The task set to the son of Sehoy was one of incredible difficulty, for he was head of a loose array of towns and tribes from whom no man could get perfect, and none but himself even imperfect, obedience.  The nation could not stop a town from going to war, nor, in turn, could a town stop its own young men from committing ravages.  Thus the whites were always being provoked, and the frontiersmen were molested as often when they were quiet and peaceful as when they were encroaching on Indian land.  The Creeks owed the land which they possessed to murder and rapine; they mercilessly destroyed all weaker communities, red or white; they had no idea of showing justice or generosity towards their fellows who lacked their strength, and now the measure they had meted so often to others was at last to be meted to them.  If the whites treated them well, it was set down to weakness.  It was utterly impossible to restrain the young men from murdering and plundering, either the neighboring Indians or the white settlements.  Their one ideal of glory was to get scalps, and these the young braves were sure to seek, no matter how much the older and cooler men might try to prevent them.  Whether war was declared or not, made no difference.  At one time the English exerted themselves successfully to bring about a peace between the Creeks and Cherokees.  At its conclusion a Creek chief taunted the mediators as follows:  “You have sweated yourselves poor in our smoky houses to make peace between us and the Cherokees, and thereby enable our young people to give you in a short time a far worse sweat than you have yet had."[29] The result justified his predictions; the young men, having no other foe, at once took to ravaging the settlements.  It soon became evident that it was hopeless to expect the Creeks to behave well to the whites merely because they were themselves well treated, and from that time on the English fomented, instead of striving to put a stop to, their quarrels with the Choctaws and Chickasaws.

The record of our dealings with them must in many places be unpleasant reading to us, for it shows grave wrong-doing on our part; yet the Creeks themselves lacked only the power, but not the will, to treat us worse than we treated them, and the darkest pages of their history recite the wrongs that we ourselves suffered at their hands.

1.  Letter of Commissioners Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh, to the President of the Continental Congress, Dec. 2, 1785. (Given in Senate documents, 33d Congress, 2d session, Boundary between Ga. and Fla.) They give 14,200 “gun-men,” and say that “at a moderate calculation” there are four times as many old men, women, and children, as there are gun-men.  The estimates of the numbers are very numerous and very conflicting.  After carefully consulting all accessible authorities, I have come to the conclusion that the above is probably pretty near the truth.  It is the deliberate, official opinion of four trained experts, who had ample opportunities for investigation, and who examined the matter with care.  But it is very possible that in allotting the several tribes their numbers they err now and then, as the boundaries between the tribes shifted continually, and there were always large communities of renegades, such as the Chickamaugas, who were drawn from the ranks of all.