Excerpt
Although they may have been a crude and uncouth people themselves, the white settlers had an even lower opinion of Native Americans. The settlers viewed all red men as the same. After some Upper Creeks murdered two Georgia settlers in 1787, the Georgians retaliated by killing several Lower Creek hunters. When the Lower Creeks protested that they were not the guilty party--"You always promised that the innocent should not suffer for the guilty"--the Georgians replied that they would hold them accountable for acts done by the Upper Creeks. "Should any act of hostility be committed on our people by your nation," they warned, "be perfectly assured we will not hesitate to do our selves ample justice by carrying War into your Country burning your Towns and staining your land with blood."
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Unaware of the truce, White's troops made a dawn attack on the unsuspecting Hillabee town on November 18.
The town targeted by the East Tennesseeans was on Hillabee Creek, a tributary of the Tallapoosa. Its main occupants--sixty-five wounded warriors who had escaped the bloody Talladega encounter, plus their women and children--thought they were under Jackson's protection and were not expecting to be attacked. White's troops and Cherokees dismounted and surrounded the town during the predawn darkness and then attacked at sunrise. The Cherokees were the first in and did their work very effectively; many of the white troops didn't even have time to take part in the killing. The slaughter took less than fifteen minutes. White's troops shot or bayoneted the occupants of the cabins, took 256 prisoners...put the town to the torch, and withdrew to Fort Armstrong. They left sixty Hillabees dead.
Most of the prisoners were women and children who were sent on to the Hiwassee garrison in the Cherokee nation. Ridge sent one Muscogee girl and several black slaves home to his wife... the young girl was treated like a member of the Ridge family. Some of the male captives were not so fortunate. Hartsell witnessed the killing of two prisoners by the Cherokees--shot and then tomahawked "in a crewal manner," he wrote. The Cherokees took one of the captive's scalps. The other they took three scalp locks from, because, they said, he had killed three white men.
The tragic Hillabee massacre dashed any hopes of bringing the Creek War to an immediate end. The Hillabees blamed Jackson for a cruel betrayal of their trust. They resolved to fight to the end and were among the last die-hard Red Sticks to give up.