Exhausted after a sleepless Saturday-Sunday night, not from worry but from writing ideas and plot problems that kept swirling in my head, I nevertheless dragged myself to church that stormy morning, a thirty-minute drive. Rain pelted my car and wind howled. Ordinarily, I’d have gone home after church, but my pastor called a special meeting with us lay leaders. Thus, I stayed with a friend till meeting time … and got little rest.

Upon my return home that evening, I found an urgent message in my email’s inbox. My sister’s message was brief: my brother-in-law’s farm suffered a direct hit from an EF4 tornado, the second strongest category of these storms and equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane (the worst).

My nephew, his two sons, and their dog were there when the storm hit. Thankfully, they hid in the farmhouse’s closet, except for their dog who refused to join them. They all survived. According to my brother-in-law, the storm’s eye came within one hundred yards of the house. Had it come any closer, my nephews might have perished. I’m grateful to the Lord for protecting them.

What does this have to do with writing? Priorities. I put aside my writing for a while in order to help my family clean up from the storm. Though writing should be near the top of our list if we’re serious about it, as Christians, we cannot make it an idol. Church attendance, Bible study, worship, prayer and family should always come first, in addition to sacrificing our time to help others. So, make writing a priority, yes, but be careful not to make it an idol.

In the “good ole days,” when working on the characters for my novels, I often used a sheet listing things such as hair color, eye color, build, etc. As far as physical descriptions go, these sheets served me well. They helped me keep them consistent throughout the book. However, with the advent of AI, I now draw them.

Here’s what I do. I ask AI to draw a character based on the description I give it. For example, in my current work-in-progress, one of my main characters is a young, mischievous nineteenth-century Southern belle named Martha. I told AI that I wanted her to have red hair, green eyes, and a mischievous smile. The picture shown here is AI’s result.

For another example, I gave AI the description of a setting based on the details I found in my research. In the picture below, the setting is the market in the Northern prisoner-of-war camp in Elmira, New York. Confederate prisoners often used tobacco as currency. True, I have period photographs of this prison, but I did not find any photograph that showed the market. So, this drawing helped.

Why not give it a try and see if it works for you?

A Grandfather’s Sermon

The Geographical Setting and Settlements

Before we discuss the Creek War, it’s helpful to briefly establish some background to this conflict.

During and immediately after the American Revolution, many settlers who sided with the British (Tories) left their homes in the former colonies and migrated to Alabama, settling in the Tensaw-Tombigbee valleys just north of Mobile. Many married Indian women and became rich through trade and other means. Their offspring were called métis, French for mixed blood. Originally, France ruled Mobile, but the British took over after the French and Indian War.

In 1780 Spain, an American ally during the Revolution, captured Mobile. Some Spaniards then moved up the Tombigbee River and built a fort on a limestone bluff overlooking the river that would later become Fort St. Stephens.

Under the Treaty of Paris (1783) at the end of the Revolution, Spain was granted all of Louisiana as well as territory along the Gulf of Mexico, called East and West Florida. In 1798, Congress established the 31^st parallel as the boundary between Spain and the United States and created the Mississippi Territory. It later expanded to the 32nd parallel (1802) when Georgia ceded lands to the federal government. The map below shows what the Territory, a vast region spreading from the Chattahoochee River to the Mississippi River, looked like in 1813, at the time of the Creek War.

In 1799, the federal government built Fort Stoddert on the Mobile River, and in April 1813 the American general, James Wilkinson, captured Mobile without a shot fired.

American pioneers who weren’t Tories, along with their slaves and cattle, began moving into Alabama and Mississippi country in the early 1800s.

The Tribes

Four tribes lived in the Mississippi Territory during this era: the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, and the Creeks. With the exception of the Pueblos in present-day New Mexico, these tribes were more culturally advanced than all the other tribes north of Mexico.

The Creeks were a matrilineal society, which meant a child’s inheritance was passed through the mother. Women managed households and farmed. Men hunted and fought wars. Often, chiefs and headmen consulted their women when decisions had to be made on issues that concerned their towns. However, when it came to war, chiefs made the decisions.

Because their society was matrilineal, a white man who’d married a Creek woman was considered Creek. Two of the Creek War’s most prominent Creek leaders were cousins who fought on opposite sides, William Weatherford and William McIntosh, but we’ll get into that later.

The Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees were also matrilineal. Most of the members of these tribes supported the settlers. One Choctaw leader we’ll be discussing later is Pushmataha, a highly respected chief.

Next week we’ll look at two major leaders of the Red Sticks.

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Sources

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McMillan, Malcolm C. The Land Called Alabama, Austin, TX:: Steck-Vaughn Company 1968.

Waselkov, Gregory A. A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2006

 

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Lieutenant Spruce McKay Osborne was born in Rowan County, North Carolina in 1784. Upon his graduation from college there, he moved to the Mississippi Territory to practice medicine. When the Creek War broke out in 1813, he joined the Mississippi Volunteers as its surgeon and served at Fort Mims.

He didn’t think he’d see any action there, so he wrote General Claiborne, commander of the territorial militia, a request for a transfer to a more active region. Six days later, Redstick Creeks attacked the fort and massacred its inhabitants. Lieutenant Osborne was killed near the end of the battle. His portrait is the only picture we have of any of the fort’s inhabitants. Hundreds were slaughtered. Although we know the names of some who perished, we do not know the names of everyone.

The lieutenant is buried in a mass grave with others who perished.

Sources

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9508351/spruce_mckay-osborne

Waselkov, Gregory A. A Conquering SpiritL Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814. Tuscaloosa, AL.: The University of Alabama Press, 2006.