Free Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom Page A

A melee ensued: Stockley Hays, Jackson’s nephew, began stabbing at Jesse with a sword cane, while Jackson’s faithful cavalry commander, John Coffee, brutalized Thomas with the butt of his pistol. Both Bentons managed to make their getaway, but Andrew Jackson was left in very bad shape.
    At first it was feared he would not live; his blood soaked up two mattresses before the bleeding stopped. Every physician in Nashville attended the general, and all but one agreed he’d have to have the arm amputated lest gangrene set in and kill him. Jackson would have none of it, though, saying, “I’ll keep my arm.” He remained bedridden for more than three weeks, until momentous news arrived from Alabama.
    Following Tecumseh’s visit to the Creek Nation there two years earlier, a band of about two dozen Creek warriors trekked all the way up to Indiana to meet with Tecumseh about the great Indian Confederation he had planned. They accompanied him on several raids against white settlers and also participated in the massacre of U.S. prisoners at the River Raisin in Michigan Territory. Afterward the Creeks returned to Alabama more bloodthirsty than ever, massacring settlers all along the way. When they got home they found that something even larger was in the wind: William Weatherford, the powerful Creek chief now known as Red Eagle, had put on his warpaint.
    W eatherford’s ancestry is so unusual that it begs amplification. Nearly a hundred years earlier, in 1722, an officer named Captain Marchand was ordered by French authorities in New Orleans to take a body of troops and establish an outpost on the upper reaches of the Coosa River where it joins the Alabama near present-day Montgomery. Once there he built Fort Toulouse, constituting thereby a French presence against encroachments by the English from their colonies to the east, or by the Spanish, who controlled Florida to the south.
    There Marchand met an Indian girl, who produced for him a lovely child they named Sehoy. Shortly afterward, Marchand’s troops mutinied and killed him, which is the end of his story, but the soon-to-be legendary Sehoy grew into a beautiful woman who, when the British encroached into Alabama, just as the French had feared, began consorting with one of their officers, and producing children, until a handsome and wealthy Scottish adventurer by the name of Lachlan McGillivray turned up and “repaid his host’s hospitality” by running away with Sehoy. McGillivray then built a fashionable home on the Coosa River and established an Indian trading post, which soon made him a very wealthy man.
    One of their sons, Alexander McGillivray, whom Lachlan had sent away to boarding school in Charleston, returned to the Coosa and promptly disavowed both his education and his three-quarters-white blood by joining the Creek “Clan of the Wind,” of which he soon became head chief. The younger McGillivray also disliked Americans, and during the Revolution he became a colonel in the British army, after which he worked in Pensacola for Spain, before changing allegiances once again and winding up at his death, in 1793, “a brigadier-general in the United States Army, worth one hundred thousand dollars, and . . . buried with Masonic honors in a Spanish gentleman’s garden at Pensacola.”
    Before Alexander died, however, another Scottish trader named Charles Weatherford happened along and married Alexander’s half sister, whereupon, like the elder McGillivray, this new Scotsman built a fine house for himself and his wife and went on to make a fortune in the Indian trade. Of Weatherford’s two sons—themselves only one-eighth Indian by now—Robert chose the way of the white man (and was never heard of again), but William, like his famous uncle Alexander McGillivray, chose the path of a Creek warrior and soon became known as the ferocious Chief Red Eagle of the Clan of the Wind.
    The visit to Alabama by Tecumseh in 1811 had left a murderous impression on