In 1715, early in the Yamasee War, Oconee and the other towns of the former Apalachicola Province moved back to the Chattahoochee River.
Around 1750, part of the people of Oconee, under the leadership of Ahaya, moved to Florida, settling next to the Alachua Prairie.
[1] Oconee was one of a number of towns in the Apalachicola Province on the Chattahoochee River in Alabama and Georgia in the first half of the 17th century.
The towns were situated along 160 kilometres (100 mi) of the river from the south of the falls at present-day Columbus to Barbour County, Alabama.
[2] The people of Oconee and other Hichiti towns on the Chatthoochee River are believed to have descended from earlier inhabitants of the area.
The next year the towns of Apalachicola Province began moving from the Chattahoochee River to the interior of Georgia, closer to their trading partners in Carolina.
[8] Most of the towns from the Chattahoochee River that moved to central Georgia settled on what the Btitish called Ochese Creek or its tributaries.
The Ochese Creek towns moved west, with most of them returning to the Chattahoochee River.,[16] where they became known as the Lower Creeks[a] or Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy)[17] Oconee moved back to the Chattahoochee River that year, and was possibly located at archaeological sites 1RU20 and 1RU21 in Russell County, Alabama from 1715 into the 1750s.
[19] Pedro de Olivera y Fullana, governor of Spanish Florida, sent Diego Peña, a retired lieutenant from the garrison in St, Augustine, to the towns on the Chattahoochee River three times between 1716 and 1718; in 1717 with an invitation to the towns to move into the former Apalachee and Timucua provinces of Spanish Florida.
[23] The people of what is now Georgia and the towns on the Chattahoochee, including Oconee, used Florida as a vast hunting ground.
[10] James Oglethorpe, the governor of the Province of Georgia, invaded Spanish Florida in 1740, laying siege to its capitol, St. Augustine.
Several archaeological sites on the east (Georgia) side of the Chattahoochee River have been tentatively identified with Oconee, including 9SS3 and 9SW52.
[27] About 1750, Ahaya, later called "Cowkeeper" by the British, led a faction of Oconees into Florida in search of a new home.