he should depart) until the last day and just before it broke up, when he rose majestically and de- livered that most memorable harangue in which, with pathos and eloquence surpassing human nature," as some one has characterized it, and employing every art and gesture of the Indian orator, he unveiled his policy of uniting all the abo- riginal tribes for selkprotection in one great confederacy. He said the condi- ton of the Indians filled his soul with sorrow. Even nature pitied them, and the very trees of the forest up der which he walked in his long journey to meet them dropped their tears upon him. Their only safety was to have nothing to do with the white people or their civiliz ation. Let the white people manage their own country in their own way We should not interfere with or injure them. Do not touch their property. Do not steal even a cow-bell from any other color. We are formed to keep apart from them. The Great Spirit has painted the Indian red to distinguish him from every other race. The red men are all one family, and they have one common country, no part of which any single tribe has right to treat away. If any traitor chiefs should dare to do so, their people should kill them The wilderness IS the Indians heritage, and his only security It, of right, be- longs to us alone. The Great Spirit gave 1t to us for happy home, and we must preserve its sheltering forests and trans parent streams just as He has given them. The axe and the blow of the whites are roobing us of this great gift of our Father, and destroying the mother who nurses us, by cutting down the forest and mud dying the rivers. Tke white man is pre- pairing your ruin by bringing into your country his firewater to take away your reason. lfyou will reject his company, his habits, his councils, and his civiiza- tion, and live to yourselves, united from the great lakes, where my home is, to the gulf which is your border, the wilderness will hide you from him, and he will not be able to subject you to the servile fate to which you see he has doomed another race. see white bird which is even now flying across the ocean to assist us. We must wait till she alights But, said he, scowling ferociously al the Big War rior," Tustenuggee Thlucco, suspect treachery here in your very capital. The Great Spirit frowns upon it; and to prove | 1t to you, when return home will stamp | my foot upon the ground and shake down every house in Tuckabatchee.
 Tecumseh departed and went back to the lakes. The white Bird came as he had prophesied, and Tecumseh spilled i the trst white blood in the war with Eng land, declared June IS, 1872. The earth quake came also in the same year and demolished the Indian capital ot Tucka. batchee. The awe-struck savages imme- diately cried out, '" Tecumseh has arrived at home!" and almost all the Upper Creeks, in the words of Colonel Hawkins '' commenced to sing songs and dance the war dance ofthe Indians of the lakes :" and no persuasion of "the beloved m an of the four nations" as the Creeks used 10 call him, and no influence of the " Big Warrior" or the friendly chiefs of the Lower Creeks, could restrain hostilities. The earthquake answered all their argr- nents; the Great Spirit was with Tecum-