Jul. 28, 2017

Native American Payback Time

As you drive by what must be the highest building in Elmore County, Alabama, located just south of downtown Wetumpka, the thought drifts by that the Indians, or Native Americans, or what ever name satisfies your people description requirements, that they are having the last laugh.  The old Creek Indian Land boundary line ran up in a generally northwest direction from the Chattahoochee River and crossed the Tallapoosa River very near where the second Creek Casino stands today.  At that point it went up into Elmore County slightly before heading directly west to the Coosa River on the south side of what is today downtown Wetumpka.  In fact Boundary Street, on the south side of the Wetumpka downtown area, runs along that line.  This boundary marked the last stand of the Creek Indians against the steady onslaught of the American settler's usurpation of their ancestral homelands.  That the Creeks are back in Wetumpka, that they are completing the tallest and most beautiful building in the area, not far from their old boundary line, and that they are preparing to relieve the palefaces of much of the contents of their coin purse with their beautiful new casino, just has to make the ghosts of those Creeks buried so long ago in the vicinity of the new casino area howl with a laughter of vindication at last.  For all the crooked land deals in which they were victimized in their lands east of Wetumpka, for the forced, long and arduous trip down the Alabama River to Mobile, from Mobile over to New Orleans, from New Orleans up the Mississippi to Arkansas, and the trek from Arkansas by foot to Oklahoma, payday has finally arrived. Few people in this area know that hundreds of them were killed when a steamboat going down the Mississippi ran into, and split apart, the boat on which the Indians were being transported upriver to Arkansas.  And now probably more than 500 local white eyes will wind up working for them in their new facility.  For the Creator of the universe, truly, payday is not always on Friday.  But a reaping in the early 2000's is following the sowing in the early 1800's.