TTHN Ep 11 - Red Stick Ruination

Division.

Before there was Horseshoe Bend…there was a nation tearing itself apart.

In the years leading up to the Creek War, the Muscogee Confederacy found itself divided over one question that would reshape the future of the American South:

How do you survive the unstoppable expansion of the United States?

Some Creek leaders believed accommodation and diplomacy offered the best chance for survival. Others believed that path would only lead to the destruction of their people, their culture, and their lands.

The result was civil war.

As violence spread across the Southeast, Red Stick warriors struck at those they believed had aligned themselves with the Americans. American frontier settlements answered with retaliation. The conflict spiraled…until finally it came to a bend in the Tallapoosa River called Tohopeka.

Known today as Horseshoe Bend.

There, in March of 1814, roughly 1,000 Red Stick warriors fortified themselves behind a massive barricade alongside hundreds of women and children. Facing them was an army under Andrew Jackson made up of Tennessee militia, United States Regulars, Cherokee warriors, and Lower Creek allies.

What followed was brutal.

In this episode, we examine the divisions within the Creek Nation, Tecumseh’s influence, the rise of the Red Sticks, the Creek War campaign, the battle itself, and the devastating aftermath that followed.

Because Horseshoe Bend did more than end a war.

It redrew the map of the American South.

📚 Sources

Braund, K. H. (2024). Mapping Conquest: The Battle Maps of Horseshoe Bend. University of Georgia Press.

Braund, K. H. (n.d.). “American Indians and the War of 1812.” In The War of 1812 Official National Park Service Handbook. National Park Service.

Kanon, T. (2015). Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans. University of Alabama Press.

Peach, S. (2025). Muscogee Creek History and the American South, 1750–1815. Presentation transcript.

Encyclopedia of Alabama. (n.d.). “Battle of Horseshoe Bend.”

Encyclopedia of Alabama. (n.d.). “Battle of Burnt Corn Creek.”

University at Albany Libraries, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives. Espy Project Execution Record: John Woods. Espy File ID 10002. Reviewed by author.

Tennessee Encyclopedia. (n.d.). “Creek War of 1813 and 1814.”

Horseshoe Bend National Military Park museum exhibits, battlefield interpretation, maps, brochures, and interpretive materials reviewed by author.

National Park Service. (n.d.). Horseshoe Bend National Military Park official interpretive materials.

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). “Battle of Horseshoe Bend.” Wikipedia. Used as supplemental reference material.

