Fort Mims

Fort Mims was a stockade around a plantation that became the Creek War's starting gun. By August 1813 the Red Stick faction — Creeks following Tecumseh's brother the Prophet, armed through Spanish Pensacola — were already at war with their own accommodationist kin. Roughly 400 people — settlers, allied Creeks, enslaved African Americans — had crowded behind Samuel Mims's hastily built one-acre stockade on the Tensaw when 700 Red Sticks under William Weatherford rushed the open gate at noon on August 30.

The defense lasted four hours — Major Beasley and half the garrison died in the first minutes; Captain Dixon Bailey, himself Creek, held the stockade until burning arrows set the buildings alight. Then came the killing that gave the event its name: about 250 defenders and civilians dead, a hundred captives taken, only a few escaping to the swamp. 'Remember Fort Mims' became the war's rallying cry — Andrew Jackson's volunteers answered, and the war ended at Horseshoe Bend with the Creek Nation broken.

The site is a state historic site now, closed to casual visitation, the ground where a frontier plantation's stockade became the war that cost the Creek Nation 20 million acres. The file keeps the full complexity — a Native civil war, a settler refuge, and a massacre that served every side's narrative, the gate left open at noon on the lower Alabama River where the war for the Deep South began.

Fort Mims is the archive's open-gate file — the 1813 stockade massacre where Red Sticks killed 250 and started the war Jackson ended at Horseshoe Bend, 'Remember Fort Mims' as the nation's cry.