Two hundred years ago, when the activities of the white man in
North America were dominated by clashing imperial ambitions and
colonial rivalry, the great Creek Confederacy rested in savage
contentment under the reign of native law. No one in their whole
world could do the Creeks harm, and they welcomed the slight white
man who came with gifts and promises to enjoy the hospitality of
their invincible towns.
Their reputation as warriors and diplomats, during the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, extended to the most
distant reaches of the Indian country. Secure in their careless
strength, friendly toward the white man until his encroachment made
them resentful and desperate, they learned that they had no guile
to match broken promises, and no disciplined courage to provide
unity against white ruthlessness. Broken, dissembled, and their
ranks depleted by the Creek and Seminole wars, they were subjected
to that shameful and tragic removal which forced all the Five
Civilized Tribes to a new home in the untried wilderness west of
the Mississippi.
There, when they found the land good, they revitalized their
shattered tribal institutions and rebuilt them upon the pattern of
the American constitutional republic. But contentment again was
short-lived as they were encircled by the encroaching white man
with his hunger for land, his herds of cattle, and his desire for
lumber, minerals, and railway concessions. They were faced,
moreover, with internal political strife, and split by the
sectionalism of the Civil War. Yet, they still survived in native
steadfastness-a trait which is characteristic of the Creek-until
the final denouement produced by the Dawes Act.
In "The Road to Disappearance, "Miss Debo tells for the first
time the full Creek story from its vague anthropological beginnings
to the loss by the tribe of independent political identity, when
during the first decade of this century the lands of the Five
Civilized Tribes were divided into severalty ownership. Her book is
an absorbing narrative of a minority people, clinging against all
odds to native custom, language, and institution. It is the
chronicle of the internal life of the tribe -the structure of Creek
society-with its folkways, religious beliefs, politics, wars,
privations, and persecutions. Miss Debo's research has divulged
many new sources of information, and her history of the Creeks
since the Civil War is a special contribution because that period
has been largely neglected by the historians of the American
Indian.
"The vitality of our race still persists," said a Creek orator.
"We have not lived for naught.... We have given to the European
people on this continent our thought forces-the best blood of our
ancestors having intermingled with that of their best statesmen and
leading citizens. We made ourselves an indestructible element in
their national history. We have shown that what they believed were
arid and desert places were habitable and capable of sustaining
millions of people.... The race that has rendered this service to
the other nations of mankind cannot utterly perish."
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