🎙️ Credits

Hosted by Big John Summers
Produced by Summers Media Enterprises

Music by Big John Summers

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to The Tennessee History Nerd. This is a podcast dedicated to Tennessee's past. Every week we bring you a new story about the people, places, and events that have shaped Tennessee and made it and us who and what we are. So grab your favorite beverage, find a comfortable place, and sit back and enjoy. Division. In the summer of eighteen thirteen, that word division described the state of the Muscogee Confederacy, the Creek Nation. Call it what you want. Rift, split, conflict, descent, rupture, discord. It doesn't matter. The point was that the nation was at a point of deadly, serious contention. And the primary cause of it was the conflict and philosophies of what to do about the never-ending flood of white settlers encroaching on Muscogee lands. In the National Council of the Confederacy, the leaders of the Lower Creeks had typically more influence. And those lower creeks were generally more favorable to their European descended neighbors and more likely to favor assimilation with them. The Upper Creeks, who leaned very militantly toward the traditional Creek ways, were more likely to resist violently the incursions into Creek territories by American settlers. They had been influenced by Shawnee Statesman Tecumseh's visit in 1811, but also their own prophets had encouraged armed resistance to the whites' violations of their sovereignty. In mid-1812, Muscogee Warriors led by Chief Little Warrior attacked and killed several white settlers on the Duck River in Tennessee and kidnapped Martha Crawley as they were returning from Detroit, where they'd met with Tecumseh to discuss military strategy and to meet the British at Fort Malden. He made a second trip later in 1812 to coordinate assistance from the British, pledges of arms and ammunition, including letters from the British to agents in Florida. And on this return trip in February 1813, near the mouth of the Ohio River, they murdered seven white families. U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins demanded that the Muscogee leadership either surrender those responsible or punish them and made it clear that they would be invaded if the Detroit Travelers weren't punished. The Muscogee National Council, which was led by Big Warrior, ordered that those responsible be executed. In April 1813, a group led by Chief William McIntosh tracked down Little Warrior and ten of his men and executed them. Immediately, this resulted in a substantial rift within the Muscogee Nation. In retaliation, the Upper Creeks targeted the chiefs and warriors who had carried out the executions of Little Warrior and his men. They were outraged that the Muscogee leadership would kill their own people to appease the American government, and they raised their red war clubs in rebellion. And those red war clubs gave the Muscogee rebels their name that we know them by today, the Red Stick Creeks. And now Muscogee blood had been shed, and there would be war. War within the Muscogee nation itself, and war against the white settlers encroaching on Muscogee lands. In July of 1813, about 300 Red Sticks led by Peter McQueen traveled to Pensacola with the letters that had been given to Little Warrior and money, either about $400 or about 400 British pounds, depending on what account you reference, for the purpose of obtaining those arms and ammunition promised by the British in Detroit. This wasn't exactly a secret mission. Both Lower Creek allies and American spies reported the presence of the Red Sticks in Pensacola and their purpose for being there. And so a militia force was organized to intercept those warriors as they returned to prevent them from carrying that large amount of munitions and arms back with them. Because this was considered part of the territory of Mississippi at that time, the Americans saw this as a legitimate action to take as part of the scope of protecting the white settlers in the territory. But until this point, with the exception of the actions like Raids by the Little Warrior, the war had been internal to the Muscogee Nation. The Red Sticks were practicing a scorched earth war to brutally eliminate those who had aligned themselves with the European settlers, and this was in direct opposition to the Americanization program led by Benjamin Hawkins. That program was based on the concept of the yeoman farmer that would turn the Native Americans, in this case the Muscogies, into sedentary farmers on relatively small plots of land. This would in turn free up the excess lands required for hunting and trapping for white settlement. Thus, the traditionalist red sticks saw any type of livestock such as cattle, sheep, or pigs, and technology such as weaving looms as white influence. So not only did they kill those rival Muscogee who had those things, they also killed all the livestock and burned all the looms. They saw the possession of those kinds of things as evidence that a Muscogee was becoming white and was thus an enemy of the spirit. One festering example of the Americanization program that was profoundly detested by the traditionalists was the Federal Road. Traveling from Milledgeville, Georgia to Fort Stoddart on the Mobile River and eventually all the way to New Orleans, the Federal Road cut through the heart of Muscogee Country. Created originally as a post road for delivering mail, it was widened by the U.S. Army in 1811 to be 16 feet wide to facilitate the travel of wagons over the road. Bridges and ferries had been constructed or implemented to facilitate river crossings. This was intended for the sake of the Army's ability to travel quickly and efficiently through the area if needed, but also served to create an efficient thoroughfare for settlers passing through as well. To the Red Sticks, it was a pestilence that carried into their heartland the very things they feared and hated the most: commerce, outsiders, and the lifestyle that ensured the destruction of their forests. The traditionalists hated the bridges and ferries in particular. To them, the rivers were spiritually significant, and thus