William Weatherford

William Weatherford, known as Red Eagle (ca. 1781–March 24, 1824), was a Creek chief of the Upper Creek towns who led many of the Red Sticks actions in the Creek War (1813–1814) against Lower Creek towns and against allied forces of the United States.

One of many mixed-race descendants of Southeast Indians who intermarried with European traders and later colonial settlers, William Weatherford was of mixed Creek, French, and Scots ancestry. 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). After the war, he rebuilt his wealth as a slaveholding planter in lower Monroe County, Alabama.

William Weatherford, known as Red Eagle (Lamochattee in Creek), was born in 1781 (Griffith Jr. analysis), near the Upper Creek towns of Coosauda. It is near the current Coosada, Alabama, and was then a Koasati Indian town, near Hickory Ground (current Wetumpka, Alabama). His mother was Sehoy III, a "daughter of a Tabacha cheiftain" and from "the most powerful and privileged of all the Creek clans," the Wind Clan (in Creek, Hutalgalgi). His father, Charles Weatherford, was a red-haired Scots trader and friend of the chieftain, and had married Sehoy III after the death of her first husband, Tory Col. John Tate, in the summer of 1780. Sehoy III was of mixed Creek, French and possibly Scottish descent. As the Creek had a matrilineal kinship system, Sehoy III's children were considered born into her clan. Charles Weatherford had a trading post near the Creek village, built a plantation, raised thoroughbred horses for racing, and contributed to his family as a trader.

Benjamin Hawkins, first appointed as United States Indian agent in the Southeast and then as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the territory south of the Ohio River, lived among the Creek and Choctaw, and knew them well. He commented in letters to President Thomas Jefferson that Creek women were matriarchs and had control of the children "when connected with a white man." Hawkins observed that almost all of the traders, some wealthy, were likewise as "inattentive to their children as the Indians". As Griffith explains (based on John R. Swanton), the lack of fatherly concern was not an "unnatural indifference," given the Creek culture and clan kinship system, and which established a closer relationship of children to their mother's eldest brother (more so than with their biological father).

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