Red Sticks is the English language term for a traditionalist faction of Muscogee Creek people in the American Southeast in the early 19th century. They led a resistance movement to European-American encroachment and assimilation; the tensions culminated in the outbreak of the Creek War in 1813. Initially a civil war among the Creek, the conflict drew in United States state forces, when the nation was already engaged in the War of 1812 against the British.
The term "red sticks" was derived from their red-colored war clubs and the ceremonial red sticks used by Creek medicine men. This faction was made up mostly of Creek of the Upper Towns, who supported traditional leadership and culture, including the preservation of communal land for cultivation and hunting. It was a time of increasing pressure on Creek territory by European-American settlers. Creek of the Lower Towns, who were closer to the settlers and had more mixed-race families, had already been forced to make numerous land cessions to the Americans.
Read more about Red Sticks: Background, Fort Mims Massacre, Aftermath, Memorial
Famous quotes containing the words red and/or sticks:
“For which he wex a litel red for shame,
Whan he the peple upon him herde cryen,
That to beholde it was a noble game,
How sobreliche he caste doun his yen.
Criseyda gan al his chere aspyen,
And let so softe it in her herte sinke
That to herself she seyde, “Who yaf me drinke?””
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400)
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)