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The Kolomi Tribe
The earliest mention of Kolomi town is contained in a letter of the Spanish
lieutenant at Apalachee, Antonio Mateos, in 1686.1 A translation of
this has been given in considering the history of the Kasihta.2 The
town was then probably on Ocmulgee River, where it appears on some of the very
early maps, placed close to Atasi. From the failure of Mateos to mention Atasi
it is possible that that town was not yet in existence. From later maps we learn
that after the Yamasee war the Kolomi settled on the Chattahoochee. The maps
show them in what is now Stewart County, Ga., but Colomokee Creek in Clay County
may perhaps mark a former settlement of Kolomi people farther south. The name is
often given on maps in the form ''Colomino.''3 Still later they
removed to the Tallapoosa, where, as appears from Bartram, they first settled
upon the east bank but later moved across.4 In all these changes they
seem to have kept company with the Atasi. Their name appears in the lists of
1738, 1750, 1760, and 1761. In 1761 their officially recognized trader was James
Germany.5 Bartram thus describes the town in 1777:
Here are very extensive
old fields, the abandoned plantations and
commons of the old town, on the east side of
the river; but the settlement is removed,
and the new town now stands on the opposite
shore, in a charming fruitful plain, under
an elevated ridge of hills, the swelling
beds or bases of which are covered with a
pleasing verdure of grass; but the last
ascent is steeper, and towards the summit
discovers shelving rocky cliffs, which
appear to be continually splitting and
bursting to pieces, scattering their thin
exfoliations over the tops of the grassy
knolls beneath. The plain is narrow where
the town is built; their houses are neat
commodious buildings, a wooden frame with
plastered walls, and roofed with Cypress
bark or shingles; every habitation consists
of four oblong square houses, of one story,
of the same form and dimensions, and so
situated as to form an exact square,
encompassing an area or courtyard of about a
quarter of an acre of ground, leaving an
entrance into it at each comer. Here is a
beautiful new square or areopagus, in the
centre of the new town; but the stores of
the principal trader, and two or three
Indian habitations, stand near the banks of
the opposite shore on the site of the old
Coolome town. The Tallapoose River is here
three hundred yards over, and about fifteen
or twenty feet deep; the water is very
clear, agreeable to the taste, esteemed
salubrious, and runs with a steady, active
current.6
A little later Bartram called again and
has the following to say regarding the
trader, James Germany, mentioned above:
[I] called by the way at
the beautiful town of Coolome, where I
tarried some time with Mr. Germany the chief
trader of the town, an elderly gentleman,
but active, cheerful and very agreeable, who
received and treated me with the utmost
civility and friendship; his wife is a Creek
woman, of a very amiable and worthy
character and disposition, industrious,
prudent and affectionate; and by her he has
several children, whom he is desirous to
send to Savanna or Charleston, for their
education, but can not prevail on his wife
to consent to it.7
In May, 1797, according to a list
compiled by Hawkins, there was no trader in
this town, but in a subsequent list, dated
September of the same year, he gives William
Gregory, who was formerly a hireling of
Nicholas White at Fushatchee.8
Swan (1791) mentions the place,9
and Hawkins (1799) thus describes it:
Coo-loo-me is below and
near to Foosce-hat-che, on the right side of
the river; the town is small and compact, on
a flat much too low, and subject to be
overflowed in the seasons of floods, which
is once in fifteen or sixteen years, always
in the winter season, and mostly in March;
they have, within two years, begun to settle
back, next to the broken lands; the
cornfields are on the opposite side, joining
those of Foosce-hat-che, and extend together
near four miles down the river, from one
hundred to two hundred yards wide. Back of
these hills there is a rich swamp of from
four to six hundred yards wide, which, when
reclaimed, must be valuable for corn and
rice and could be easily drained into the
river, which seldom overflows its banks, in
spring or summer.
They have no fences; they
have huts in the fields to shelter the
laborers in the summer season from rain, and
for the guards set to watch the crops while
they are growing. At this season some
families move over and reside in their
fields, and return with their crops into the
town. There are two paths, one through the
fields on the river bank, and the other back
of the swamp. In the season for melons the
Indians of this town and Foosce-hat-che show
in a particular manner their hospitality to
all travellers, by calling to them,
introducing them to their huts or the shade
of their trees, and giving them excellent
melons, and the best fare they possess.
Opposite the town house, in the fields, is a
conical mound of earth thirty feet in
diameter, ten feet high, with large peach
trees on several places. At the lower end of
the fields, on the left bank of a fine
little creek, Le-cau-suh, is a pretty little
village of Coo-loo-me people, finely
situated on a rising ground; the land up
this creek is waving pine forest.10
The name of this town is wanting from the
census rolls of 1832, and there is little
doubt that the tradition is correct which
states that it was one of those which went
to Florida after the Creek war of 1813.11
A part of the Kolomi people were already in
that country, since they are noted in papers
of John Stuart, the British Indian agent,
dated 1778.12 According to a very
old Creek Indian, now dead, Kolomi decreased
so much in numbers that it united with
Fus-hatchee, and Fus-hatchee decreased so
much that it united with Atasi, with which
the town of
Kan-hatki, to be mentioned
elsewhere, also combined. But, as we shall see,
this can not have been altogether true,
though it is an undoubted fact that the
towns mentioned were closely united in terms
of friendship. While Kolomi is still
preserved as a war name very few of the
Creeks in Oklahoma remember it as a town.
Back to:
The Muskogee
Tribe
Footnotes:
- 1 Serrano y Sanz, Doc. Hist., pp.
194-195.
- 2 See p. 221.
- 3 This form of the name suggests a
derivation from kulo, a kind of oak with
large acorns, and omin, "where there
are."
- 4 Bartram, Travels, p. 394.
- 5 MS8., Ayer Lib.; Miss. Prov.
Arch., I, p. 94; Ga. Col. Docs., VIII,
p. 523.
- 6 Bartram, Travels, pp. 394-395.
- 7 Bartram, Travels, pp. 447-448.
- 8 Ga. Hist. Soc. Colls., IX, pp.
168-195.
- 9 Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, V, p.
262.
- 10 Ga. Hist. Soc. Colls., III, pp.
33-34.
- 11 See Gatschet in Misc. Colls. Ala.
Hist. Soc., I, p. 401.
- 12 Copy of MS. in Lib Cong.
Back to:
The Muskogee
Tribe
Notes About Book:
Source: Swanton, John R., Early
History of the Creek Indians and Their
Neighbors. Pub. Smithsonian
Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology,
Bulletin 73. Washington, 1922.
Notes about Online Publication: This manuscript has been ocr'd and heavily
edited. Many of the Native American words have been reproduced as clearly as
online publication will allow us, but not all are exactly the way they were in
the original work. The structure of this manuscript has been changed to allow
better online presentation.
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