Opothleyahola - Leader of The Creek

Leader of The Creek

Later the young man developed as an influential and eloquent speakers who utilized his skills for his people first and foremost. He was selected as a speaker for the chiefs, which was a distinct political role on the National Council. He became a wealthy trader and owned a 2,000-acre (8 km²) plantation near North Fork Town. As did other Creek and members of the Five Civilized Tribes, he purchased African-American slaves as workers for his plantation. Opothleyahola joined the Freemasons and accepted Christianity to become a Baptist.

Alarmed by land cessions made by chiefs of the Lower Towns without tribal consensus, the National Council of the Creek Confederacy enacted a law that made further land cessions a capital offense. In 1825, William McIntosh and several Lower Creek chiefs signed the Treaty of Indian Springs with the US, which gave up most of the remaining Creek lands in Georgia for payment and removal to west of the Mississippi River.

Opothleyahola supported the death sentence passed by the National Council against McIntosh and other signatories of the 1825 Treaty. The chief Menawa led 200 warriors to attack McIntosh at his plantation. They killed him and another signatory chief, and burned down his mansion.

The Creek National Council, led by Opothleyahola, went to Washington, DC to protest the illegality of the 1825 treaty. President John Quincy Adams was sympathetic. The US government and the chiefs made a new treaty with more favorable terms, the Treaty of Washington (1826).

But, Georgia officials began forcibly removing the Indians from lands which it claimed under the 1825 treaty. In addition, the state ignored the 1832 US Supreme Court ruling in Whitmire v. Cherokees that the state's legislation to regulate activities within American Indian territories was unconstitutional.

When the Alabama legislature also moved to abolish tribal governments and extend state laws over the Creek people, Opothleyahola appealed to the administration of President Andrew Jackson. He had already signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act and wanted the Creek to move west. Given no relief, the Upper Creek signed the Treaty of Cusseta on March 24, 1832, which divided up Creek lands into individual allotments. They could either sell their allotments and receive funds to remove to Indian Territory, or stay in Alabama as state and US citizens and submit to the state laws.

In 1834, Opothleyahola traveled to Nacogdoches, Texas, to try to purchase communal land for his people. After he had paid landowners $20,000, pressure from both the Mexican and American governments forced Opothleyahola to abandon the idea.

In 1836, Opothleyahola, commissioned as a colonel by the U.S. government, led 1,500 of his warriors against the rebellious Lower Creek who had allied with Seminole in fighting the white occupation. Soon after, the US Army rounded up the remaining Southeast Indian peoples and forced their emigration to Indian Territory, on what was known as the "Trail of Tears." In 1837, Opothleyahola led 8,000 of his people from Alabama to lands north of the Canadian River in the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.