• Raven
• August 20, 2016

Prior to the early 18th Century, most of Georgia was home to American Indians belonging to a southeastern alliance known as the Creek Confederacy. Today's Creek Nation, also known as the Muskogee, were the major tribe in that alliance.

Pleasant Porter was elected principal chief on September 5, 1899, on a platform of compromise with the federal government. In addition to dealing with tribal dissension over the agreement, Porter also had to try to resolve the controversial question of the rights of the freedmen.

On August 4, 1898, Aylesworth gave Isparhecher a signed receipt for twenty-five 1896 town census rolls. It had taken more than two years of requests and then threats of court action to get just one of the "official rolls." The ninety days that the Dawes Commission had to decide applications under the 1896 act had, of course, long since elapsed.

The Creeks were overwhelmingly opposed to allotment or any change in the treaty of 1832, which had forced them to move to Indian Territory. One full-blood expressed a common sentiment when he told a Senate investigating committee that "I love my treaty, and I want my old treaty back."(21) He went on to say that "I will never stop asking for this treaty, the old treaty that our fathers made with the Government which gave us this land forever ... as long as the grass grows, water runs, and the sun rises."(22)

At a meeting held in Okmulgee on April 3, 1894, the commissioners explained at great length to a crowd of nearly three thousand (mostly full-bloods) all of the benefits allotment would bring, but the entire group "voted" against the plan.(23)

What can you do when you "discover" a continent, but there are already people living there? Europeans arriving in North America tried a number of approaches to solve what was often referred to as "the Indian Problem," depending on the relative military power of the natives and non-natives.