"“No other Indian conflict in our nation’s history so changed the complexion of society as did the Creek War…A dispute that began as a Creek civil war became a ruthless struggle against American expansion, erupting in the midst of the War of 1812. Not only was the Creek War the most pitiless clash between American Indians and whites in U.S. history, but the defeat of the Red Sticks � as those opposed to American encroachment were known because of the red war clubs they carried � also cost the entire Creek people as well as the neighboring Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations their homelands. The collapse of the Red Stick resistance in 1814 led inexorably led to the Indian Trail of Tears two decades later, which opened Alabama, much of Mississippi, and portions of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to white settlement. That in turn gave rise to the Cotton Kingdom, without which there would have been no casus belli for the American Civil War…�
- Peter Cozzens, A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South

You would be forgiven if you do not know much � if anything � about the Creek Indian War of 1813. While American popular culture is awash in tales of cowboys, Indians, and cavalrymen, the focus is typically on the tribes of the Trans-Mississippi West. The Creek have only seldom made an appearance on screens large or small. In fact, one of the few that comes to mind is Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. That came out in 1955.

In A Brutal Reckoning, Peter Cozzens � one of America’s best Indian War historians � gives this sad event the treatment it deserves. If it is not quite as good as his earlier volumes about the American Indian Wars � The Earth is Weeping and Tecumseh and the Prophet � it is still rather excellent. It is a book that is morally damning and dramatically lively, all at once.

***

From the start, Cozzens is quick to point out the complexity of the Creek Indian War. Belonging to a group once known as the “Five Civilized Tribes,� the Creek � or Muscogee � had deeply assimilated themselves within the encroaching United States. Unlike the Indians on the Great Plains, who followed the buffalo in their seasonal progresses, the Creek lived in towns; they had trading networks; they raised crops. Some also embodied racial prejudices, and enslaved black men and women.

Creek culture was vibrant and diverse, and successfully melded traditional and borrowed elements. Unsurprisingly, Indian-white proximity and exchanges led to romantic liaisons, and intermarriage resulted in a Métis population that played a huge role in the war to come. One consequence of these unions is that many Creek Indians had Anglo-European names. For example, Alexander McGillivray might have been a Scottish laird; instead, he became one of the Muscogee’s most famous chiefs. At the battle of Fort Mims, a man named Paddy Walsh played a prominent role. Paddy sounds like the goodtime guy you meet at the pub on Thursday nights; in reality, he was a Creek prophet.

The upshot is that there are a lot of characters here, and it is often quite hard to keep everyone’s roles straight. Cozzens does his best to ameliorate this, by proceeding methodically, and by including a dramatis personae at the end. Still, one has to pay close attention.

***

Before the American Revolution, the Creek managed to preserve their lands by exploiting the competition between the French, Spanish, and British Empires. This leverage eroded quickly. France was vanquished from North America in the Seven Years� War. Spain was perpetually on the decline. Meanwhile, following the Revolutionary War, Great Britain had to contend itself with Canada. Soon, pressure mounted on the Creek, as eager American settlers eyed prime Muscogee territory.

When war between the United States and Great Britain broke out in 1812, battle lines were drawn. The Upper Creek, known as the Red Sticks, attempted to resist further expansion. The Lower Creek � who’d always had closer trading ties with the United States � sided with the whites. The Cherokee and Choctaw also allied with the young American Republic, though it would not save them in the long run.

Things exploded on April 30, 1813, at an unfinished stockade in present-day Alabama called Fort Mims. A battle there degenerated into a massacre that left hundreds of dead, including many noncombatants. From then on, it was a war to the knife, with the United States relying upon a courageous, vengeful, and relentless major general of Tennessee volunteers.

***

As noted above, the cast list here is full of intriguing personalities, men and women attempting to straddle competing cultures, races, and loyalties, and to navigate through a rapidly changing world. Above them all towers Andrew Jackson: frontier lawyer and Congressman; duelist and Tennessee Supreme Court justice; wealthy planter and owner of humans. Though his plantation � the Hermitage � made him rich, soldiering was his true calling.

For good reason, Cozzens focuses on Jackson, sometimes at the expense of others. His personality and actions greatly shaped events. Hair tempered, consumed of an abiding hatred of the British, and guided by terrible passions, Jackson eventually met the Creek at Horseshoe Bend, for what might have been the bloodiest encounter of the long American Indian Wars.

***

Here, as in his other books, Cozzens deftly balances research, storytelling, and biography. He is equally adept at explaining a situation, parsing through competing sources, and delivering a strong set piece. For instance, his handling of both Fort Mims and Horseshoe Bend is gripping.

Perhaps the one flaw in A Brutal Reckoning is its size. There is less than 400 pages of text in which to capture an extremely big event, with roots that can be traced back to the 1500s and Hernando de Soto. This is the shortest of Cozzens’s three Indian War books, and it feels like a lot was cut from this one. In particular, Cozzens makes a lot of bold statements about the impact of the Creek Indian War on subsequent events like the Trail of Tears and the American Civil War. Yet when it comes time to explain these assertions, all we get is a rather rushed final chapter that only skims over the shameful epilogue to this saga.

***

To my mind, there are three major threads running throughout American history. The first is slavery, which predated the Republic, survived the drafting of a constitution devoted to human rights, culminated in the nation’s bloodiest war, and follows us today like a stench. The second is the evolution of American capitalism, which has always worked towards a radically unequal distribution of wealth, a process encouraged by governmental policies and sold to us as “liberty.� The third is America’s continental expansion at the expense of the Native American tribes that lived here first.

Despite its importance, the American Indian Wars have not necessarily been well-served by historians. Even some of the best works have evidentiary flaws, while others are hopelessly reductive or polemical.

Cozzens does a marvelous job of treating complicated affairs as complicated affairs. He recognizes humans as moral agents driven by contradictory passions, imbued with less-than-perfect information, and capable of goodness and cruelty, compassion and callousness. Yet Cozzens also makes sure that everything takes place within a clear-eyed ethical framework that recognizes the ultimate wrongs done the Creek � and hundreds of other tribes � which cannot be explained as anything other than the application of power to expand national boundaries at the expense of thousands of men, women, and children who lost their homes, their traditions, and very often their lives."

"“The book you are about to read tells the story of the Middle Ages. It is a big book, because that is a big task. We are going to sweep across continents and centuries, often at a breakneck pace. We are going to meet hundreds of men and women, from Attila the Hun to Joan of Arc. And we are going to dive headlong into at least a dozen fields of history � from war and law to art and literature. I am going to ask � and I hope to answer � some big questions: What happened in the Middle Ages? Who ruled? What did power look like? What were the big forces that shaped peoples� lives? And how (if at all) did the Middle Ages shape the world we know today…�
- Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages occupies an interesting place in the history of the western world. Sandwiched between the half-mythological glories of classical antiquity, and the vivid artistic and scientific expressions of the Renaissance, it can seem � by contrast � a rather grim place to visit: a gloomy milieu of toiling peasants in their cheerless hovels, and bickering nobles in drafty stone castles. It was a time � to steal a phrase from Hobbes � when life tended to be nasty, brutish, and short.

I hasten to add, however, that what I know about the Middle Ages can fit into the codpiece I once wore to a Ren Fair in Kansas City. It is an incomplete picture cobbled together from a few European castle tours, a half dozen stray books, and numerous movies, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Thus, my conception of this era is necessarily far from complete.

What I required was a mile-high overview that threaded the line between serious and not-too-serious, and that simplified things without dumbing them down.

That’s the reason why I turned to Dan Jones’s Powers and Thrones.

***

Jones is a model of the modern popular historian. He has a strong internet presence; he makes analogies to sports, especially the game the world sensibly refers to as football, and which Americans call soccer; and he seems genuinely passionate about getting paid to do what he clearly loves. The archetypal academic historian is writing for his colleagues. Jones is writing for everyone. He has an eagerness to share akin to a kindergartener at show-and-tell.

Jones’s willingness � nay, his intent � to appeal to a broad audience is a great thing in general. Yet in the area of the Middle Ages, it is especially important. That’s because medievalists are a notoriously unfun bunch, despite making a living dreaming of the past. For example, well-respected author-historians such as Barbara Tuchman and William Manchester have been slammed for encroaching on this territory, and for daring to compare then to now. There is an apparent belief in this field of study that interpreting the Middle Ages is a matter of life and death, and that everyone must act accordingly.

In Powers and Thrones, Jones wants things to be fun. Or at least as fun as anything involving the Black Death can be.

***

Not only is Jones accessible, but he has a marvelously methodical, building-block approach. This is important, because he’s trying to digest a lot in Powers and Thrones. More specifically, the tale begins in 410 AD, and ends in 1527 AD, which is a solid eleven centuries of human life.

Jones divides Powers and Thrones into four sections, each one corresponding to a specific date range. However, he is not telling a single, chronological narrative. Rather, the chapters within each section are thematic, covering topics such as knights, crusaders, merchants, and scholars. Within these chapters, Jones highlights individual characters, important events, technological advances, cultural trends, and architecture.

With so much to survey, there are inevitable highs and lows, though everything is fascinating in its own right. For instance, I found myself surprisingly engaged in Jones’s discussion on monasteries.

***

Given the scope of Powers and Thrones, Jones has to make inevitable tradeoffs in order to deliver a reasonably-sized single volume. This results in a lack of depth in some areas, and the elision of others completely.

For a starter book, though, that’s okay. In choosing this, I wanted to avoid getting lost in minutiae, or discovering that I required prerequisites to understand what was going on. From the beginning, which includes a long exploration of the fall of Rome, Jones proves an attentive tour guide.

It should also be noted that despite an acknowledged bias in favor of western Europe, Jones makes a concerted effort to provide a global snapshot. To that end, there is a chapter on the Arab conquests of the 600s, and the brief-but-spectacular emergence of the Mongol Empire in the 1200s.

***

The phrase “popular historian� is often used as a thinly veiled insult, or as a synonym for unseriousness. That’s not the impression I want to leave. Though he is often in front of a camera � especially on YouTube or Britain’s Channel 5 � and has also been known to be photographed looking self-consciously pensive while wearing a leather jacket, Jones is not an unlettered dilettante. This period of history is his thing, and he provides a long list of primary sources to back that up.

***

Whenever I branch off into a new area of history, I try to start with the biggest of big pictures. While this seems obvious, there have been times when I tried to jump into the deep end, and ended up hopelessly confused. The first time I tackled the French Revolution, for instance, the titles I chose made me feel like I was reading something that had been translated from Greek to Latin to English.

As I hoped, Powers and Thrones gave me the lay of the land. Jones did not knock me over with his prose or insights, but he provides a nice jumping-off point for further exploration. And not for nothing, he made the Middle Ages a pleasant place to visit vicariously, if not in reality."