The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler by Joshua Piker

Author:Joshua Piker [Piker, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, North America, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775)
ISBN: 9780674075627
Google: JcsGeJa_avwC
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-06-01T01:48:29+00:00

IV

COLONIAL

ACORN WHISTLER WOULD have survived the 1752 crisis if it had not been for Thomas and Mary Bosomworth. Of course, it was Malatchi’s willingness first to accept the fiction of Acorn Whistler’s guilt and then to push Acorn Whistler’s kinsmen into planning the execution that sealed the Little Okfuskee’s fate. But it was the Bosomworths who offered Acorn Whistler to Malatchi, and they did more than anyone else to ensure that Acorn Whistler would take the fall for the April 1 attack. In fact, the evidence suggests that Acorn Whistler was their preferred fall guy even before they accepted Glen’s offer to be agents to the Creeks. Mary knew that Glen wanted the heads of several of the Osochi attackers and that, as she told Glen in early June, “the Satisfaction this Government thinks itself Honour bound to demand will be a very nice and difficult Point to be obtained.” Or, put another way, Mary knew that Glen’s other potential agents were right: the Creeks would not execute the men guilty of the April 1 attack, and it “would not be very safe for an Agent to ask.” Mary and Thomas accepted the job anyway. They did so for two reasons. They were desperate—more on that below—and they knew that, while the Osochis were out of reach, the Creeks just might execute someone else. The Bosomworths, in short, left Charleston with Acorn Whistler in their sights.1

That fact explains why the Bosomworths were so threatened by reports that after Acorn Whistler fled Charleston on April 2 he stopped by to see them. There is no proof that such a visit took place, although the path from Palachucola (where Acorn Whistler left his horses in mid-March) to Lower Creek country (where Acorn Whistler met with Malatchi in mid-April) passed through the Bosomworths’ trading post at the Forks; the Bosomworths were trading for deerskins that spring.2 Whether or not the Bosomworths met Acorn Whistler in April 1752—and my guess is that they did not—Thomas was worried enough about the accusation that, in November 1752, he had the trader Moses Nunes sign an affidavit swearing that Acorn Whistler had told him that he “never came near Mrs. Bosomworth’s House or spoke to her”; a month later, John Spencer, another trader, signed a similar affidavit at Thomas’s request. And then, in January 1753, Thomas forwarded those affidavits to Glen, along with a letter that mentioned the “many Slanders and absolute Falsehoods” concocted by his enemies, particularly “that the Acorn Whistler . . . came to our House in Georgia.”3 Of course, by that point, the Bosomworths had succeeded in having Acorn Whistler executed, and so Thomas and Mary naturally wanted to beat back rumors linking them to him. The odd thing, though, is that the Bosomworths were beating back those rumors well before there was any reason to do so—well before, that is, anyone was accusing Acorn Whistler of murdering those Cherokees.

Acorn Whistler was not publicly named as the mastermind of the April 1 attack until August 11.

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