But Then The Other Moccasin Drops

From my last post, one might get the wrong impression about the native peoples of our fair Southeast. The Seminoles may have partied hard in northwest Florida, but the Creeks (a/k/a "Muscogulges"), who lived in Alabama, took a decidedly different view of "spiritous liquors":

The Muscogulges, with their confederates, the Chactaws, Chicasaws, and perhaps the Cherokees, eminently deserve the encomium of all nations, for their wisdom and virtue in resisting and even repeling the greatest, and even the common enemy of mankind, at least of most of the Eurpoean nations, I mean spiritous liquors.

The first and most cogent article in all their treaties with the white people, is that there shall not be any kind of spiritous liquors sold or brought into their towns; and the traders are allowed but two kegs (five gallons each) which is supposed to be sufficient for a company, to serve them on the road, and if any of this remains on their approaching the towns, they must spill it on the ground or secrete it on the road, for it must not come into the town.

On my journey from Mobile to the Nation, just after we had passed the junction of the Pensacola road with our path, two young traders overtook us on their way to the Nation. We enquired what news? They informed us that they were running about forty kegs of Jamaica spirits (which by dashing would have made at least eighty kegs) to the Nation; and after having left the town three or four days, they were surprised on the road in the evening, just after they had come to camp, by a party of Creeks, who discovering their species of merchandize, they forthwith struck their tomahawks into every keg, giving the liquor to the thirsty sand, not tasting a drop of it themselves, and they had enough to do to keep the tomahawks from their own skulls.

--page 116.

So it's not just fundamentalist Christianity after all that makes it hard to buy good liquor and impossible to buy high-alcohol beer in Alabama; it turns out that temperance just runs in the Alabama soil!