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Claudio Saunt, Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 3, December 2006, Pages 673–697, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486409
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“Tradition says the Muscoghees [or Creeks] came from the Mississippi,” the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray told Henry Knox in 1790. McGillivray, a guest in the home of the secretary of war, had traveled north to New York City to negotiate the Creeks' first treaty with the United States, a momentous occasion for his nation, which was struggling to cope with Georgia's increasingly belligerent land grabs. Continuing his narrative, McGillivray recounted a detailed history of the Creeks that included the arrival of the French (who ignited a smallpox epidemic, he noted), the Yamasee War with South Carolina in 1715, the construction of Fort Toulouse by the French two years later, and the appearance of James Oglethorpe in 1733. Having dispensed with “tradition” in a single sentence, McGillivray related a Creek story about the past that Knox could readily recognize as history. Chronological and mundane, it integrated the Creeks into a narrative of events already familiar to the secretary of war.1
