Coweta and the People Before Columbus

Before Columbus was a city, this stretch of the Chattahoochee was a center of the Muscogee world. The falls at what Spanish documents called Coweta were a landmark in the interior Southeast for centuries, a crossing, a trading place, a gathering point. The Lower Creeks, as the British and then Americans called the Muscogee-speaking peoples of the Chattahoochee and Flint river valleys, lived in towns along both banks. Coweta, the principal Lower Creek town, stood on the Alabama side. Its leaders were recognized across the Creek Confederacy as heads of the most powerful division of the nation.

When Georgia surveyors came to lay out Columbus in eighteen twenty-eight, they were building on land that the Muscogee had occupied for hundreds of years, and from which they had only recently been dispossessed by one of the most consequential frauds in American treaty history.

In eighteen twenty-five, a single Creek leader named William McIntosh signed away most of the remaining Muscogee territory in Georgia at a place called Indian Springs, south of present-day Atlanta. McIntosh was acting without the authority of the Creek National Council, and the council knew it. They convicted him of treason under Creek law and had him executed that same year at his plantation on the Chattahoochee. The treaty, invalid by any Creek legal standard, was nevertheless ratified by the United States Senate, then renegotiated under protest, then used as justification for removing the Muscogee from Georgia anyway.

Land speculators based in the new town of Columbus, aware that removal was inevitable, illegally purchased Muscogee lands and then, according to accounts documented by historians of the period, quietly encouraged friction between settlers and Indians to accelerate the process. When a small band of Lower Creeks rose in resistance in eighteen thirty-six, Andrew Jackson had his pretext. United States troops and state militia rounded up the remaining Muscogee and marched them west. Some went in chains. None went willingly.

Columbus's county is named Muscogee. The county seat of the Muscogee Nation today is Okmulgee, Oklahoma, more than six hundred miles from the falls where Coweta once stood.