High Stakes Ball Game – 1790 (pages 111-120)
(page 111, par. 1, line 3 ) Creeks’ McGillivray Chief Alexander McGillivray, Creek (1750-1793) Caughey, John Walton. McGillivray of the Creeks; Frank, Andrew K. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier; Saunt, Claudio. The New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816. McGillivray’s relatively short life, spanning both Muscogee Creek and Anglo-American societies was very consequential to Southeastern U.S. and Indian history. For a time he skillfully played off competing colonial and other tribes’ interests to the benefit of Creek autonomy over their traditional lands. His centralization of his own power and acquisitive and self-aggrandizing ways rendered him a controversial figure, with a clouded legacy.
(page 113, Par. 3, line 2) quarrelling chiefs determined to settle their dispute peaceably Creeks were being pushed west under the pressure of enlarging American settlements in Georgia. Additionally, hunting parties, armed for generations with trade muskets, had reduced the game population on which the Southeastern Indians had come to depend. Competition with neighboring tribes increased for a dwindling population of game. Creek conflicts played out against a backdrop of acquisitive westward-looking Georgians, and the Creeks’ Native neighbors are summarized in: DuVal, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, pp. 324-332; Weeks, Charles A. Paths to a Middle Ground, pp. 20-22; and Cotterill, R.S. The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes Before Removal, pp. 70-81.
Creeks and Choctaw local leaders were arguably more aware of longstanding inter-tribal rivalries over trapping and hunting rights to a particular beaver pond in their immediate vicinity, than in ecological and environmental trends decades and centuries in the making. Local chiefs exercised considerable autonomy in settling inter-tribal disputes, and even conducting their own foreign policies.
(page 113, Par. 4, line 2) 1790 Noxubee River ball game Published sources for this incident, apparently derived from a common source, but differing in some details, are: Cushman, Horatio B. and Debo, Angie ed. History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians, pp. 131-137; and Claiborne, John F. H. Mississippi as a Province, Territory, and State, Vol. I, pp. 484-487. Modern references I have encountered do not question the historic accuracy of the incident or its huge number of Indian deaths. See: Blanchard, Kendall. The Mississippi Choctaws at Play: The Serious Side of Leisure, p. 130; Treuer, Anton, Wood, Karenne, et al. Indian Nations of North America, p. 94; and Vennum, Thomas Jr. American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War, p. 115. I have been unable to find any direct contemporary American, Spanish, or Indian trader accounts indicating awareness of this episode in the timeframe in which it was reported to have occurred.
While inter-Indian conflicts in the Southeast in historic times are known, none approach the scale of mayhem and the violent destruction of Indian lives associated with the 1790 Noxubee River ballgame.
(page 114, par. 2, lines 6-7)“every other imaginable thing that was part and parcel of Indian wealth” Cushman, Ibid, pp. 190-191 in the 1899 edition.
(page 114, par. 2, lines 10-11) Surrender their goods without so much as a murmur There were no point spreads, statistical odds, or proportionate payouts, which were approaches to wagering mostly beyond the mathematics tracked and calculated by Choctaw and Creek at the time. These books contain good discussions of customs associated with the ball games: Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War, Op. cit., pp. 27-52; For an older, anthropological consideration of the game, including many pictures and drawings of tribal variations of game paraphernalia, see: Culin, Stewart. Games of the North American Indians, pp. 563-577.
Those tempted to believe that Native American casinos and gaming industry are modern aberrations, or decadent impositions by the broader American culture, might broaden the basis for their opinions to include the wagering traditions of many Native American nations dating back into pre-history and pre-dating European contact. See Vennun, Ibid, pp. 105-117, covering many Nations’ wagering practices, including Choctaw and Creek, that would have informed the great 1790 Noxubee River ball game.
(page 115, par. 3, line 6) “Little brother of war” The Indian nickname for their ball game suggests its rough and tumble nature, requisite athletic skills comparable to those required of warriors, and occasional use as a means to settle territorial disputes. The Native stickball or the ball game, went by names specific to each Nation’s language. It was ubiquitous in the Southeast and all the way north into the lands of Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Federation. Its central place in Eastern Woodlands Indian societies bears a striking resemblance to pre-contact Mesoamerican ceremonial ball games, though anthropologists have so far found no direct link between the two traditions. For a concise discussion of the place of the ball game in Indian societies see: Greg O’Brien, “Warriors, Warfare, and Male Power” in Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830, pp. 41-42.
