This is the true story of a Tennessee woman who was kidnapped by Indians in 1812 and brought down to BLACK WARRIOR'S TOWN. This incident became one of the pretexts Jackson used to justify the annexation 23-million acres of Creek land by his Treaty of Ft. Jackson in 1814.

Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Crawley
by Robert Register

On August 9, 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson with the Chiefs of the Creek Nation. Jackson's treaty mentions Creek aggressions against citizens of the U.S. "at the mouth of the Duck River, Fort Mims and elsewhere..." Here Jackson used the tragic saga of Mrs. Martha Crawley of Duck River to justify tearing 23-million acres away from the Creek Nation.
This is her story...


In June of 1812, the Creek-American War had not begun, but war clouds could be seen on the horizon. Congress had issued a declaration of war against Great Britain on June 18, so news could not have reached Hillabee Haujo's men at Black Warrior's Town, but one did not need a formal declaration of war to assess the hostile disposition of the young Creek Warriors who gathered around the cooking fires on that warm evening 200 years ago this year.


Mrs. Martha Crawley of Humphrey County, Tennessee, certainly appreciated the threat these young men represented as she stirred their hominy cooking on the fire. Three weeks earlier this courageous pioneer woman had witnessed these fellows' skills of destruction with fire and gunpowder. These angry, thoughtless young criminals were ungovernable and their indiscretions would lead their tribe into a bloody civil war of annihilation.


Mrs. Crawley was in her home waiting for her husband to return when she heard the monstrous screams of the young Indians coming through her open door. Quickly shutting the door, she held it against the attacking Creeks. Her visitor, Mrs. Manly, sat in the living room of the house clutching her eight-day old infant. The last thing she told Mrs. Crawley was that it would be impossible to keep the Indians out. At that moment the war party burst through the door, slamming Mrs. Crawley behind the door and hiding her. From the temporary sanctuary of the space behind the door, she witnessed acts that would "chill the blood of any human being."

Helplessly, she watched one of her own children hide in the potato cellar as one of the Creeks snatched Mrs. Manly's baby from her arms and threw it into the fireplace. Mrs. Manly was then shot and scalped. Mrs. Crawley witnessed two of her own children, two of Mrs. Manly's children and a young man name Hays brutally murdered.

When discovered hiding behind the door, Mrs. Martha Crawley begged for her life. The Indians let her live. Maybe they needed her to cook for them on the trail south to Black Warrior's Town, or maybe those boys had their fill of killing that day.

The captive Mrs. Crawley and Hillabee Haujo's men took three weeks to cover the trail to Black Warrior's Town. It was now June and they had been back only one day when one of the squaws told Mrs. Crawley that the men were digging her grave and that she would be put to death right after she cooked supper. No longer needed for her cooking skills on the trail, Mrs. Crawley knew time was of the essence and the boiling pot of hominy was central to her plan of escape.

There are many sources that detail her captivity and escape, but the most compelling document is her own sworn deposition. On August 11, 1812, Mrs. Martha Crawley appeared before the Justice of the Peace of Humphrey County, Tennessee, and testified about her treatment during her captivity. According to her testimony, Mrs. Crawley was hurriedly taken by her captors to the mouth of Duck River, where bark canoes stashed on the river bank enabled the party to escape the Nashville militia which was assembling seventy miles to the east.

Mrs. Crawley spent her first night tied to a tree by her neck and arms. The next day they headed south for Bear Creek on the Tennessee River. After a twelve day journey, they arrived at the point near the northern terminus of the Alabama-Mississippi state line. At this place, the men spent the day smoking and drinking with some Chickasaws headed by George Colbert. Colbert, for whom Colbert County takes its name, had a family that ran a ferry across the Tennessee River on the Natchez Trace. As Chief of the Chickasaws, Colbert probably regretted ignoring Mrs. Crawley while enjoying refreshments with her gangster captors, especially after he received a letter from Andrew Jackson dated June 5, 1812. Jackson was not happy with the report that the rumor mill was sending him concerning Chickasaw Chief Colbert's indifference to Mrs. Crawley's distress. Jackson wrote:

Friend and Brother!
Mark what I tell you!
The white people will do no wrong to the Indians and will suffer the Indians to do no wrong to them. The Creeks have killed our women and children:
We have sent to demand the murderers, if they are not given up, the whole Creek nation shall be covered with blood:
fire shall consume their towns and villages:
and their lands shall be divided among the whites.

