William Weatherford, known as Red Eagle, was a Creek chief of the Upper Creek towns.
Background
William Weatherford was born among the Creek Indians. Most of his life he lived on the right bank of the Alabama River within the present limits of Elmore County, a few miles above the site of Montgomery, Ala. , and it is usually said that he was born there. Statements concerning his parentage are contradictory; that his mother was a Seminole and his father a "pedlar" of uncertain character, that he was the son of Charles Weatherford, a prosperous Scotch or English trader, and Sehoy, the half-sister of Alexander McGillivray.
Career
Actuated to war against the whites by the visit of Tecumseh in 1811, he, nevertheless, did not take up arms until after the battle of Tippecanoe. Then, ignorant that his cause was already hopeless, he led his followers in a war of destruction and won for himself the hatred and malice of the whites. Although they accused him of the utmost limits of personal degradation, they also described him as able, eloquent, and courageous. At the outbreak of the Creek War he was responsible for the massacre at Fort Mims on August 30, 1813, in which some 500 victims were put to death, men, women, and children with indiscriminate cruelty. He was one of the leaders, apparently with Menewa a principal leader, of the Creeks in the disaster at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, when Andrew Jackson defeated about 1000 Indian warriors barricaded in the great bend of the Tallapoosa River. Shortly after the battle he surrendered to Andrew Jackson. In the remaining years of his life he seems to have accepted the situation and lived fairly prosperously on a plantation among the white people of Monroe County. His personal reputation improved with that adjustment, and no more was heard of his dissolute habits, whether from a reformation of character or from lack of malice is uncertain. He bore no important part in the difficulties and anxieties of his doomed people, and, dying before westward removal was actually accomplished, he was buried in the beloved land of his forefathers.
Achievements
He was raised as a Creek in the matrilineal nation and achieved his power in it, through his mother's prominent Wind Clan (as well as his father's trading connections[not verified in body]). After the war, he rebuilt his wealth as a slaveholding planter in lower Monroe County, Alabama.
Connections
He had two Indian wives, Mary Moniac, who died in 1804, and Sapoth Thlanie. In 1817 he married his third wife, Mary Stiggins, a white woman.
