William Augustus Bowles

William Augustus Bowles (1763–1805), also known as Estajoca, was a Maryland-born English adventurer and organizer of Native American attempts to create their own state outside of the control of the United States, Spain, or Great Britain.

Some sources give his date of birth as 1764. Bowles was born in Frederick County, Maryland, and joined the Maryland Loyalist Battalion at the age of thirteen, travelling with the battalion when it was ordered to form part of the garrison of Pensacola. Upon arrival, and as he was an officer, Bowles resigned his commission, and left the fortifications. He was captured by Indians from the Creek Nation.

While he was living with the Creek Tribe, Spanish naval forces with soldiers embarked upon their ships, and began to attack British forts along the Gulf Coast. Bowles convinced the Creeks to support the British garrison of Pensacola against the Spaniards, but the garrison fell when the powder magazine at the fortress was hit by artillery fire from the Spanish ships. The survivors of the garrison were captured, but Bowles escaped into the wilderness with his Creek allies. This occurred May 9, 1781, when Bowles was either 16 or 17 years old.

After this battle, he was reinstated in the British Army, and went to the Bahamas. After a few months in the Bahamas, the British governor Lord Dunmore, sent Bowles back among the Creeks with a charge to establish a trading house among them. Bowles established a trading post along the Chattahoochee River. He would marry two wives, one Cherokee and the other a daughter of the Hitchiti Muscogee chieftain, William Perryman, and used this union as the basis for his claim to exert political influence among the Creeks, later styling himself "Director General of the Muskogee Nation".

Pursuing his idea of an American Indian state after the end of the Revolutionary War, he was received by George III as 'Chief of the Embassy for Creek and Cherokee Nations' and it was with British backing that he returned to Florida.

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