Friend and Brother!
You tell us you are the friend of the whites. 
Now prove it to me.
Send me the names of the Creeks who have killed our women and children:
Tell me the towns they belong to; and the place where they carried the women.

I am your friend and brother. 
Andrew Jackson
5 June 1812

After leaving Bear Creek, another week on the trail took the Indians and their captive across the Tennessee Valley Divide, down the Tombigbee and east to Black Warrior's Town. Soon word that a captive American woman was being held at Black Warrior's Town traveled downriver to St. Stephens and into the Choctaw Indian Trading House of George Strother Gaines. The bearer of the news was Tandy Walker, Choctaw agency blacksmith and one of the most extraordinary backwoodsman on the Alabama frontier. Since 1811, Walker had secretly informed Gaines of Ocheocheemotla's schemes to support the British in a new war where Ocheocheemotla would pillage Gaines store at St. Stephens on the Tombigbee.

Gaines' wife also heard Tandy Walker's information and she pleaded with this daring frontiersman who spoke the Muskogee language to rescue Mrs. Crawley and bring her down the river to St. Stephens.

While Tandy Walker paddled up the Black Warrior to attempt the rescue of Mrs. Crawley, there was no time to be lost in getting her out of Black Warrior's Town. The squaw's warning about the freshly opened grave let Martha know it was time to act. After stirring the thick hominy, Martha Crawley told one of the men by sign language that the hominy was too thick and she asked permission to take a tin cup to the spring for water.

She made her escape in the dark woods but instead of wandering aimlessly through the night, she hid in a hollow log. Daybreak found her uncertain and confused. It was afternoon before she decided upon her strategy. She would follow the setting sun toward the Tombigbee. Martha knew where that river was located. She and her captors had traveled south down the Tombigbee after leaving Bear Creek and she was certain that this pioneer trade route from the Tennessee River to the settlements around St. Stephens was her only hope for finding Americans who could protect her from the Indians.

Hungry after two days of subsisting on blackberries as well as wet and weary from her attempt to cross the swamps, Martha turned back east. By nightfall she approached an Indian town on the Black Warrior. The first Indians she saw gave her some exciting news. Her prayers had been answered. The Indians signaled that there was someone in their town who spoke English.

Could this be an American trader capable of effecting her rescue? Filled with anticipation, this pioneer woman followed the Indians to their town and she entered the dark door of the English speaker.

Anticipation turned to panic. There was no English being spoken in that house. In the dimly lighted cabin room, all Martha saw was a bunch of Indians.

Immediately she used sign language to tell the squaw she needed to step outside. With the squaw's permission, Mrs. Crawley began her second attempt to escape and ran into the night.

This time she did not seek the refuge of a hollow log. Now she walked all night and into the next day. At about one o'clock in the afternoon, an Indian with a gun walked up to Mrs. Crawley as she walked through the woods. He signaled for her to follow him back to the town on the Black Warrior. Martha refused. A little animal noise came from the armed Indian's lips and it was answered immediately by an identical noise from the woods. Martha Crawley and her new captor were soon joined by other Indians and for the third time she was heading back to Black Warrior's Town.

On this trip back to town, Martha did meet an English speaker. He was standing by a cowpen. Tandy Walker had arrived from St. Stephens under the pretense of coming upriver for a beef cattle buying trip. By offering a reward of $25 to anyone who could find Mrs. Crawley, Tandy had turned his buying trip into a dramatic rescue of a captive American woman.

With war with the Creeks inevitable, Walker probably never squared up with the Indians over the $25 reward. He and Martha took his canoe down river and soon Mrs. Crawley was mending her sore hands and feet in the comfort of Strother Gaines' Choctaw Indian Trading House located in the old Spanish fort of St. Stephens.

After recovering, Martha returned to her home on the Duck River with a group of Mr. Gaines' friends who were heading north to Tennessee through the wilderness.

