Ships of Oak, Guns of Iron by Ronald Utt

Author:Ronald Utt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2012-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

II

Panicked by the news of armed Indians routing their militia, settlers throughout southern Alabama began to fortify their villages and build stockades, to which they flocked for security and strength. Worried settlers—whites, Indians, and mixed-race—gathered at the house of a wealthy farmer, Samuel Mims, forty miles north of Mobile and just a few miles east of where the Alabama River joins the Tombigbee before spilling into Lake Tensaw. Supported by militia, the settlers built a stockade around Mims’s house, enclosing about an acre of land and filling the space with temporary shelters. They cut port holes built into the timber pickets for the rifles and built gates in the east and the west walls of their fort.

As more settlers sought refuge within the fort, they built rude dwellings wherever space allowed and planted crops outside the stockade. The black slaves who belonged to the white and Indian settlers built their shelters outside the walls of what was now known as Fort Mims. By late August 1813, seventeen structures had been built within the walls, and the population of the tiny fort, including the militia under Major Daniel Beasley, a regular U.S. Army officer of mixed race,12 numbered 553 men, women, and children of a variety of races, including several Spanish deserters from Pensacola.13

With the arms supplied by the Spanish, a thousand Creek warriors14 under William Weatherford—the son of a white Georgian frontiersman and an Indian mother and known to the Creeks as Red Eagle—marched south to the Lake Tensaw region. Henry Adams believed that Weatherford and McQueen picked Fort Mims as their target because of the mixed-race officers Beasley and Bailey, both of whom helped lead the attack on McQueen’s column at Burnt Corn.15

Along the way, Weatherford’s force attacked the plantation of Zachariah McGirth on 20 August, capturing several slaves who gave Weatherford information about Fort Mims. One of the slaves, named Joe, escaped from Weatherford and fled to Fort Mims, where he warned the settlers of the impending attack. They tightened security for a day or two, but when nothing happened—Weatherford had halted his force to give them a rest in the humid heat of Alabama’s late summer—they let down their guard.

On 29 August, two slaves tending the cattle in a pasture near the fort spotted a hundred or so warriors hiding in the woods. They reported the news to the fort’s command, and a squad of mounted soldiers searched the area but found nothing. Believing that the slaves had lied, Beasley had one of them flogged. The next morning, the beaten slave again spotted an Indian force approaching the fort. To avoid another beating by the soldiers and massacre by the Indian warriors, the slave fled to nearby Fort Pierce.16 At about noon, as the drum roll announced the soldiers’ midday meal, Weatherford’s force—“Every man painted red or black and stripped to the buff”17—attacked the fort, whose gates were wide open and walls unguarded.

Major Beasley ran to shut the eastern gate, but it was obstructed, and he fell under a swarm of Creek warriors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.