(page 117, par. 2, line 5) “all were engaged in bloody strife” Cushman, Horatio B. and Debo, Angie ed. History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians, Op. cit., pp. 131-135.
(page 117, par. 3, lines 2-3) littered with hundreds of the dead The number of Creek and Choctaw athletes and on-lookers killed is recorded as high as 500. The entire Creek federation population is estimated to have numbered 20,000 in 1790. Assuming that the casualty figure is accurate, and half of the dead were Creek, we calculate that over one percent of the entire Creek nation, and a similar portion of Choctaw, were annihilated in one night – in inter-Indian violence.
Settling territorial disputes via ball game athletic contest has been portrayed as supporting inter-tribal social structures, and enabling peaceful settlement of disputes in the absence of centralized political structures. Such benefits were not realized in this instance.
I also note that the number of Native American casualties suffered at the Noxubee River ball game far exceeded the Native lives lost at Harmar’s Defeat, St. Clair’s Defeat, The Battle of the Fallen Timbers, as well as the better known, later Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.
The pre-contact and pre-historic Crow Creek Massacre, dated about 1325, is an episode of a like scale of inter-Indian violence in North America. Over 400 men, women, and children were murdered and mutilated in an apparent genocidal destruction of an entire Indian settlement in the Northern Plains. Evidence has been brought forth from anthropology and archeology, whose experts speculate that the murders resulted from competition over farmland during a period of scarcity. Remarkably, 90% of the remains show evidence of having been scalped – all without guns, germs, or steel, or Spanish war horses. No trace of this incident, to my knowledge, exists in oral traditions of Native Americans inhabiting the region in modern times. See: Zimmerman, Larry J, and Lawrence E. Bradley. “The Crow Creek Massacre: Initial Coalescent Warfare and Speculations about the Genesis of Extended Coalescent.” Plains Anthropologist, 1993, Vol. 38 (145): pp. 215-226; and Willey, P., and Thomas E. Emerson. “The Osteology and Archaeology of the Crow Creek Massacre.” Plains Anthropologist 1993, Vol. 38: pp. 227-269.
Extended Indian depopulation following contact with Europeans was fueled by colonial warfare, other violence perpetrated on Indians, imported epidemic diseases, and imposed environmental changes inimical to lives based to varying degrees on hunting wild game. Deadly Indian on Indian violence was, in the larger scheme over centuries, a trifling factor. But in isolated instances, such as the deadly aftermath of the 1790 Noxubee River ball game, it may have made a huge difference in pan-Indian regional prospects. As confederated Miami, Delaware, and Shawnee of the Northwest Indian Federation sought allies in their assertion of an Indian homeland Middle Ground; and Spain and the United States vied for influence in West Florida; Creeks, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee could be interpreted as having been too pre-occupied with struggling amongst themselves to have asserted a united front against colonial settler encroachments during the 1790s.
(page 117, par. 4, lines 4-5) An affront to the forces of nature. For spiritual aspects of the ball game see Blanchard, The Mississippi Choctaws at Play, Op. cit., Chs. 1-2, pp. 1-63. No one knows where or when the ball game originated, as played by the Choctaw, Creeks, and other Eastern Woodlands Nations. In cultures where athleticism and achievement in the hunt and in war were prized, the ball game was permeated with Indian mysticism. Some believe the ball game was played before men and women peopled the Earth, and indeed before the Earth itself existed, by primal spirits playing to entertain the Creator. Indian boys were encouraged to develop and test ball field skills from an early age.
Downey, Allan. The Creator’s Game : Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood contains a colorful exposition of spiritual aspects of the ball game, interwoven with the origin tale of Sky Woman and the creation of Turtle Island, that is characteristic of Northern tribes mostly resident in modern Canada. Though mythology is quite different from that associated with Choctaw, Creek, and Southern nations, Indian stick ball regional variations remain more than a game. In its descendant lacrosse, and in resurgent modern incarnations closer to the original game, for Native American teams and players, it enacts Native heritage, physical vitality, and self-determination.
East central Mississippi is the general vicinity of Nanih Waiya, a Native American sacred site indicative of the centrality of the linkage between revered sites and the spirit world. An ancient Mississippian Indigenous culture mound in east central Mississippi, it is sacred to the Choctaw Nation, and figures into the origin stories of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee Indians. For descriptions of Nanih Waiya and the various origin stories with it see: Barnet, James E. Jr. Mississippi’s American Indians; Galloway, Patricia. Choctaw Genesis; and Swanton, John R. Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians, pp. 5-37.