The Creek War (1813–1814), also known as the Red Stick War and the Creek Civil War, began as a civil war within the Creek (Muscogee) nation. United States forces became involved by attacking a Creek party in present-day southern Alabama at the Battle of Burnt Corn. The war ended after Andrew Jackson in command of a force of combined state militias, Lower Creek and Cherokee defeated the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend. This led to the Treaty of Fort Jackson (August 1814) where the general insisted on the Creek ceding more than 20 million acres of land from southern Georgia and central Alabama. These lands were taken from the allied Lower Creek as well as the defeated Upper Creek.
Since tribal tensions tended to be exacerbated when the War of 1812 broke out between the United States and Great Britain and because prominent figures such as Andrew Jackson participated in both, historians sometimes include this regional conflict as part of that wider war.
Read more about Creek War: Background, Opposing Forces, Results
Famous quotes containing the words creek and/or war:
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)
“We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)