British troops arrived here in June 1814 as the War of 1812 entered its closing months. They first recruited and trained Native American Red Stick Creek, Seminole, Miccosukee, and Yuchi warriors as auxiliaries, while the Apalachicola River became a major enlistment point for Maroon fighters who joined a new battalion of Colonial Marines. Construction of a fort at today's River Landing Park began in November 1814 on a large prehistoric mound; it was an earthen redoubt surrounded by a ditch and palisade, with British troops and their Native American allies camped around it and two pieces of artillery inside. The fort was intended to protect the Apalachicola River from American forces and to serve as a jumping-off point for a British campaign against the Georgia frontier. After Great Britain's defeat at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, the force here grew to nearly 800 soldiers and warriors. An American force with U.S.-allied Creek warriors soon arrived north of the forks of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers, near today's Lake Seminole, and battle seemed near until a British sailing vessel arrived under a white flag with news that the war was over. Native American chiefs then signed a mutual defense pact here on March 10, 1815, bringing together for the first time the independent groups that formed today's Seminole and Miccosukee tribes. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Nicolls, known as Fighting Nicolls, fought in more than 100 battles, was wounded 13 times, was later knighted, rose to brigadier general, and became a leading 19th-century abolitionist. Colonel Benjamin Hawkins commanded the U.S. forces that came down the Chattahoochee River to attack the British in the war's final days, but the war's end halted his plans. Josiah Francis, a noted prophet or hillis hadjo, inspired and led the Red Stick movement during the Creek War of 1813-1814 and the First Seminole War of 1817-1818, and he signed the Treaty of Nicolls' Outpost on March 10, 1815. Major William McIntosh, the Lower Creek war chief of Coweta, served under Hawkins in the campaign here. Most of the British troops here were of African descent and enlisted in the Colonial Marines after escaping slavery in Spanish Florida or the United States; some later evacuated to Trinidad after the War of 1812, while others remained and adopted new lifestyles as Black Seminoles.