Curious about the name Red Stick and to what it applies. I know that warriors of the Creek nation called themselves Red Sticks during the Creek Wars. The decisive battle was at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River near the Ga-Ala border. Just curious.
the founder of the French colony of Louisiana, the Sieur d' Iberville, first beheld an object, 30 feet tall, that he described as "... a maypole with no limbs, painted red, several fish heads and bear bones being tied to it as a sacrifice." The maypole, which was placed there by the Native Americans, thereafter provided a landmark for Frenchmen travelling upriver. Early map makers noted that the bluffs on the east bank of the Mississippi began at "le Baton (stick) Rouge (red)."
A slightly different version... My understanding is that the native American Indians in the area now know as Baton Rouge were not the most friendly of Indians and in fact were very hostile to foreign settlers intruding upon their lands. To mark the boundaries of their land, these Indians, after capturing any intruders, would cut off the scalp of the intruding settlers. The Indians would then secure the scalps atop very tall wooden posts and place those posts at the borders of their lands. The blood from the scalps would run down the sticks, thereby 'painting' the posts red. Thus when subsequent passing 'foreigners' would see them, who at the time were mostly the French, including D'Iberville, they named the area Baton Rouge, or Red Stick.
