Oketeyeconne / Chattahoochee Theater

Oketeyeconne, or Okitiyakani, was a Hitchiti-speaking Lower Creek town near here on the east bank of the Chattahoochee River south of Sandy Creek during the late frontier period. In 1799 Benjamin Hawkins called it a little village on good land whose people had settlements extending as low as the forks of the river and raised plenty of corn and rice and kept cattle, horses, and hogs. As the southernmost of the main towns on the Chattahoochee, its people were affiliated both with the predominantly Muskogee-speaking Creek Confederation and a Hitchiti mother town to the north and with Hitchiti-speaking towns of the Sawokli, Tamathli, Apalachicola, Yamasee Mikasuki, and other Seminoles to the south. Though peaceful and considered friendly by Americans, many Lower Creeks and Seminoles had strong ties to the British through Revolutionary War service and trade. Distressed by continuing white settler encroachments, the American war against the Red Sticks faction of the Upper Creeks, and severe food shortages, Lower Creeks and Seminoles led by William and Thomas Perryman appealed to the British and Spanish for arms and supplies in September 1813. William and Thomas Perryman then became leaders of the war faction of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles, and their settlement, Perryman, on the Chattahoochee above the Flint, became headquarters for the Hostiles, while their relative James Perryman was chief of Oketeyeconne. The Creek request for aid suggested to the British high command a strategy of using Indians, slaves, and pirates in the Gulf region to divert American forces from Canada, and because the Creeks said contact with the Four Nations could be maintained from Apalachicola Bay, the Chattahoochee became central to British invasion plans. When the British arrived with munitions at Apalachicola in May 1814, they found many starving Red Stick refugees who had come after Jackson's defeat of them at Horseshoe Bend in March, and people from Oketeyeconne were prominent among those armed, with Hawkins reporting that four kegs of cartridges of 100 pounds each went to Oketeyeconne and Tuttallossee along with some arms, short rifles, and others. After receiving such reports, Jackson demanded a huge land cession, mostly from his Lower Creek allies, and placed the boundary strategically just south of Oketeyeconne to suppress the insurgency.

Fort Gaines, Georgia · United States