Mrs. Crawley's story does not end with her return to Humphrey County and to the smiling faces of her surviving children. In the newspapers and political offices of the Old Southwest, Martha had become a cause celebre'. On June 25, 1812, Willie Blount, Governor of Tennessee, wrote Secretary of War John Armstrong to demand an invasion of the Creek Nation and claimed Martha had been stripped and paraded naked through the Indian villages along the route south to the Black Warrior's Town(In his extensive research on the Creek War published in Petitioner's Exhibit No. 410, Creek Nation East of the Mississippi versus the United States, Dr. James Doster, professor of history at the University of Alabama, writes,"I find nothing in the published statements of Mrs. Crawley or other eye witnesses to support this [Blount's] statement)." The Tennessee legislature also believed that it was a time "to kill or be killed," and called for troops to eliminate the Creeks.

A Nashville newspaper, THE CLARION, declared that the Creeks"have supplied us with a pretext for the dismemberment of their country."Andrew Jackson, enraged by President Madison's delay in delivering him his commission to be a Major General of United States Volunteers, wrote Governor Blount on July 10:

When we make the case of Mrs. Manly and her family and Mrs. Crawley our own-
when we figure to ourselves our beloved wives and little prattling infants, butchered, mangled, murdered, and torn to pieces, by savage bloodhounds, and wallowing in their gore, you can judge of our feelings. What feelings can a government have, who can hear the recital, and await the slow progress of dispatches thro the channel of a mail to an Indian agent..

Ironically, the actions of the Creek Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins, may have contributed more to war than Jackson's threat to "penetrate the Creek towns, untill the Captive, with her Captors are delivered up, and think myself Justifiable, in laying waste their villages, burning their houses, killing their warriors and leading into Captivity their wives and children, untill I do obtain a surrender of the Captive, and the Captors." Agent Hawkins assembled a Creek council that administered the death penalty to Mrs. Crawleys captors in August of 1812. This kind of leadership of the Creek Nation by Hawkins split the Indians and led to the formation of the Red Sticks.

One year later Jackson got his wish. The Creek-American War commenced when the Red Stick forces of Red Eagle (a.k.a. Billy Weatherford) attacked Ft. Mims. More than 300 people "were butchered in the quickest manner... The children were seized by the legs, and killed by batting their heads against the stockading. The women were scalped, and those who were pregnant were opened, while they were alive, and the embryo infants let out of the womb."

Angie Debo in her book on the Creeks, THE ROAD TO DISAPPEARANCE, writes about the impact of Ft. Mims,"...when the savage din died down, one hundred-seven soldiers, one hundred-sixty civilians and one hundred Negroes were lying dead and their bloody scalps were dangling from the belts of their exultant foes." The Creek Nation had been unable to restrain their own young hoodlums so now the militias of Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi with their unquenchable appetite for Indian land had the excuse they needed to burn and murder Indian friends and foes alike.

In September of 1813, Colonel John McKee, later to become Tuscaloosa County's first U.S. Representative, was in Nashville when the messenger from General E.P. Gaines, Strother Gaines' brother, arrived with the news of Fort Mims. One of General Jackson's first orders directed McKee to gather Choctaw and Chickasaw warriors to march a diversionary force against Black Warrior's Town.

The location of the Creek town on the Black Warrior which was called "Black Warrior's Town" in so much of the Creek War correspondence is controversial due to Davy Crockett's 1834 autobiography where he recalled that the abandoned Indian village Coffee's army burned in 1813 was located where Tuscaloosa stood in 1834. Contemporary study of maps and correspondence have now concluded that Black Warrior's Town was located many miles north of Tuscaloosa where two of the Black Warrior River's sources, Sipsey Fork flows into Mulberry Fork a few miles north of Sumiton near the present-day Sipsey community. McKee's Indian warriors may have burned an abandoned Creek town near present-day Tuscaloosa but that was not where Mrs. Crawley was finally rescued by Tandy Walker.

Regardless of its location, the kidnapping of Mrs. Crawley, the publicity surrounding her hardships and the punishments meted out to her kidnappers were among the major factors that led to the Indian attack on Ft. Mims where they murdered, mutilated and burned almost every person who had sought refuge there. This was the justification Andrew Jackson needed to take 23 million acres away from the Creek Indians and finally open Alabama to settlement.



MY ARTICLE FROM A '97 ISSUE OF OLD TUSCALOOSA MAGAZINE:

JOHN MCKEE: INDIAN AGENT

By Robert Register

The memory of the frontier career of Colonel John McKee, Tuscaloosa's first U.S. Representative, can never be relegated to the shadows of oblivion shared by most of Alabama's pioneers. A mountain of documentation produced by almost forty years of McKee's public service in the old Southwest continue to await the biographer who will someday preserve McKee's memory for posterity.

