The Birth of a Nation 91kogee deer parks, with the intention of wiping out the livelihood of
Muskogee hunters, who also made up the resistance forces. But the
War Department was complicit, using money due to the Muskogees
under the treaty to divide them by bribing leaders (miccos) and thus
isolating the insurgents from their communities. Eighty Muskogee
fighters joined the Chickamaugas when they were still fighting, and
together they attacked the Cumberland district of Tennessee in early
1792, while others struck Georgia squatters in Muskogee territory.
It was then that Shawnee delegates, sent by Tecumseh, visited from
the Ohio Country to encourage the Muskogees to drive the squatters
from their lands, as the Shawnees h�d done successfully up to that
time. Secretary of War Knox wrote to the federal agent in Georgia
that he knew the Muskogee militants were "a Banditti, and do not
implicate the whole nor any considerable part of that Nation. The
hostilities of the Individuals arise from their own disposition, and
are not probably dictated, either by the Chiefs, or by any Towns or
other respectable classes of the Indians." 21
By this time, in the process of the preceding British coloniza
tion and continuing with US colonization of the Muskogee Nation
and other southeastern Indigenous nations, an Indigenous client
class-called "compradors" by Africans, "caciques" in Spanish
colonized America-essential to colonialist projects, was firmly in
place. This privileged class was dependent on their colonial masters
for their personal wealth. This class division wracked the traditional
relatively egalitarian and democratic Indigenous societies inter
nally. This small elite in the Southeast embraced the enslavement
of Africans, and a few even became affluent planters in the style
of southern planters, mainly through intermarriage with Anglos.
The trading posts established by US merchants further divided Mus
kogee society, pulling many deeply into the US economy through
dependency and debt, and away from the Spanish and British trad
ing firms, which had previously left their lands undisturbed. This
method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective
wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when
it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of indigenous
insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this
manner. While most Muskogees continued to follow their traditional