Influenced by Tenskwatawa's interpretations of the 1811 comet and the New Madrid earthquakes, the Upper Towns of the Muscogee, supported by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, actively resisted European-American encroachment.

[10] Here they waged war against other bands of Native American Indians, such as the Savanna, Ogeeche, Wapoo, Santee, Yamasee, Utina, Icofan, Patican and others, until at length they had overcome them,[11] and absorbed some as confederates into their tribe.

The earliest Spanish explorers encountered villages and chiefdoms of the late Mississippian culture, beginning on April 2, 1513, with Juan Ponce de León's landing in Florida.

Because of endemic infectious diseases carried unknowingly by the Europeans, but new to the Muscogee, the Spanish expedition resulted in epidemics of smallpox and measles, and a high rate of fatalities among the indigenous peoples.

[19][20] The Upper Towns, located on the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Alabama rivers, were Tuckabatchee, Abhika, Coosa (Kusa; the dominant people of East Tennessee and North Georgia during the Spanish explorations), Itawa (original inhabitants of the Etowah Indian Mounds), Hothliwahi (Ullibahali), Hilibi, Eufaula, Wakokai, Atasi, Alibamu, Coushatta (Koasati; they had absorbed the Kaski/Casqui and the Tali), and Tuskegee ("Napochi" in the de Luna chronicles).

[24][25] In 1704, Irish colonial administrator James Moore led the Carolina militia and Ochese Creek and Yamasee warriors on a series of raids against Spanish missions in the Florida interior during Queen Anne's War.

[26] The Ochese Creeks joined the Yamasee, burning trading posts, and raiding back-country settlers, but the revolt ran low on gunpowder and was put down by Carolinian militia and their Cherokee allies.

French Canadian explorers founded Mobile as the first capital of Louisiana in 1702, and took advantage of the war to build Fort Toulouse at the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa in 1717, trading with the Alabama and Coushatta.

In May 1718, the shrewd Emperor Brim, mico of the powerful Coweta band, invited representatives of Britain, France, and Spain to his village and, in council with Upper and Lower Creek leaders, declared a policy of Muscogee neutrality in their colonial rivalry.

The colony of Georgia was created in 1732; its first settlement, Savannah, was founded the following year, on a river bluff where the Yamacraw, a Yamasee band that remained allies of Britain, allowed John Musgrove to establish a fur-trading post.

Led by Chief Secoffee (Cowkeeper), they became the center of a new tribal confederacy, the Seminole, which grew to include earlier refugees from the Yamasee War, remnants of the 'mission Indians,' and escaped African slaves.

[14]: 54 As Andrew Frank writes, "Terms such as mixed-blood and half-breed, which imply racial categories and partial Indianness, betray the ways in which Native peoples determined kinship and identity in the eighteenth- and early-nineteen-century southeast.

Fears of land-hungry settlers and need for European manufactured goods led the Muscogee to side with the British, but like many tribes, they were divided by factionalism, and, in general, avoided sustained fighting, preferring to protect their sovereignty through cautious participation.

During the American Revolution, the Upper Creeks sided with the British, fighting alongside the Chickamauga (Lower Cherokee) warriors of Dragging Canoe, in the Cherokee–American wars, against white settlers in present-day Tennessee.

The bilingual and bicultural McGillivray worked to create a sense of Muscogee nationalism and centralize political authority, struggling against village leaders who individually sold land to the United States.

McGillivray refused to negotiate with the state that had confiscated his father's plantations, but President George Washington sent a special emissary, Col. Marinus Willet, who persuaded him to travel to New York City, then the capital of the U.S., and deal directly with the federal government.

Cashiered for dereliction of duty after returning too late to his ship at Pensacola, Bowles escaped north and found refuge among the Lower Creek towns of the Chattahoochee basin.

He was received by King George III as 'Chief of the Embassy for Creek and Cherokee Nations'; it was with British backing that he returned to train the Muscogee as pirates to attack Spanish ships.

Bowles envisioned the State of Muskogee, with its capital at Miccosuki, encompassing large portions of present-day Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and incorporating the Cherokee, Upper and Lower Creeks, Chickasaw and Choctaw.

He denounced the treaties Alexander McGillivray had negotiated with Spain and the U.S., threatening to declare war on the United States unless it returned Muscogee lands, and issuing a death sentence against George Washington's Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins, who won the loyalty of the Lower Creeks.

He built a tiny navy, and raided Spanish ships in the Gulf of Mexico, and, in 1800, declared war on Spain, briefly capturing the presidio and trading post of San Marcos de Apalache before being forced to retreat.

With Federal troops tied up on the northern front against the British in Canada, the Tennessee, Georgia, and the Mississippi Territory militias were commissioned and invaded the Upper Creek towns.

On March 27, 1814, General Andrew Jackson's Tennessee militia, aided by the 39th U. S. Infantry Regiment and Cherokee and Lower Creek warriors, crushed the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River.

The British had built a strong fort on the Apalachicola River at Prospect Bluff, and in 1815, after the end of the War of 1812, offered it, with all its ordnance (muskets, cannons, powder, shot, cannonballs) to the locals: Seminoles and maroons (escaped slaves).

The following year, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida with an army that included more than 1,000 Lower Creek warriors; they destroyed Seminole towns and captured Pensacola.

In the late 1810s and early 1820s, McIntosh helped create a centralized police force called 'Law Menders,' establish written laws, and form a National Creek Council.

For the improvements in the country where you now live, and for all the stock which you cannot take with you, your Father will pay you a fair price ...At Jackson's request, the United States Congress opened a fierce debate on an Indian Removal Bill.

Captured with Emathala were some one thousand other person ... their [racial] colors were black, red, and white ...At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Opothleyahola refused to form an alliance with the Confederacy, unlike many other tribes, including many of the Lower Creeks.

Runaway slaves, free blacks, Chickasaw and Seminole Indians began gathering at Opothleyahola's plantation, where they hoped to remain neutral in the conflict between the North and South.

These efforts were part of the US government's attempt to impose assimilation on the tribes, to introduce household ownership of land, and to remove legal barriers to the Indian Territory's achieving statehood.