CREEK INDIAN TRIBES

MOUNDBUILDER ORIGINS

Moundbuilders, the first great civilization in North America, arose 4,000 years before the Spanish set foot on the islands of coastal Georgia. From the oldest of these sites, Poverty Point in Louisiana, this great culture spread across two-thirds of the United States, following the Mississippi north to Minnesota, its tributaries, including the Ohio, east and west deep into the continent, and around the Florida peninsula into coastal Georgia.

By the time Spanish conquistadors worked inland in search of the wealth of a continent the Moundbuilder culture was in steep decline. Cahokia, Etowah and Ocmulgee, major cities of a dying culture, were no longer active sites. The remaining Moundbuilders were absorbed into the Woodland cultures which they dominated. With few exceptions in the state of Georgia, the Indians that deSoto met were not Moundbuilders, but these remnants of that tribe.

The Muscogee (Creek) people are descendents of this remarkable culture that, before 1500 AD, spanned all the region known today as the Southeastern United States. The Creek were originally one of the dominant tribes in the mid-south and later became known as one of the Five Civilized Tribes.

Most of the Creeks descended from groups living in six towns: Cusseta, Coweta, Areka, Coosa, Hoithle Waule, and Tuckabatchee, all within the confines of the future Alabama and Georgia. The historic Muscogee later built expansive towns in Florida and South Carolina.

They were known in their own language as Muskoke or Muskogee, by the Shawnee as Humaskogi, by the Delaware as Masquachki and by the British as the Ochese Creek Indians, hence the present name. Their name has been adapted for that of their linguistic group and for Muskogee, Oklahoma, which was a major city of the Creek Nation in Indian territory.