A Nation Rising by Kenneth C. Davis Page A

had lost two brothers and his mother to the war; he had never known his father. Hisnightmarish childhood clearly hardened him. But as Robert Remini remarks, “No one has ever seriously questioned Jackson’s courage or his sense of duty. Those who knew his family background understood a little about where and how he had obtained them.” 8
    These war experiences also made Jackson intensely distrust those forces he saw as enemies of America. In his experience, they were the British, the Spanish, and the Indians. For the rest of his life, he hated all three with a passion that often drove his questionable actions.
    Â 
    L IKE MANY OTHER Native Americans of his day, William Weatherford saw the American government, and most whites, as the enemy. Long before the American Indian wars took place on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century and became a staple of dime novels and Hollywood, long before the “pony soldiers” battled the Sioux, Weatherford and other Indians in the eastern and southern states had fought furiously against the encroachment of white American settlers. They were battling history and modernity.
    Born around 1781, William Weatherford was the son of Charles Weatherford, a Scottish merchant and horse breeder who ran a trading post and racetrack. William’s mother was a Creek of noble lineage. Such ancestry was not at all unusual. A roster of the names of a number of significant Creek tribal leaders of this generation reads like a gathering of the Highlands clans: they included Peter McQueen; William McIntosh, Weatherford’s cousin; and Alexander McGillivray, Weatherford’s uncle, who had earlier signed a peace treaty with George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox.
    As the nineteenth century opened, many Creeks lived in settled towns and villages in Georgia and the future Alabama. Part of the Muskogee (or Muskogean) speaking groups in the American Southeast that included the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Alabama nations, they had been forced from their traditional territories with the arrival of the Spanish and later the English in the American Southeast. But they remained a force in the region, and in 1730 a Creek trade delegation had traveled to London to negotiate agreements with the British government. Demolishing the simplistic image of the fur trade as a lopsided deal in which “civilized” Europeans exchanged trinkets for furs and skins with unsophisticated natives, the historian Daniel K. Richter explains, “A series of fatal bovine epidemics struck continental Europe, creating a huge market among leather workers for North American deerskins to replace now-scarce cattle hides. The Creeks—controlling territories that, largely as a result of their own previous slave-raiding expeditions, were devoid of humans but thronging with white-tailed deer—were ideally placed to profit from that demand.” 9
    Having allied themselves with the British during the Revolution, the Creeks felt betrayed when they learned that the English had simply transferred ownership of their territory to the new American nation under the terms of the peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War in 1783.
    Under an official United States federal policy of “civilization,” many Creeks and members of the other nations of the Southeast accepted the new way. As Richter explains, the U.S. government, “sought to teach Indian peoples to abandon their traditional gendered economy of male hunting, female agriculture and communallandholding in favor of male plow agriculture and animal husbandry, female domesticity, and especially, private property. This shift toward a Euro-American way of life, the theory went, would allow Indians to prosper on a much smaller land base, opening up the vast remainder to White yeoman farmers. Of course, it also envisioned the end of Indian culture and Indian political autonomy.” 10
    The shift created policies that soon had Indians