the bridges were perceived as a form of spiritual desecration. So the Red Sticks attacked those Muscogies they saw as corrupted and traitors to their people. But these actions also resulted in them being low on ammunition and needing to resupply. Thus, the purpose of the trip of McQueen's large group to Pensacola. This mission would provide the flashpoint that would be the ultimate undoing of not only the Red Sticks, but of the entire Muskogee nation in the southeast. And it would lead to a place called Burnt Corn Creek. McQueen's Red Sticks were successful in obtaining ammunition and gunpowder in Pensacola that they had sought when they went there. Based on the letters that Little Warrior had obtained from the British, the Spanish governor of Pensacola, Mateo Gonzalez Manrique, provided the munition to McQueen's men as a friendly present, presumably for hunting purposes. On July 27, 1813, McQueen's party of red sticks were returning home through what is today South Central Alabama. They had pack horses laden with munitions that they had obtained. As they rested at Burnt Corn Creek, they were ambushed by the militia that had been assembled under Colonel James Kallor. Incidentally, Kallor was evidently a local firebrand who was operating without official orders from the territorial governor. Initially, the Americans captured the pack horses carrying the munitions, but while the militia was then attempting to loot the supplies, the Red Sticks regrouped and counterattacked, and the militia were ultimately driven back. This incident served to escalate the conflict from an internal Muscogee Civil War and to ignite what came to be called the Creek War within the larger War of 1812 conflict. And that escalation led to a place called Fort Mims. Fort Mims was so named because it was the home of Samuel Mims. Mims was a trader who had become wealthy because of the Federal Road. The fort itself was not a proper professional military blockhouse type of structure. It was more of a stockade, roughly a rectangular wall of upright pine logs comprised of about an acre in area. It was built around the home and outbuildings of Samuel Mims. The entrance was a large heavy wooden gate on the eastern wall. Because of recent rains and traffic at that time, a substantial sand drift was built up at the base of the gate, which made it difficult to close and impossible to do so quickly. On August 30th, 1813, the militia commander of the fort, Major Daniel Beasley, was overconfident. He didn't feel it necessary to keep the gate closed or to maintain a proper watch, and he ignored warnings from enslaved scouts who had observed the Red Sticks in the woods nearby. The Red Sticks had been observing the fort for hours and knew that the rhythm of daily life in the fort was based on the beat of the drum. Different times of the day were signaled by the drum beat. The routine was predictable, and the overconfidence and laxity of the troops there proved to be their downfall. The Red Sticks used the fort's own strict, civilized routine, the noon drum signaling midday as the signal to commence the attack. At that time, the militia who were present laid down their arms to head to the mess to eat. The gate was stuck open, blocked open by the sand drift. As the drum ceased, the Red Stick warriors arose from the tall grass and rushed through the open gate and were inside the outer wall before the militia could even reach their weapons. Beasley was among those who struggled to close the gate and was struck down by a war club early in the attack. According to legend, so confident had Beasley been of the security of the fort that as the attack commenced, one of the scouts who had warned of the presence of the enemy was tied to a post in preparation for being whipped for lying and raising a false alarm. So complete was the surprise that the attackers used the loopholes in the wall to shoot at people inside the fort. These were meant to be firing positions from which the defenders could shoot at the enemy outside the fort, but the red sticks were at those positions from outside the fort before they could be manned by the defenders inside the fort, turning those defensive positions into killing fields. Additionally, the fort at the time of the attack was a crowded place. The roughly one acre interior of the fort was packed with over 500 people, not just the militia, but also white families, friendly creeks, and slaves. That density made a coordinated defense by the militia impossible once the gate was breached. Estimates are that 250 to 300 of the defenders, men, women, and children, were killed, and additionally a great many were carried away captive. A handful were able to escape what was called a dog hole that was cut through the wall of the fort. But still, about 100 of the roughly 1,000 Red Stick warriors involved in the Fort Mims massacre were also believed to have been killed in the attack. So, while this was definitely a victory for the Red Sticks, the loss of about a tenth of the attacking force of experienced warriors was a significant blow to the rebellion. That said, a much more significant blow to the rebellion was the reaction to the massacre. From the perspective of the Red Sticks, Fort Mims was retaliation for Keller and the militia attacking them at Burnt Corn Creek. For many Americans, this was an unjustified massacre of innocent life, and it had to be addressed. And this is the point at which this truly becomes Tennessee history, because it is at this point that an ambitious Nashville attorney and politician turned militia officer takes center stage, Andrew Jackson. Jackson had been spoiling for a fight with the Creeks ever since Little Warriors' Duck River murders and the kidnapping of Martha Crawley in 1812. The Fort Mims massacre ensured that this now became a United States issue instead of an internal Muscogee Confederation affair. After news of the Fort Mims massacre reached Nashville on September 18, 1813, the Tennessee legislature authorized Governor Wiley Blunt to raise 3,500 volunteer militia for the purpose of exterminating the Creek Nation. Blunt had Jackson in mind for leading this force. However, there was a problem. Jackson