"Ocmulgee Town": Trading, Raiding, Nations, and Empires in the Southeast, 1690–1716

From the 1690s until the 1710s, "Ocmulgee Town" fairly hummed with activity.  It was a leading outpost of the English trading regime that fanned out from  Charles Town, the starting point for multiple invasions that devastated  Spanish missions, and a key way station on a path that stretched across the Southeast. Here, in the shadows of the massive earthworks that were the impressive, if haunting, reminders of the site's ancient past, Muskogee people and their allies built a close relationship with the English. This bond was strong, but it was fraught and complicated on both sides as well. The Muskogees and the English traders who served them both were players in the rise of merchant capitalism in Southeast, but Native and English people brought different perspectives to their economic relationship. Though they may have shared certain military objectives, such as the dispersal of Spanish towns, these acts meant different things depending on whether one's loyalties were primarily Creek, or English. Eventually, Ocmulgee came to take on a signal importance in the history of the Muskogee Nation, as the place where the people first "sat down," or conceived of themselves as a nation, according to a 1770s retelling of the origin story of the Creek town of Kasihta. The English, too, building on their victory in the Yamasee War, solidified their nation's place in the Southeast in the years after they burned Ocmulgee Town. This paper, based on original research in archives throughout the Southeast, examines the activities carried out at the Ocmulgee trading post from a variety of perspectives. It argues that trade, violence, and a burgeoning sense of nationhood were tightly connected in both English and Muskogee worldviews, and that the connection between these factors made all the difference in the intense, if somewhat short-lived, friendship that grew at Ocmulgee.