George Stiggins

This 1830s manuscript was the first narrative history of the Creek Indians to be written by a member of the tribe. For generations it gathered dust in the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society, one of hundreds of documents on southern history acquired or "borrowed" by a man named Lyman Draper. In the 1970s a transcription was finally published in two issues of the academic journal Ethnohistory.

The manuscript finally appeared between hard covers in 1989, thanks to the efforts of Birmingham, Alabama librarian Virginia Pounds Brown. But the result is not entirely a happy one. Brown followed the old-fashioned (and inexcusable) practice of silently "improving" the text by normalizing spelling, punctuation, etc., without indicating where and how she did it. That is why the book is almost never cited by scholars.

The introduction to Brown's edition is a recycled 19th-century essay from the unpublished papers of William Stokes Wyman. Best known as a Victorian-era president of the University of Alabama, Wyman was a scholar of Latin and Greek who also dabbled in American Indian languages. The essay is of interest only as a period piece.

Stiggins' text is important because of its uniqueness, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. He was a strongly biased observer. Perhaps the most enduring influence this text has had on southern history is in promoting the author's brother-in-law, William Weatherford, to reluctant principal leader of the 1813 Red Stick rebellion. Weatherford certainly played an important role, but there is little reason to believe that anyone dominated the Red Stick movement. Anyway, thanks largely to Stiggins' publicity for his kinsman, Weatherford went on to become a romantic hero in Alabama historical literature — especially after a white poet gave him the pseudo-Indian name "Red Eagle."… (mehr)