The State Of Muskogee

Establishing a Native State

Before beginning this post I wish to encourage Seth Abramson’s posts her on substack on the conflict in Israel.

Every year in the month of May, there is a festival held in Fort Walton, Florida to honor William Augustus Bowles. I spent a couple of late fall-early winters in the Bradenton area, but I was never able to visit the festival.  Supposedly, there is an historical reenactment of Bowles’ life, but I’m told they get little of Bowles’ history correct.  In the first place it is called the Billy Bowlegs Festival, the name the Americans placed upon Halputo Mikko (there are a variety of English attempts at phonetically spelling his common Seminole name.Halputo Mikko successfully  (depending on your point of view of success meaning keeping his band in Florida while retreating), nevertheless Halputo  finally signed a treaty after the fourth Seminole war and notoriously retreated even further into the hinterlands for another 21 years where he and his people survived until 1855 when they were (re)”discovered” and shipped to Oklahoma.  

Well the festival supposedly honors William Bowles, not Billy Bowlegs, so I know they have that much wrong at any rate.

William Augustus Bowles,  also known as Estajoca, was from Maryland, but was a loyalist sailor during the  American Revolution. Bowles was sympathetic to Natives in America and felt the American cause would endanger their survival even further and became one of the first to propose a separate Native American country that would exist outside of the control of the United States and European powers.  Bowles championing of a Native homeland predated Tecumseh’s attempt to achieve one some thirty plus years later, but was contemporaneous with Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant),who also allied with the  British during the revolution with the promise of a Native state being formed.  

Bowles almost assuredly  was not from an elitist family.  Quite possibly his family were escaped indentured  and he had been raised near or with Natives.  We know he spoke their languages (several of them) fluently, but he appears in history as a thirteen year old boy when he enlists in the British navy at the dawn of the revolution. Well some suggest that’s not true, that he did have a wealthy upperclass background and his father remained allied with loyalists sympathies.  That is the biography the Americans would later put forth, that he was the William, son of Edward Bowles, a Maryland planter.  The problem with that is William could not write and needed to sign his mark on legal documents and he died in 1662 without heir.  During Bowles’ illness prior to his death, Maryland court records state:

In a 1663 Charles County, Maryland, suit, High O’Neale v. William Bowles, "for the Care" of the defendant, the sparse case records do not reveal the involvement of O'Neal's wife Mary as the healer in question. Rather, that crucial piece of information emerges from the context of a series of five lawsuits dating back to the fall of 1661, all revolving around her medical activies. . .Were it not for this extensive litigious history, O'Neale's 1663 suit against Bowles could not be recognized for what it is: the sixth in a string of similar cases deriving from the work of an active female healer.

As a result, it is not possible that our William Bowles miraculously survived death for 111 years and reemerged as a 13 year old heir to a loyalist family that no longer had titles to any lands.  So I stick  with my made-up genealogy

While France often gets much of the credit for their role during the American Revolution the Spanish are often forgotten. While their contribution was minor compared to the French, the Spanish still maintained a decent navy and were a threat to British holdings in the Caribbean.

And because of that threat, the British sent Bowles, as part of their Navy, to Florida to fend against the Spanish who might have tried an attack on their southern flank.  He was sent  with a squadron to counter an attack at their fort in Pensacola (they failed), but Bowles was delayed for some reason and didn’t arrive with the others back on the ship and was released from service. Bowles then convinced the leaders of the Creek Nation to support the British garrison of Pensacola against the Spanish. They agreed to do so, but were unable to stop the Spanish from gaining control of the garrison. Bowles had surprising influence over the Natives despite his age. This event would have occurred in May of 1781 when he was just 16 or 17 years old. Bowles led a group of natives to a semi-successful attack against the Spanish. After the battle he was reinstated into the British Army and sent to the Bahamas. His presence in the Bahamas  did not last long as he was sent back to live among Creeks and establish a large trading post. Establishing the post a trading but fully embracing the Native lifestyle, he married two native wives, one Creek, the other Cherokee.

At the end of the revolutionary war, he began to pursue  his idea of a Native State and he sailed with a  Native delegation to England, and appears to have been received by George III as an the “Chief of the Embassy for the Cherokke and Creek Nations." and it was with British backing that he returned to Florida.In 1795 he managed to form a short-lived state in northern Florida known as the State of Muskogee.  A flag was designed and a constitution was written for his state. He even was able to raise an army and carry out raids against the Spanish. He saw some small success and in 1800, declared war against the Spanish. Taking this unkindly, the Spanish offered a bounty for his capture. When he was finally captured, he was transported to Madrid where he was unmoved by King Charles IV's attempts to make him change sides. Bowles managed to escape and  commandeered a ship to return  to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1803, not long after having declared himself "Chief of all Indians present" at a tribal council, he was betrayed and turned over to the Spanish. William Augustus Bowles died in 1805, having refused to eat in a Havana prison.

But Bowles' legacy lived on, and a sixty year war began with the Seminole, the longest in American history, not only to subdue any Native population, but just plain the longest.  The second war (we numbered them by the lead chiefs we captured, but a new chief would arise or renege on a treaty (who reneged?), led by Osceola took the lives of fifteen thousand troops and countless civilians and cost the treasury twenty million dollars.  And that was only about a ninth of the long struggle, albeit the fiercest.