ee thousand other chiefs and
warriors said that by Creek law, which Chief Macintosh himself had
proposed, the land could not be sold except through the consent of a
grand council.

As the nation owned the land, and had built better towns, and was
living well and peacefully, the council decided that Chief Macintosh
must be put to death--for he was a traitor and he knew the law.

Chief Menewa was asked to consent; he ruled, by reason of his wisdom
and his scars. Finally he saw no other way than to order the deed
done, for the Creek law was plain.

On the morning of May 1 he took a party of warriors to the Chief
Macintosh house, and surrounded it. There were some white Georgians
inside. He directed them to leave, as he had come to kill only Chief
Macintosh, according to the law.

So the white men, and the women and children, left. When Chief
Macintosh bolted in flight, he was shot dead.

The Georgia people, who desired the Creek land, prepared for war, or to
arrest Menewa and his party. But the President, learning the ins and
outs of the trouble, and seeing that the land had not been sold by the
Creek nation, ordered the sale held up. The Creeks stayed where they
were, for some years.

Menewa went to war once more, in 1836, and helped the United States
fight against the Seminoles of Florida. In return for this, he asked
permission to remain and live in his own country of the Creeks. But he
was removed, with the last of the nation, beyond the Mississippi to the
Indian Territory.

There, an old man, he died.

CHAPTER XV

BLACK-HAWK THE SAC PATRIOT (1831-1838)

THE INDIAN WHO DID NOT UNDERSTAND

The two small nations of the Sacs and the Foxes had lived as one family
for a long time. They were of the Algonquian tongue. From the
northern Great Lakes country they had moved over to the Mississippi
River, and down to Illinois and Iowa. Their number was not more than
six thousand. They were a shave-head Indian, of forest and stream, and
accustomed to travel afoot or in canoes.

The Foxes built their bark-house villages on the west side of the
Mississippi, in Iowa's "great nose." They called themselves
Mus-qua-kees, or the Red Earth People. They said that they had been
made from red clay. Their totem was a fox; and the French of the Great
Lakes had dubbed them Foxes--had asserted that, like the fox, they were
quarrelsome, tricky and thievish. As warriors they were much feared.
They had lost hea