prostrate.  Quite a panic ensued.  Two of the colonels, abandoning their regiments, rushed across the creek to escape the deadly fire.  There is no evidence that the Indians were superior in numbers to the Americans.  But it cannot be denied that the Americans, though under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, were again outgeneralled.  General Jackson lost, in this short conflict, in killed and wounded, nearly one hundred men.  His disorganized troops at length effected the passage of the creek, beyond which the Indians did not pursue them.  Crockett writes: 

“I will not say exactly that the old General was whipped.  But I think he would say himself that he was nearer whipped this time than any other; for I know that all the world couldn’t make him acknowledge that he was pointedly whipped.  I know I was mighty glad when it was over, and the savages quit us, for I began to think there was one behind every tree in the woods.”

Crockett, having served out his term, returned home.  But he was restless there.  Having once experienced the excitements of the camp, his wild, untrained nature could not repose in the quietude of domestic life.  The conflict between the United States and a small band of Indians was very unequal.  The loss of a single warrior was to the Creeks irreparable.  General Jackson was not a man to yield to difficulties.  On the 27th of March, 1814, he drove twelve hundred Creek warriors into their fort at Tohopeka.  They were then surrounded, so that escape was impossible, and the fort was set on fire.  The carnage was awful.  Almost every warrior perished by the bullet or in the flames.  The military power of the tribe was at an end.  The remnant, utterly dispirited, sued for peace.

Quite a number of the Creek warriors fled to Florida, and joined the hostile Indian tribes there.  We were at this time involved in our second war with Great Britain.  The Government of our mother country was doing everything in its power to rouse the savages against us.  The armies in Canada rallied most of the Northern tribes beneath their banners.  Florida, at that time, belonged to Spain.  The Spanish Government was nominally neutral in the conflict between England and the United States.  But the Spanish governor in Florida was in cordial sympathy with the British officers.  He lent them all the aid and comfort in his power, carefully avoiding any positive violation of the laws of neutrality.  He extended very liberal hospitality to the refugee Creek warriors, and in many ways facilitated their cooperation with the English.

A small British fleet entered the mouth of the Apalachicola River and landed three hundred soldiers.  Here they engaged vigorously in constructing a fort, and in summoning all the surrounding Indian tribes to join them in the invasion of the Southern States.  General Jackson, with a force of between one and two thousand men, was in Northern Alabama, but a few days’ march north of the Florida line.  He wrote to the Secretary of War, in substance, as follows: