Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom

Whenever he reached a Creek village whose occupants were suspected of participating in the uprising, Jackson burned it to the ground and sent the inhabitants fleeing toward Spanish Florida. If they resisted, he ordered them hunted down and killed. In the process, Jackson had the additional concept of establishing a permanent north-south road through the wilderness from Nashville to Mobile—felling trees, removing stumps, filling, backing, leveling, and bridging—to open the Gulf trade to Tennessee (which, in fact, he did).
    Not only that, but when he was finished with the Creeks in Alabama, Jackson had determined to move against the Spanish stronghold at Pensacola to eject them from or neutralize their control over West Florida. Although Spain was ostensibly at peace with the United States, Jackson knew from his many spies that the Spanish were quietly arming and supplying the Creeks and other Indians, inspiring them to cause trouble in the southern regions of the country. And there were worse things, too, far worse, that Jackson did not know at the time.
    With Brigadier John Coffee’s 1,200-man cavalry as its spearhead, Jackson’s army marched southward. There were several major battles, the first fought at the large Creek town of Talluschatchee. There Coffee, a giant of a man who would go on to become Jackson’s most trusted lieutenant, was fighting the first military engagement of his life, but proved he had an unerring aptitude for it. He posted his men in two large half-circles, performing an envelopment outside the town. When the Indians spotted several riders sent in as “bait,” they all rushed out to give chase, and Coffee’s men sprung the trap. Many Creeks were killed, and the rest ran back into the town, where they were relentlessly hunted down by the Tennesseans. “We shot them like dogs,” Davy Crockett remembered.
    Several dozen braves ran into a large hut guarded at the door by a Creek squaw with a bow and arrow. When she killed a young lieutenant with it, she was in turn shot by his troops and the hut set afire, roasting the Indians alive. One hundred and eighty-six dead Indians were counted when the battle was over, and several dozen women and children taken into custody, including a beautiful boy about three years old who was found terrified and crying in his dead mother’s arms. When Coffee’s men marched the women and children back to Jackson’s camp, the general immediately noticed the boy and inquired of the squaws who among them was going to take care of him. Their reply disgusted the general: “All his relations are dead; kill him too,” they said.
    Jackson did no such thing, but instead took the little boy into his tent and nursed him with brown sugar water until the child could be sent to Rachel in Nashville. Afterward, the Jacksons named the boy Lincoyer, and he lived with them as beloved as any of their own family until his death from tuburculosis at the age of seventeen.
    Next on Jackson’s list was the large Creek encampment at Talladega,*  24 where some 1,000 Red Sticks had besieged an old fort inhabited by about 150 friendly Creeks. They had been on the verge of starvation when one of their chiefs, “enveloping himself in the skin of a large hog with head and hoofs attached, left the fort and went about rooting and grunting, gradually working his way through the hostile host until he was beyond reach of their arrows.”
    By the time this bold hog-man reached Jackson’s camp, the Americans, too, were on the edge of starvation, their suppliers having failed them. Jackson nevertheless saddled up almost his entire army and moved on Talladega, which he reached in the early hours of November 9, 1813. They formed ranks at sunrise and moved toward the enemy in an envelopment formation similar to the one Coffee had used previously. In the ensuing battle 239 Indian bodies were left on the field, and others, wounded, undoubtedly died in the woods into which they had run. Jackson had 15