Creek Indian Globetrotter: Tomochichi's Trans-Atlantic Quest for Traditional Power in the Colonial Southeast

This essay reinterprets the life of a famous Muscogee Creek leader and examines the relationship between chiefly power and foreign travel in American Indian studies and Atlantic world studies. In spring 1734, the Creek headman Tomochichi and British imperialist James Edward Oglethorpe traveled to London to ratify a treaty that established the British colony of Georgia in the neighborhood of the Creek Confederacy. During his five-month sojourn, Tomochichi forged alliances with the Georgia trustees and the British royal family that resulted in a unique trans-Atlantic network of patronage. Upon return home, he leveraged his ocean-going imperial connections to craft an authoritative chieftainship that dated to the seventeenth-century Mississippian era.