On August 30, 1813, a war party of 750 enraged American Indian warriors attacked a haphazard stockade known as Fort Mims in the south western corner of present-day Alabama, 50 miles from Mobile. After killing most of the 146 defending militiamen, the warriors turned on nearly twice that number of White, Black, and Métis (mixed indigenous and white) noncombatants, slaughtering scores of women and children with sickening ferocity.
The victorious assailants called themselves the Red Sticks, after the traditional red war clubs they carried. Until 1812, they also had belonged to the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy, a loose alliance of largely autonomous villages, or talwas, that claimed a sprawling domain comprising modern Alabama and the western and southern portions of Georgia. Contact with British colonial traders in the late 17th century wrought the first significant change in the Creek domain. Those Creeks residing north and west of the trade route from the Carolinas became known as the Upper Creeks, those below it the Lower Creeks. The distinction was more than a matter of nomenclature. Living nearer to Whites, the Lower Creeks slowly shed much of traditional Creek culture in favor of accommodation. Upper Creeks tended to be traditionalists, profoundly distrustful of White encroachment, particularly once the American Revolution gave rise to an expansionist young Republic.
At nearly 25,000 members, the Creeks were the most numerous Indian people in the American South. The other indigenous tribes in the region were the Cherokees in northern Georgia and western North Carolina, and the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who occupied the northern two thirds of present-day Mississippi. All three would side with the United States in the pending conflict. Spanish Florida would prove sympathetic to the Red Sticks but remained effectively neutral.
With the Fort Mims massacre, what had begun as a Creek civil war in 1812 metastasized into war with the United States. An outraged nation demanded vengeance against the Red Sticks. Total war was to be the price they paid, retaliation complete and unsparing. There was just one the War of 1812 against Great Britain, possessed neither the resources nor the will to confront the Red Sticks threat. Prospects consequently seemed good for the Red Sticks, who hoped not only to subdue the Lower Creeks, but also perhaps roll back the border with Georgia and