was bedridden with wounds suffered in a gunfight on September 4, 1813, that had resulted from a side argument related to a duel in which Jackson was the second for one of his officers. In that gunfight, Jackson was seriously wounded. His left shoulder was shattered, and his doctors implored him to allow the arm to be amputated, which he refused. When he rode out of Nashville on October 7th, he was so weak that he had to be lifted into the saddle by his aides, and he wore a sling for his left arm for the entire campaign leading up to Horseshoe Bend. Jackson and his force did not go straight from Nashville to Horseshoe Bend. He engaged in a war of attrition to do what he had been commissioned to do. He was striving to completely eliminate the Red Sticks. So he spent several long, grueling months destroying Red Stick villages like Tallas Hatchie and Talladega. And yes, for the NASCAR fans out there, this is the same Talladega near which the modern super speedway exists today. The racetrack is about 10 miles north of the site of the battle. And as an aside, because it does have a bit of a connection, many race fans believe that the racetrack is cursed because it was built on sacred Indian ground. The entire region is the heart of the Muscogee homeland, and that curse, often called the Talladega Jinx, is cited to explain the freak accidents and the big one crashes that happened there. At the time of the Battle of Talladega, Jackson was actually responding to rescue a group of Friendly Creek Indians who were trapped inside Fort Leslie by about 700 red sticks. Jackson surrounded the force with about 2,000 troops and killed about 300 of them in 15 minutes. However, Jackson was unable to fully exploit the victory because throughout the whole campaign, his force was always on the edge of starvation. Legends claim that there were periods that he and his men were reduced to eating acorns to survive. So he had to retreat to his base to try to find food, and the remainder of the Red Sticks were able to escape. As Jackson and his militia campaigned throughout what is today central Alabama, and as he continued to destroy the Red Stick villages, the refugees from these villages began more and more migrating to the area of the Tallapoosa River. And not all of the battles in the campaign turned out to be victories for Jackson. In January 1814, he had tactical setbacks in the battles of Emmacfowl and Anita Chopko. These battles were fought with green troops. His original militia's enlistments had expired, and the men he had at this point were largely raw, inexperienced recruits. He determined to strike the Red Stick concentration on the Tallapoosa River and moved in with about 800 green troops and about 200 Cherokees and Friendly Creeks. At Emakfow, his men managed to hold the line, but Jackson realized his men were not in a position to overcome the enemy and the battle was a stalemate. So he decided to pull back to his base at Fort Struther. At a point two days later, where Jackson's force was pulling back and crossing Anita Chopco Creek, the Red Sticks ambushed him from the rear, and the center of his line broke and fled. Only when John Coffey had the six-pounder cannon dragged into position and started firing grape shot into the Red Sticks did they fall back. It was a narrow escape. Jackson realized that he was not equipped to carry the battle to the Red Sticks with his green militia. So he waited until he was reinforced by the 39th U.S. Infantry before continuing the fight. Meanwhile, the Red Sticks gained confidence from the near disaster and began to place a lot more faith in their holy ground at Tohopaca, believing that they were invincible there. And this is where more and more of the Red Sticks began to concentrate. Tehopaca was located on a peninsula formed by a bin in the Talapusa River. It was bordered on three sides by the river itself, and the Red Sticks had constructed a fortification across the narrow neck at the top of the U of the peninsula. By all accounts, this was a very well-engineered and constructed fortification. It was built in a zigzag pattern that forced attackers to be vulnerable to crossfire from multiple directions as they drew closer to the wall. It had two sets of loopholes, one for standing defenders and the other for kneeling defenders. It was constructed from massive pine and oak logs that were stacked horizontally to a height of five to eight feet. In short, it was a formidable position. To the rear of the barricade is where the village was located, where the women and children were. And the Red Sticks had made a fatal error in their calculations regarding their position. They believed that the Tallapoosa River created an impenetrable wall for the rear of their positions. This would prove to be a tragic miscalculation for them. The 52-mile trek for Jackson's force from Fort Williams to Tohopaca was a brutal test of resolve and endurance. There were no roads. The Red Sticks had chosen a pathless wilderness for their final stronghold. And this was a tremendous challenge for the transport of the artillery and supply wagons. Jackson's men had to literally cut a road through the forest as they advanced. And so that they could try to maintain surprise, no drums or other loud signals. Were permitted by Jackson. The men carried seven days of rations with them. Either the battle would be won quickly or they would starve. They didn't have enough supplies for a protracted siege. Just before the march began, a seventeen-year-old soldier by the name of John Woods had been executed by firing squad. He was charged with mutiny. While on guard duty at Fort Williams, Woods was eating breakfast when an officer ordered him to pick up some bones scattered around the camp. Woods, feeling he was being treated unfairly, refused and allegedly leveled his musket at the officer. Woods was executed by firing squad in front of the entire army. The message was clear. There were no more volunteers, only soldiers. From that moment on, the militia moved with a terrified precision they had not been showing previously. Jackson used Woods as an object lesson for his militia. As a result, at the point the 52-mile march began, his