Guest Author, Jack Cunningham

 

This is a great story. I am thankful to know Jack and have enjoyed many of his books. Thank you, Jack, for sharing with us.

 

From Picture to Novel

 

A picture in my fourth grade Alabama history textbook is engraved in my memory— the massacre at Fort Mims during the Creek Indian War (1813-1814). Although it’s romanticized and has several inaccuracies, I’ve wanted to write a story about it for a long time. After thirty years of writing professionally, I finally did. The title: Frontier Circuit, A Story of the Creek War. 

 
            Most folks in Alabama are familiar with this conflict. It started as a civil war between two Creek Indian nations—the Upper Creeks, who lived in south-central Alabama and the Lower Creeks, who lived in southwestern Georgia. The Upper Creeks wanted to keep their traditional ways of life, whereas the Lower Creeks preferred the settlers’ ways. The early settlers called the radical band of Upper Creeks Redsticks, for their red war clubs.

 Other factors played into this war too: a road being built through the Upper Creek Nation, the Shawnee Tecumseh’s visit to the Indian nations in Mississippi and Alabama to stir up strife, and the settlers trespassing on Creek land, to name just a few.

            In July 1813, word reached the settlers in the region that a band of Redsticks had gone to Pensacola, in Spanish West Florida, to obtain arms to fight them, so the militia ambushed them while they stopped to eat lunch on their way home. After a brief skirmish, the Redsticks routed the militiamen.

            Alarm spread throughout lower Alabama. Settlers scattered into hastily built stockades. One of these was Fort Mims, thrown up around the house of Samuel Mims, a man of wealth and influence in Alabama’s Tensaw and Tombigbee settlements. On August 30, 1813, the Redsticks attacked it, and a massacre ensued. 

            As I pondered these people’s fates, I wondered how many of them died without knowing the Lord. Then in rode my circuit rider characters, Thomas Murcher and Phineas Steward. Also, a settlement’s murderous gang which persecuted them and opposed their efforts to establish a church. When the gang leader’s girl, Annabelle Lawson, experiences a dramatic conversion she falls in love with Thomas, and my story began to take shape. If Thomas doesn’t overcome his insecurities and shyness around girls, and if he and Annabelle don’t escape the Fort Mims massacre, they’ll never discover their true destinies.

            I hope readers will take away two major lessons from this story: (1) Live for the Lord, not the world. Fort Mims serves as a metaphor for this. (2) Accept yourself and the way God created you. Thomas’s experience illustrates this.

To purchase a copy of the book, visit

Frontier Circuit: A Story of the Creek War: Cunningham, Jack: 9781732248854: Amazon.com: Books.

Also, visit the author’s website at www.theaauthorscove.com