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This chapter focuses on the family background and life of Jackson Barnett. Barnett was born around 1856 in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory, in what is today McIntosh County in eastern Oklahoma. His life began inauspiciously as the child of a transient union between his father Siah Barnett, a freedman, and mother Thlesothle, of full- or mixed-blood Creek. There are many unknowns in Jackson Barnett's genealogy, which complicated the determination of heirs after Jackson's death and demonstrated how imprecise the Indian bureau's blood quantum distinctions were, though decisions vitally important to Indians' lives were based on the crude and proximate data in its files.

During the Civil War, many Creek Indians (as well as other members of the Five Civilized Tribes) joined the Confederacy. This chapter follows the fate of the Graysons as some family members went South and others headed North. In Indian Territory, slavery and race played a significant role in dividing families and communities.

In the 1880s, Creek Indians sought to rebuild their nation. Some Creeks, such as G. W. Grayson, profited greatly by pursuing cattle ranching. But black Indians, including G. W.'s own relatives, did not fare as well. Indian women also struggled, finding it difficult to thrive in an increasingly patriarchal society.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief background on the discovery of oil at the Cushing field in Oklahoma in 1912, which eventually supplied 17 percent of all oil marketed in the United States and by 1917 accounted for 3 percent of total world production. A profile of Jackson Barnett is then presented, a middle-aged and illiterate Creek Indian who experienced a major windfall after several wells were drilled in his property. The power struggle among many parties seeking to control his estate is discussed, which illuminates the broader principles of law that gave authority to certain individuals and governmental agencies to manage Indian property.

This chapter examines the Trans-Oconee Republic, an embryonic nation established on Creek land just beyond Georgia's established western border by frontiersmen who had battled Tories and their Indian allies during the war of independence. Disillusioned by the turn of events following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and the subsequent intervention of the federal authorities in their relations with the neighboring Indians, backcountry settlers, white and also possibly black, created a republic that fulfilled their visions of the American Revolution.

This chapter uses ethnohistorical evidence to reconstruct the context for Mary's childhood. First, it establishes the context for her childhood home of Coweta and its rise to power and introduces readers to Mary's English father. It also posits that Mary's early influences included her Creek mother and female clan-kin, whose work routines constituted Mary's first lessons in Creek culture. Additionally, the chapter explores how warfare affected Mary and her people, finding striking continuities between her childhood and adulthood.

This chapter explores the bicultural upbringing of mixed-race children produced via intermarriages between Creek Indians and southern colonists. On a daily basis, white and Native American parents struggled to find compromises and common ground in the socialization of their children, resulting in a bicultural upbringing. This process of middle-ground parenting defied and adhered to many of the norms that structured southeastern Indian society, but it almost always reflected the interests of Native society. Most fathers had the ability to influence the upbringing of their Creek children only when it suited their Indian mothers and families. Creek women and their matrilineal kin maintained the upper hand in this process, carefully regulating the actions of intermarried white men.

The fifth chapter examines white Georgians' drive to extend the state's frontiers and expand plantation slavery in the 1810s. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the growing demand for cotton brought increasing number of white settlers and slaves to Georgia's southern and southwestern frontiers. The resulting pressure to expand brought white Georgians into conflict with the Creek and Seminole Indians, their British and Spanish allies, and the escaped slaves who found refuge in their midst. With the aid of federal troops, the Tennessee militia, and “friendly” Indians, white Georgians defeated their interracial foes in a series of brutal engagements that ultimately extended Georgia's boundaries and defeated the last remaining impediment to the spread of plantation across the Southeast.

The sixth chapter focuses on the political debates over the removal of the Cherokee Indians. White Georgians had few misgivings to expel the Creek Indians in the wake of the wars of the 1810s, but the same was not true with the Cherokees. Within the state, a sizable population opposed forced-relocation schemes. As migrants flooded into the Georgia upcountry, the numbers favoring Indian removal dramatically increased. These men shifted the demographic and political balance in the state. The new settlers possessed little wealth and arrived in search for land. They pressed for new priorities, especially a speedy resolution to the obstacles to white settlement on the remaining Cherokee lands and the creation of a white republic.

This chapter traces intermarriages between Scots and Indians and the families they established in the matrilineal indigenous societies of the American Southeast. It examines the roles played by Scots in the deerskin trade and in the British Indian department, and by their children in Creek and Cherokee history. It reconstructs the historic connections between Scots and Cherokees that endured after the Cherokees were forced west by US policies of Indian removal.

This chapter discusses the fourth and last governor of the Mississippi Territory, David Holmes. His placid personality helped him suppress the rancor that had previously characterized territorial policies. Holmes would be faced with three major crises over the next few years. These would be the rebellions in Spanish Florida, an uprising of the Creek Indians, and a British invasion.