Colonel McKee would certainly be unconcerned that his life had never been illuminated by American historical research.
Consider the Colonel's own words.
"...money is the subject of my story, and if they will, God bless them, give me but enough of that they may keep their honors for those who are more ambitious of them."The grateful citizens of Tuscaloosa certainly spared no expense in honoring Colonel McKee at his retirement party held at the Eagle Hotel on May 19, 1829. The Tuscaloosans were eating high on the hog and they were well aware that Colonel McKee held responsibility for much of their good fortune. For eight years, ever since he opened Tuscaloosa's Land Office and sold the first lots in 1821, John McKee had had his finger in the pie. Some of the men in the audience at this public dinner in the Eagle Hotel had fathers who had received their Revolutionary War & War of 1812 pensions with McKee's help while he served in Washington as their congressman from 1822 to 1828. The property deeds that many of these men held were received from Colonel McKee in 1821. This real estate certainly turned out to be a good investment.

At the time of the dinner, in the spring of 1829, Tuscaloosa had been Alabama's capitol for more than two years.

This party hosted by the men of a grateful city raised their glasses forty-two times for the toasts that preceeded sitting down to have dinner with the Colonel. Toast #11 was drunk to "The University of Alabama- may is indeed become the cradle of genius and the abode of science."Colonel McKee himself led the congregation at the end of Toast #6. The old colonel raised his cup to "The citizens of Tuscaloosa- may wealth reward their industry and enterprise, and health and happiness surround their firesides."Tuscaloosa's leaders were reminded of something very important as Colonel McKee stood at the head of the table to address them. This old man in his blue swallowtail coat held himself up with the assistance of a knotted hickory walking stick. Each of the stick's thirteen knots held a silver plate onto which a letter had been engraved. Together the thirteen silver letters spelled "ANDREW JACKSON."The first year of Jackson's presidency was 1829 and the Tuscaloosans looked forward to seeing Old Hickory put the tariff-loving Yankees in their place. Jackson also promised to fix the "Indian Problem" once and for all.

Three years after his retirement party, McKee's body, weakened by decades of frontier living, gave up the ghost at his plantation home, Hill of Howth, near Boligee in Greene County. In its obituary THE GREENE COUNTY GAZETTE stated: "With the earlier history of Colonel McKee's life we are unacquainted..."

In this newspaper obituary from August of 1832 we begin to find evidence that a collective amnesia concerning their frontier origins had already begun to cloud the thinking of Alabama's citizens. To consider Colonel McKee's earlier career would force Alabama's men to consume a bitter pill of history. Not only would they have to recall the long forgotten memories of abandoned Indian wives and children, they would also have to face the unpleasant fact that the negotiations that produced the civilization they and their fathers had founded, were based on three elements:
alcoholic intoxication, intimidation and bribery.

John McKee knew this better than anyone else. McKee's influence was ubiquitous throughout many affairs of the Southern Indians from 1792 until his death in 1832. Colonel McKee may have been an honorable man, but the frontier world he lived in was anything but honorable. The records of the Colonel are a window into the destruction of every Southern Indian nation; the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Creek. Through his life one can know the complete historical record of the decline of the Southern Indian, yet a comprehensive analysis of the Colonel's life has never been written. The light that this yet unwritten biography would shed upon our forgotten past would certainly be appreciated by an American public that treasures a legacy which has shown the world that self-government is possible. Regardless of the psychic trauma that certain unpleasant details about our origins might produce, this history continues to influence continues to influence us in the present day.

John McKee's life with the Indians began in 1791 during General George Washington's presidency when William Blount, Governor of the territory south of the Ohio, appointed him to survey the Cherokee boundary from Clinch River to Chilhowee Mountain according to the Treaty of Holston, July 2, 1791. Educated at Liberty Hall Academy, now Washington and Lee University, the twenty-year-old McKee began to apply the lessons he learned in this log schoolhouse near the Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, Virginia. To go along with his surveying skills, McKee began to acquire a mastery of Indian languages by utilizing the most renowned of all foreign language classrooms:
the marriage bed.

