With the warning that any officer or soldier who fled before the enemy would suffer death, Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson marched his soldiers 52 miles from the Coosa River to Horseshoe Bend for a bloody contest with the Red Sticks. Early on Sunday morning, March 27, 1814, he positioned his troops for battle in a field that was then a forest of pine, oak, and hickory. A half mile ahead stood a log barricade built by the Red Sticks, who waited behind it for Jackson's advance. The barricade sealed off the horseshoe bend in the Tallapoosa River and protected their village, Tohopeka, where 350 women and children were present. The war had begun in 1813 as a civil war within the Creek confederation of towns, when a portion of the population known as the Red Sticks rebelled against the Creek national council, which generally sought to accommodate rather than challenge American expansion. The Creek civil war quickly grew into a larger conflict involving Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory. As Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson pushed south with his Tennessee army, Red Sticks from several towns sought refuge at Horseshoe Bend, and Jackson, determined to succeed where earlier campaigns had been indecisive, marched his soldiers for two and a half days through the forest to this ground.