Who Were the "Red Sticks"?

The Red Sticks were Creek Indians from present-day Alabama. They resisted the western expansion of the United States at the same time that Tenskwatawa's movement and his brother Tecumseh's confederacy were resisting the United States in the Great Lakes region.

According to the Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 (443), there were a total of about 4,000 Red Sticks coming from sixty townships. (The townships were loosely organized into a confederacy.)

Despite having two centuries of contact with white "civilization," the Red Sticks had largely "held firm to their traditional religious beliefs"(444).

Why were they called Red Sticks?

According to Gregory Evans Dowd (A Spirited Resistance, 147), they were named after their war clubs. However, another answer (that I prefer to believe) comes from the Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 (444).

The name "Red Stick" evidently derived from the Creek practice of counting down the days to an important event (such as the advent of war) by remvoing sticks from a red stick bundle.

 

[caption id="attachment_3006" align="aligncenter" width="471"] This section of a map of the War of 1812 was originally produced by the WW Norton company and is re-used here under fair use for commentary.[/caption]


To read about the Red Sticks' Creek War of 1813-1814 - one part of the War of 1812 - see The Warfare Historian.


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