Creeks
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
kreks, a tribe of American Indians. They are related to the Seminoles and Cherokees, as well as to the Choctaws and Chickasaws. At their height they numbered from 20,000 to 30,000. They occupied the greater part of Alabama and Georgia. They cultivated gardens and fields of corn, dressed comfortably, and lived in log houses plastered with clay. Their villages were along the streams. They were skillful in the management of dugout canoes, and in hunting and fishing. Their influence was courted by the English and by the Spanish authorities on the Gulf. They aided the forces of Cornwallis during the Revolution, and at its close afforded a harbor for Tory refugees driven from the southern colonies. During the War of 1812 a band fell on Ft. Mimms near Mobile and massacred 500 men, women, and children. The entire nation was punished severely in the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Two thousand warriors were slain. In 1825-28 their lands were taken by the United States . In 1836 about 25,000 Creeks were transported to Indian Territory , where they settled with their slaves, and still form one of the Indian nations. During the Civil War they divided. About 1,000 enlisted in the Union army. The Confederate section drove the others out of the territory. The number has been increased by whites and negroes to 40,000, but the Creeks proper number about 8,000. A few hundred escaped from the troops at the time of the removal, and still linger in their native mountains, trapping, hunting, fishing, raising patches of corn, and acting as guides for white hunters. See Indian Territory
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 it counted "about 8,000" Creeks proper and spoke of them as one of the nations of a still-existing Indian Territory — which had in fact become the state of Oklahoma in 1907, its tribal governments dismantled and lands broken into individual allotments. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, seated at Okmulgee, Oklahoma, rebuilt its government after decades of federal supervision, resumed electing its own principal chief in 1971, and now counts roughly 100,000 citizens; the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, descendants of those who never left the Southeast, won federal recognition in 1984 and are the only federally recognized tribe in Alabama. In 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court held in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the Creek reservation had never been disestablished by Congress, restoring tribal and federal criminal jurisdiction over a large part of eastern Oklahoma. One linguistic point has also been corrected: Creek belongs with Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole in the Muskogean family, but is not related to Cherokee, an Iroquoian language, and the status of the descendants of the "slaves" the entry mentions — the Creek Freedmen — remains a live dispute over tribal citizenship.
Written for this edition, 2026.