Virginia Pounds Brown – författare

George Stiggins, a Creek Indian half blood living in Alabama, wrote this history more than 150 years ago. Raised in the white culture by his father, an English trader, Stiggins nevertheless lived in close contact with the Creeks because his mother was a full blood of the Natchez tribe, part of the Creek Confederacy. Stiggins writes with firsthand knowledge of the tribes in the central southeast - the Alabamas, Natchez, Abekas, Uchees, and others. He tells of their origins, their towns and chiefs, and their way of life. He traces critical events leading to the Creek War - the battles of Burnt Corn and Fort Mims - and details the roles of the Indian leaders involved. In ""Tecumseh and the Age of Prophecy,"" he describes the powerful influence of prophets, such as Josiah Francis and Jim Boy, who incited the Creeks to civil war as the confederacy split into war and peace factions. Stiggins's account of William Weatherford's controversial role in the Creek War has speical value because Weatherford was Stiggins's brother-in-law. His descriptions of religious and social aspects of the Creek lifeways make this work prime source material. William Wyman's notes and introduction put the Stiggins account into historical perspective and trace its circuitous route to publication. First issued in 1989, Creek Indian History has become an important primary document for the study of Native American history and culture.

Mary Gordon Duffee''s father, Matthew Duffee was born in Ireland and immigrated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1823. In Tuscaloosa he operated a popular tavern, and he later bought a resort hotel at Blount Springs. Mary Duffee was born in Alabama in 1840 and spent many summers with her family at the resort. It was the journey to and from Blount Springs that inspired Duffee''s best-known work, Sketches of Alabama, which originally appeared as fifty-nine articles in the Birmingham Weekly Iron Age in 1886 and 1887. She also contributed articles to several out-of-state newspapers, wrote guide books, advertising copy, and poetry. She died in 1920. This collection contains typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee''s Iron Age columns "Sketches of Alabama," manuscripts of seven of Duffee''s poems, a typed biographical sketch of Duffee, undated, and Duffee''s obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald.

In this collection of almost sixty tales, Indians themselves—Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and others—tell us about their beliefs, their traditions, and their history, in myths and legends that cover the classic themes of world mythology. Most of the stories were recorded in the late nineteenth century, at a time when Indian myth-keepers who remembered the tribal tales were still alive. Notes and introductory comments throughout the book provide background information for the stories. Editors Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens bring these stories together for the first time in one volume. This collection makes enjoyable and significant reading for adults as well as young people.

A colorful fictional account for middle-school children of the meeting between De Soto and the Alabama Indians on his historic expedition through the South. These Indians were the last of the Mound Builders, led by a peace-loving king. The Gold Disc of Coosa describes their civilized culture in the years until 1540, when the Indians finally made their fateful stand against the Spanish at Maubila.