2017 James F. Sulzby Book Award from the Alabama Historical
Association At its height the Creek Nation comprised a
collection of multiethnic towns and villages with a domain
stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By
the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory
through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers
who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson
administration unwilling to aid the Creeks, while at the same time
demanding their emigration to Indian territory, the Creek people
suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness. Between
the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the arrival of detachment
six in the West in late 1837, nearly twenty-three thousand
Creek Indians were moved—voluntarily or involuntarily—to Indian
territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by
capturing the full breadth and depth of the Creeks' collective
tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and
during the first years of resettlement. Unlike the Cherokee Trail
of Tears, which was conducted largely at the end of a bayonet, most
Creeks were relocated through a combination of coercion and
negotiation. Hopelessly outnumbered military personnel were forced
to make concessions in order to gain the compliance of the headmen
and their people. Christopher D. Haveman's meticulous study uses
previously unexamined documents to weave narratives of resistance
and survival, making Rivers of Sand an essential addition to the
ethnohistory of American Indian removal.