The Removal

The Muscogee had lived along the Ocmulgee for generations when the United States decided their presence was a problem to be solved. The solution took several decades and several broken agreements to complete.

After Andrew Jackson's forces defeated the Red Stick faction at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama in March of eighteen fourteen, the Creek Nation was compelled to surrender twenty-three million acres under the Treaty of Fort Jackson that August. The land that would become Macon was part of what they gave up. The U.S. government established Fort Benjamin Hawkins between eighteen-oh-six and eighteen-ten to regulate Creek trade and serve as a military staging point. Benjamin Hawkins himself, superintendent of Indian affairs for two decades, was known among the southeastern tribes as the Beloved Man, a man who learned their languages and lived among them. The fort named after him became the instrument of the policy that would displace them.

The process accelerated through the eighteen twenties and thirties. In eighteen thirty-two, under relentless pressure, the Creek National Council signed the Treaty of Cusseta, ceding their remaining eastern lands and accepting removal to Indian Territory. Most Muscogee were removed beginning in eighteen thirty-four, with additional waves following the Creek War of eighteen thirty-six. They left behind the Ocmulgee Old Fields and the great mounds, which Georgia settlers at the time referred to simply as curiosities.

The Muscogee Nation is today based in Oklahoma. They have maintained formal relationships with the Ocmulgee Mounds site ever since, and their oral traditions about this place have never been interrupted, only interrupted by geography.