Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations

Claudio Saunt

"Tradition says the Muscoghees [or Creeks] came from the Mississippi," the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray told Henry Knox in 1790. McGillivray, a guest in the home of the secretary of war, had traveled north to New York City to negotiate the Creeks' first treaty with the United States, a momentous occasion for his nation, which was struggling to cope with Georgia's increasingly belligerent land grabs. Continuing his narrative, McGillivray recounted a detailed history of the Creeks that included the arrival of the French (who ignited a smallpox epidemic, he noted), the Yamasee War with South Carolina in 1715, the construction of Fort Toulouse by the French two years later, and the appearance of James Oglethorpe in 1733. Having dispensed with "tradition" in a single sentence, McGillivray related a Creek story about the past that Knox could readily recognize as history. Chronological and mundane, it integrated the Creeks into a narrative of events already familiar to the secretary of war.1	1
Nearly one hundred years later, G. W. Grayson, a prominent Creek leader and future principal chief, helped record, translate, and preserve a different version of the Creek past for Albert Gatschet, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, situated in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. Like McGillivray before him, Grayson transmitted this story at a perilous time for the Creeks, for Congress was then considering measures to terminate Indian nations across the country. The narrative was nothing like the one recounted by McGillivray in 1790. "It was in the beginning when the people were first created," the story opened. "Far off toward the west many people came out of the ground." The story, which later appeared in a publication by the anthropologist John Reed Swanton, went on to recount a long migration, interrupted by magical episodes. While McGillivray had packaged his narrative as history, Grayson framed this one as a "very old and rare Creek legend," or, as he said of a similar story, "Ancient Myth," an object of study that Smithsonian scientists were busy defining in the late nineteenth century.2	2
G. W. Grayson (1843–1920), photographed c. 1917, was a prominent Creek leader who fought to modernize his nation. Formally educated, he deemed myths objects from a bygone era, destined to disappear. Consequently, he worked with Smithsonian Institution anthropologists in the late nineteenth century to help record and preserve these stories for scholarly study. Courtesy Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
McGillivray and Grayson belong to a long line of Indian leaders in the Cherokee and Creek nations who, borrowing the narrative categories of their antagonists, creatively used history and myth to defend their nations' land titles and sovereignty.3 That strategy demanded a fluency in European narrative conventions and an awareness of the shifts in European understandings of history and myth over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For most of the eighteenth century, when Cherokees and Creeks were not yet familiar with European narrative conventions, they sought common ground with colonists by recounting stories about the past that freely mixed elements from Indian and European traditions. Given the relative weakness of the colonies at the time, perhaps Indians did not see the need to speak the language of their antagonists so completely.	. . .