men were more afraid of him than they were the Red Sticks. Harsh though it was, it ensured unit cohesion during the grueling journey, and that journey began on March 24, 1814. On the evening of March 26th, the army reached a high ridge. Below them lay the Tallapoosa River and the 100-acre peninsula of Tohopaka. Jackson spent the night studying the Red Stick Wall. He realized that for all the Red Sticks' engineering genius, they had made one fatal error. They had no reserve force. Every man was at the wall. Jackson immediately ordered General John Coffey to take 700 cavalry and 600 Indian allies and circle around to the opposite side of the river. Mid morning on March 27th, Jackson opened the assault with his artillery barrage, such as it was. He had two artillery pieces, a three-pounder and a six-pounder. He set these up several yards from the Red Stick barricade. For two hours the artillery pounded the breastworks. For two hours he achieved no results from that effort. The green timbers of the breastworks flexed and gave with the pounding, and the cannonballs were absorbed by the wall like a sponge. The Red Sticks mocked the Americans, picking up the cannonballs and waving them at Jackson's force to show that they were unharmed. By this point, John Coffey and his troops had taken up position around the entire bend of the Tallapoosa on the opposite side of the river. It was at this point that one of the Cherokee leaders named the Whale noticed the Red Stick canoes on the village side of the river. He and a few others dove into the water. Under heavy fire, they swam across the river, grabbed the canoes, and paddled them back to the American lines. These enabled the Cherokees to ferry hundreds of their warriors into the rear of the Red Stick village. When Jackson saw the smoke from the burning village, he ordered the frontal assault. As the 39th Infantry assaulted the wall, the prophets were among the first to die. Legend has it that Monahe was struck in the mouth by a piece of grape shot, thus silencing the mouth that had promised invincibility to the Red Stick warriors. Once the prophets fell and the smoke rose from the burning village behind them, the Red Sticks realized that the perceived magic of their holy ground had been broken. Jackson's troops gave no quarter. Of the roughly 1,000 warriors at Horseshoe Bend, over 800 were killed. To my knowledge, it remains the single deadliest day for Native Americans in the history of the United States to date. Nearly 90% of the Red Stick Force present was killed. That is all but total annihilation. In the subsequent Treaty of Fort Jackson, the Native Americans were forced to cede roughly 23 million acres of land to the United States, about half of modern day Alabama and a large portion of Georgia. Jackson went from avenging the Fort Mims massacre and ending the Red Stick threat to orchestrating what may be one of the most blatant land grabs in the history of the United States, even subjecting his Native American allies who had saved his life to being stripped of their lands. The Muscogee Confederacy, the Creek Nation, was broken forever. Sixteen years later, as President of the United States, he would sign the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that ultimately would lead to the Trail of Tears. If I recall my high school American history correctly, the War of 1812 was said to have resulted in status quo antebellum. The status remains as it was before the war. That may have been true for the British, but it most definitely was not true for the Native Americans. They lost huge swathes of land and would never recover. The competing philosophies for how the land should be used, right or wrong, that of the European settlers would prevail. And what a roll call of famous people, primarily Tennesseans, fought in this battle. Major Lemuel Montgomery, prominent young attorney from Nashville, would be the first atop the fortifications. He would die there. Montgomery, Alabama would be named for him. It would serve as the first capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War only a few decades later. Sam Houston would be very seriously wounded there and even left for dead. But he would recover and eventually would become governor of Tennessee. He would resign his governorship and eventually find his way to Texas. He would be in command of the Texian forces at the Battle of San Jacinto, or if you prefer, San Jacino, where those forces would defeat the Mexican forces under Santa Ana and win their independence. He would go on to serve as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas and then as governor of the state of Texas when it was admitted into the Union. The only man to ever serve as governor of two different states. Davy Crockett is said by some sources to have been president at Horseshoe Bend. He later served as a U.S. representative from the state of Tennessee. Later, he also went to Texas and he died at the Alamo. John Coffey continued to play a major role in Jackson's military campaigns throughout the remainder of the War of 1812. He participated in the Pensacola Raid in late 1814 as well as leading a daring night raid on the British force advancing on New Orleans, giving Jackson crucial additional time to prepare the New Orleans defenses. He then commanded the 2,000-man brigade that held the American left flank against the British. After the military campaigns, John Coffey moved to Alabama. He became Surveyor General of the Alabama Territory in 1817, lived for a time in Huntsville, and then founded the city of Florence, Alabama. Both Coffee County, Alabama and Coffey County, Tennessee are named for him. He died on his plantation called Hickory Hill in 1833. Andrew Jackson pinned the epitaph on his tombstone. Gideon Morgan had married Margaret Severe, the granddaughter of Tennessee's first governor, John Severe, just before the campaign. He was severely wounded in the battle, a head wound suffered during the charge. He survived, and he and Margaret settled in the Cherokee Nation in what is now McMinn County, Tennessee. He operated a trading post in Calhoun and was instrumental in the development of Calhoun, where he died in 1851. John Ross was the founder of Ross's Landing, modern-day Chattanooga. He spent a large part of his life fighting against the man he'd served under at Horseshoe Bend. He helped lead the legal fight in Worcester versus Georgia. