Tohopeka

This volume of multidisciplinary essays grew out of a symposium on the Creek War of 1813–1814, a conflict that decimated one of the strongest Indian nations in the United States and resulted in an immense land cession. The book takes its title from the Creek name for Horseshoe Bend, the climactic battle of the Creek War and the location (as Marianne Mills notes in the book's foreword) of a modern national military park in eastern Alabama. However, the essays in Tohopeka cover the entire war and its aftermath; they can be divided into three groups. In the first category, essays on the origins and context of the Creek War, Robert G. Thrower's chapter traces the start of the conflict to a civil war between Creek progressives and traditionalists. Gregory Evans Dowd notes the role played by Tecumseh in inspiring the Creek insurgents, or Red Sticks, but notes his call for pan-Indian unity was part of a long tradition. John E. Grenier examines the behavior of American troops toward Indians during the War of 1812 and concludes, unsurprisingly, that Americans' mission in Indian country was “to extirpate, expropriate, and segregate” (p. 177). Robert P. Collins carefully disproves the belief held by many contemporary Americans that Britain inspired the Red Stick uprising, and he attributes white settlers' fears of Indian massacre to what Peter Silver called “the anti-Indian sublime” (Our Savage Neighbors, 2008, p. xx

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