"Let Us Try to Make Each Other Happy, and Not Wretched"

"Let us try to make each other happy" tracks a Creek-Georgia frontier as it emerged in the American Revolution and lasted to the turn of the nineteenth century. There multiple groups of Creeks, Americans, and Europeans grappled with ideas of sovereignty and the right of self-determination. The Creek-Georgian frontier, however, embraces conceptualizations of frontiers as places where misunderstanding bred distrust, fear, localized violence, and eventually, racial hatred, challenging older definitions of frontiers as places of accommodation or mutual understanding. Multiple groups faced each other, and what they created was a place of terrible brutality where extremism, not compromise, was the natural way of things."Let us try to make each other happy" blends a New Indian History approach with recent interpretations of frontiers as areas of empire and nation-building. Italso carefully outlines how Creek decisions ordered Georgian lives on the backcountry, and embraces the importance of community-level identity in the study of Early American history. Ultimately, I utilize Creek, Georgian, and European threads to weave a twenty-year narrative of misunderstanding and violence that, as I argue, had tremendous bearing on the development of the southeast.