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in favor of Ross and the Cherokees, but Jackson ignored the ruling. Ross became principal chief among the Cherokee people, even though he was only one-eighth Cherokee, serving from 1828 until his death in 1866. He was forced westward as part of the Trail of Tears in 1838. His wife died of exposure on the Trail of Tears, having reportedly given her only blanket to a sick child. And Sequoia, the subject of episode 5, The Talking Leaves, was a Cherokee inventor, craftsman, and statesman. He famously invented the Cherokee syllabary, the first ever illiterate person in history to create a writing system. He enabled his people to become highly literate. Some figures place the percentage at about 90% of the Cherokee in Georgia were literate at the time of their forced removal to the Western lands. And at that same time, their white neighbors were about 17% literate. He was one of the early Western settlers, having moved west before the Trail of Tears. After the Cherokee Nation was moved to what is now Oklahoma, he set out to find a group of Cherokee who had moved to Mexico many years before. He died on the return trip in about 1843. And of course, Andrew Jackson went on to achieve great glory and popularity as the result of his victory at Horseshoe Bend, and even more so from his victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Ironically, the battle, which took place in January of 1815, transpired after the war was already over. The Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24, 1814, but the news had not yet traveled back across the Atlantic. Interestingly, Article IX of the treaty, insisted on by the British, required that the U.S. restore all lands taken from the Native Americans since 1811. However, the U.S. argued that because the Creeks had signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the land transfer was legal and final. The British chose not to push that issue in order to secure peace with the United States. The 23 million acres remained in U.S. hands. And following the contested 1824 presidential election, in which no candidate had a majority of the electoral votes, Henry Clay used his influence to ensure that the House of Representatives selected John Quincy Adams as president. Adams made Clay Secretary of State. Jackson publicly accused both of a corrupt bargain. In 1828, Jackson won the presidency and served two terms. At the time of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, all the lands between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River were part of the territory of Mississippi. In 1817, Mississippi became a state. In 1819, Alabama followed. About half of the territory that became the state of Alabama was comprised of lands ceded to the United States by the Muscogee and the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend is often flattened and marginalized. It's overshadowed on Jackson's resume by the Battle of New Orleans and by his later presidency. But it was a significant waypoint in the lives of several famous Tennesseans. It completely redrew the map of what would become Alabama. It broke the Muscogee Confederacy. If it's not the deadliest day for Native Americans in U.S. history, it's near the top. It laid the groundwork of what was to become the Trail of Tears. In short, it changed the trajectory of what the South was to become. It's hard to imagine how subsequent events would have turned out had Horseshoe Ben not happened or if the U.S. had lost the battle. It was that important, and the downstream impact was that deep. And that's going to do it for this episode of the Tennessee History Nerd. I hope that this journey down into Alabama to the Tallapoosa River was worth the ride for you. And I hope you'll join us next time when we wade into the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers in search of aquatic gemstones in episode 12, A Pearl of a Story. Until then, I'm Big John Summers, the Tennessee History Nerd, and I am history. So before we completely close up everything for today, I wanted to take just a few moments to highlight the authors, museums, and other researchers whose work I relied on to create this episode. Research for this episode included materials from the official interpretive resources and exhibits of Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, including battlefield maps, museum displays, park brochures, and National Park Service Historical Interpretation. Additional historical background and battlefield analysis came from Catherine Braun's Mapping Conquest, the battle maps of Horseshoe Bend, including the discussion of the battlefield terrain, the Red Stick Barricade, troop movements, and contemporary battle maps created by participants of the campaign. Dr. Braun's article, American Indians and the War of 1812 and the War of 1812 Official National Park Service Handbook also provided helpful insight in the preparation for today's episode. Supplemental historical context regarding the Creek Confederacy, Creek political culture, and Creek War of 1813 and 14, and the events that precipitated the war came from the Encyclopedia of Alabama, the Tennessee Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia's articles on the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the Battle of Burntcorn Creek, and the Fort Mims Massacre. Additional insight into Muscogee political structure and culture came from Dr. Stephen Peach's presentation, Muscogee Creek History and the American South, 1750 to 1815, which is available on YouTube. And Tom Cannon's Tennesseans at War 1812 to 1815 also provided context around the Fort Mim's reaction in Tennessee and Jackson's activities and condition at the beginning of the Red Stick campaign. As always, I extend my sincere gratitude to all these researchers for the work they do, and I highly recommend that you also check them out as you have opportunity. And thanks so much for listening.