Tallapoosas Erotic

The Tallapoosas were one of the main divisions of the Upper Creeks: a chain of Muscogee towns along the Tallapoosa River in what is now east central Alabama, known to Europeans from the late 1600s until the United States forced them west in the 1830s. They did not die out. Their descendants are citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, and the city of Tulsa carries the name of Tallasi, one of their river towns, brought west by its Lochapoka offshoot.

What made them a group was geography and politics, not blood. The basic unit of Muscogee life was the talwa, an autonomous town with its own square ground, council and sacred fire, and the Tallapoosas were simply the towns of one river: Tuckabatchee, Atasi, Tallasi, Hoithlewaulee, Fusihatchee, Kolomi and others. Tuckabatchee was the heavyweight, counted among the four mother towns of the Creek Confederacy, and Tecumseh made his case for an intertribal alliance in its square in 1811. Archaeologists link these towns to the Mississippian chiefdoms that farmed the same bottomlands before Spanish contact. Most Tallapoosas spoke Muskogee, a Muskogean language. Their neighbors at the river junction downstream spoke Alabama and Koasati, related but not mutually intelligible, and a Shawnee town sat among them for decades.

Descent ran through the mother, and clan membership decided whom you could marry and who would avenge you. Religious life turned on the Green Corn ceremony, or Busk, held when the corn ripened. Old fires were put out, a new one was kindled, most offenses of the past year were forgiven, and nobody ate the new crop until it was done. Tuckabatchee kept a set of copper and brass plates that were brought out only at the Busk. Their origin is still argued over. When removal came, the town carried them to Indian Territory.

The deerskin trade tied the Tallapoosas to Charleston merchants from the 1680s, and after the French built Fort Toulouse just downstream in 1717 they became skilled at playing empires against each other. That leverage ended with the American republic. In 1813 the Red Stick movement split the Upper towns into civil war: Tuckabatchee held out under siege against it, Atasi was burned by Georgia militia, and in March 1814 Andrew Jackson's army killed more than 800 Red Stick fighters at Horseshoe Bend, a loop of the Tallapoosa. The Treaty of Fort Jackson stripped some 23 million acres from hostile and allied Creeks alike. The 1832 Treaty of Cusseta and the removals of 1836 finished the job. Opothle Yahola, the Tuckabatchee speaker, led thousands of them to Indian Territory.