The current was against them. On a late November day in 1817, Lieutenant Richard W. Scott's keelboat labored up the Apalachicola River, heavy with supplies bound for Camp Crawford on the Flint River in southwest Georgia. The boat carried twenty armed soldiers, twenty more too sick to fight, seven women, and four small children. At the confluence where the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers merge to form the Apalachicola -- a spot the British had once fortified as Nicolls' Outpost -- the strong current forced the vessel close to the east bank. Several hundred Red Stick Creek warriors under the command of Homathlimico were waiting in the trees. What happened next would reach the desk of the President and send Andrew Jackson marching into foreign territory.
The attack was swift and devastating. Homathlimico's force, estimated at 300 to 500 warriors, opened fire on the keelboat at close range. The Red Sticks -- a faction of the Muscogee Creek Nation who had refused to accept American encroachment -- had positioned themselves precisely where the river's current would deliver Scott's vessel within striking distance. With half his soldiers incapacitated by illness and unable to bear arms, Scott had no chance. The resulting massacre claimed 33 soldiers, six of the seven women, and all four children. Only seven people survived: one woman and six soldiers who threw themselves into the river and swam to the opposite bank, where friendly Creek allies guided them through the wilderness to Camp Crawford. They arrived on December 2, 1817, carrying news of the bloodshed.
The massacre was portrayed in the American press as an unprovoked atrocity, but the full picture was more complicated. Just one week earlier, American troops had attacked the Creek village of Fowltown in southwest Georgia, killing several warriors and burning homes. For Homathlimico and his Red Stick fighters, the assault on Scott's boat was a retaliatory strike -- an act of war answered with an act of war. The Red Sticks had been dispossessed and driven south after the Creek War of 1813-1814, many finding refuge among the Seminole in Spanish Florida. Josiah Francis, another prominent Red Stick leader, supported the attack from a rear position. These men were fighting not from ambition but from desperation, defending what remained of their homeland against relentless American expansion.
News of the massacre spread fast. Camp Crawford's commander, General Edmund P. Gaines, dispatched urgent reports to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and General Andrew Jackson. American newspapers carried the story widely, stoking public outrage. President James Monroe was furious. He directed that Jackson be ordered to the frontier and that the Seminoles and Red Sticks be punished without regard to whether they were in the United States or Spanish Florida -- an extraordinary authorization to cross an international border in pursuit of retribution. Jackson, already known for his relentless pursuit of Native American resistance, needed little encouragement. Within months, he invaded Spanish Florida, launching what historians recognize as the First Seminole War. The Scott Massacre had provided the pretext the government needed.
Camp Crawford was renamed Fort Scott in honor of the slain lieutenant, a gesture of remembrance that endured even as the frontier moved westward. The attack was soon followed by the Battle of Ocheesee, another engagement in the escalating conflict. Today, the confluence of the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola rivers near Chattahoochee, Florida, is a quiet place. The thick tree canopy still crowds the banks, and the water still pushes hard against anything moving upstream. From the air, the merging rivers create a visible Y-shaped junction in the landscape, the exact spot where a supply boat drifted into an ambush that changed the course of American expansion into Florida. Spain would cede the territory just two years later, in 1819, and the Seminole Wars would grind on for decades.
The massacre site is located at approximately 30.70N, 84.86W, at the confluence of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers where they form the Apalachicola River, near present-day Chattahoochee, Florida. From altitude, look for the distinctive Y-shaped river junction where the three waterways meet. The area is heavily forested with bottomland hardwood. Nearest airports: Chattahoochee Municipal Airport (40J) approximately 3nm north; Tallahassee International Airport (KTLH) approximately 45nm east. Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 feet AGL to see the river confluence clearly. The Jim Woodruff Dam and Lake Seminole are visible just upstream.