Geology -- Georgia -- Stone Mountain; Stone Mountain (Ga.); Stone Mountain Memorial (Ga.)
McGillivray accepted payment for his property in Savannah that had been
confiscated. The Georgia colony already had twice bought and paid for
the land east of the Oconee River, but McGillivray sold the same land
again, and signed a third treaty for $100,000. For assurance against
further Indian troubles, Washington commissioned him brigadier general
in the United States Army and awarded him a pension of $1,200 a year.
McGillivray went immediately to Pensacola, where the Spaniards
proclaimed him emperor of the Creeks and Seminoles and paid him $3,500 a
year to continue harassing Georgia settlers. He died in 1793 of “gout of
the stomach,” which may have been an unidentified poison.
In 1802 the Creeks signed a treaty giving up their lands west of the
Oconee River to the state line. Georgia then ceded the Alabama and
Mississippi territories to the United States government in exchange for
a promise to remove all the Indians from within the state’s borders, a
pledge that was not carried out. The state began distributing the land
by lottery in 1803.
Reports of the rock that was as big as a mountain continued to arouse
wide interest, but they were descriptions given by Indians. Few white
men still had seen it. M. F. Stephenson, the famous gold assayer of
Dahlonega, wrote that in 1808 an Englishman returned to London with the
story, but the location of the mountain was so far from the Blue Ridge
peaks that he thought it was man-made. The president of the Academy of
Arts and Sciences in Paris addressed a letter to the Hon. R. W.
Habersham of Savannah asking for the dimensions and other data
concerning this vast relic of _architectural_ grandeur.
The frontier continued in turmoil, which reached a climax through
incitement of the Indians by the British in the War of 1812. In 1814
Andrew Jackson, with 2,500 militiamen and a lot of Cherokees, cornered
and practically annihilated the militant branch of the Creeks at
Horseshoe Bend of the Coosa River in Alabama.
During the years several more treaties concerning the Stone Mountain
area were signed and ignored. The Creeks enacted the death penalty for
any chief who disposed of any more of the tribe’s properties. Then Chief
William McIntosh again sold the land between the Oconee and
Chattahoochee rivers for $400,000 in a treaty signed at Indian Springs
in February, 1825. Two months later he was riddled with bullets from a
hundred Creek rifles.
The next year, in 1826, President John Quincy Adams invited thirteen
Creek chiefs to Washington and bought the land east of the Chattahoochee
again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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