According to a written notation made by "E.A." in the margin of page 508 of the book A HISTORY OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY VIRGINIA, McKee "...married a half-breed Chicasaw[sic], birth of a daughter Alzira is recorded in a notebook preserved from 1794."

Elizabeth Archibald, in her essay on McKee, states that, "Papers preserved from his days as a Congressman show John McKee burdened with a son, Alexander..." This child was also likely the result of McKee's relationship with an Indian woman. According to THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY, McKee "...was said to have been legally married to an Indian wife, and he provided that after his death, his friend and heir, William P. Gould, should make a quarterly payment in gold to his half-breed son." A nineteenth century biographical summary of Colonel McKee indicates that McKee died a bachelor. There's much evidence that McKee himself distanced himself from his Indian family after his entrance into politics in 1821. An example comes from the recollections of George Strother Gaines. Gaines wrote that in the early 1820s McKee mediated a Choctaw conflict a the Choctaw Indian Trading House near Epes in Sumter County. During the negotiations, Greenwood Leflore, Choctaw chief and namesake of Greenwood, Mississippi, told Gaines, "Colonel McKee has become a stranger to the Indians and cannot be expected to feel as much interest in their well doing as you feel."
This occurred thirty years after McKee's entry into Indian affairs.

In February 1793 McKee received his first opportunity to apply his mastery of Indian language when Governor Blount appointed him to head a peace mission to the Cherokees. These negotiations initiated McKee's career as an Indian agent. On page 12 of the first volume ofTHE CORRESPONDENCE OF ANDREW JACKSON,these words are found in a letter from Jackson to McKee dated January 30, 1793:
"One question I would beg leave to ask, why do we now attempt to hold a Treaty with them [i.e. the Cherokees]; have they attended to the last Treaty; I answer in the negative then why do we attempt to Treat with [a] Savage tribe that will neither adhere to Treaties, nor the law of Nations upon these particulars. I would thank you for your sentiments in your next [letter]."McKee certainly learned how to "Treat with the Savage Tribe." Over the next thirty years, at one time or another, McKee served as U.S. agent to the Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. He applied a persuasive argument in his negotiations with Indian leaders. After lubricating the chiefs' tongues by applying copious amounts of rum, McKee would ply the Indians for information and then ask them this rather pointed question when the Indians began to gripe about losing their land:
"Did you ever know Indians to recover land by war? Have you not observed that war is invariably followed by loss of land?"

With this argument McKee was able to talk the Choctaws and Chickasaws out of joining the Creeks during the War of 1812. In fact, the only action the Chickasaw tribe saw during the entire war was with McKee. They accompanied him on his expedition which destroyed all that remained of Black Warrior's Town located near present-day Tuscaloosa.

In his last years in Tuscaloosa, McKee showed evidence that he had mastered personal control over the demon rum. According to William R. Smith, McKee allowed himself only one drink per day. The occasion of this single daily libation by the Colonel turned into a sort of community ritual. McKee's rule was to take his daily drink at noon in Travis' saloon which was located at the intersection of University Boulevard and 23rd Avenue. Smith described what he saw each day when he was a ten-year-old boy growing up in Tuscaloosa:
"...when he [McKee] reached the steps he would invariably stop, pull out his watch, and go in, or not as the pointers of the watch directed; if it lacked one or more minutes of the exact period, he would walk up and down in front until the time should come...When the Colonel entered the saloon, the boys of the town would yell,'IN HE GOES; IT IS EXACTLY 12!'"

Colonel McKee's plantation home in Boligee stood until the death of John McKee Gould, Jr. in 1944. Timbers from the demolished "Hill of Howth" plantation home were used to build a relative's home between Eutaw and Greensboro. Today nothing remains on the site of McKee's 1816 home, the first house ever built by a U.S. citizen in what is now Greene County. This quiet hill where the Choctaws showed McKee springs that never ran dry has now returned to the forest. The springs at the foot of "Hill of Howth" still flow and the muck that surrounds these flowing waters produces the only evidence of human occupation. Glass bottles, left by one hundred thirty eight years of continuous human occupation, glisten as the visitor washes off the mud that covers them. Maybe someday, like these old bottles, a light will shine once more on the life of one of early Tuscaloosa's most important citizens:
COLONEL JOHN MCKEE.