On 27 March 1814, at a tight loop of the Tallapoosa River in what is now Alabama, General Andrew Jackson's army attacked about 1,000 Red Stick Creek warriors behind a log barricade. With Cherokee and Lower Creek allies striking from across the river, the defenses were broken and at least 800 of the defenders were killed. The battle ended the Creek War, cost the Creek Nation millions of acres of land and made Jackson a national figure on the road to the presidency.
A Creek civil war
The Creek War began as a war among the Creeks themselves. In 1811 the Shawnee leader Tecumseh toured the southern nations urging resistance to American expansion, and many in the Upper Creek towns listened. A faction known as the Red Sticks, hostile to the Americans and to the Creeks who cooperated with them, turned on their rivals.1
In July 1813 Mississippi militia ambushed a Red Stick party returning from Spanish Pensacola with arms and ammunition at Burnt Corn Creek. In reply the Red Sticks stormed Fort Mims, north of Mobile, on 30 August 1813, killing some 250 people according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. The massacre turned a Creek quarrel into a war with the United States, and militia armies from Tennessee, Georgia and the Mississippi Territory marched into Creek country.2
The fortress in the bend
In March 1814 Jackson, reinforced by regulars of the 39th U.S. Infantry, marched against the Red Stick refuge at Horseshoe Bend with about 3,300 men, including some 500 Cherokee and 100 Lower Creek warriors. His men cut a road through the forest and on 26 March camped six miles from the bend.3
Waiting there under the war leader Menawa were about 1,000 Red Stick warriors. The Encyclopedia of Alabama adds at least 350 women and children who had taken refuge in the village of Tohopeka. Across the narrow neck of the peninsula the Creeks had built a barricade of logs and earth nearly 400 yards long. Jackson admired it. “It is impossible to conceive a situation more eligible for defense than the one they had chosen,” he wrote afterwards.4
The assault
Early on 27 March Jackson sent General John Coffee with 700 mounted riflemen and 600 Cherokee and Creek allies across the river to surround the bend. At 10:30 a.m. his artillery opened fire on the barricade; two hours of bombardment did little harm. Meanwhile Cherokee warriors swam the river, took the Red Sticks' canoes and attacked the village from behind.5
Seeing the smoke, Jackson ordered a frontal bayonet charge shortly after noon, led by the 39th Infantry under Colonel John Williams. A young officer of the regiment, Sam Houston, the future leader of Texas, was among those who went over the wall. The Red Sticks fell back into the bend and fought on until dark. Many tried to escape across the river and were shot in the water by Coffee's men. Women and children were among the dead.6
The cost and the treaty
The National Park Service and the Encyclopedia of Alabama agree that at least 800 of the 1,000 Red Sticks died: 557 counted on the field and some 200 to 300 in the river. Jackson lost 49 killed and 154 wounded. Menawa, wounded seven times, lay among the dead until nightfall and escaped by canoe.7
On 9 August 1814 Creek leaders signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The amount of land ceded is given differently: 23 million acres by the National Park Service, more than 21 million by the Encyclopedia of Alabama, over 20 million by the American Battlefield Trust. It also took land from the Creeks who had fought on the American side; the Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins judged that it took nearly eight million acres from allied Indians. Jackson became a major general in the regular army, won at New Orleans in January 1815 and was elected president in 1828. His career is told in our article on Andrew Jackson, and the battle that followed in our article on the Battle of New Orleans. As president he signed the Indian Removal Act. The battlefield is preserved as Horseshoe Bend National Military Park.8
