bwantok] KAKLY HISTORY OF THE CREEK INDIANS 193 
to try their strength, though having nothing whatever to defend. ! 
It is evident that no women or children were there, but it is most 
likely that the place was a stockaded town from which the non- 
combatants had been removed in anticipation of the arrival of the 
Spaniards. Elvas gives quite a lively picture of this fort and the 
Indians within. He says: 
Many were armed, walking upon it, with their bodies, legs, and arms painted and 
ochied, red, black, white, yellow, and vermilion in stripes, so that they appeared to 
have on stockings and doublet. Some wore feathers and others horns on the head; 
the face blackened, and the eyes encircled with vermilion, to heighten their fierce 
aspect. So soon as they saw the Christians draw nigh they beat drums, and, with 
loud yells, in great fury came forth to meet them. 2 
After a sharp engagement the Spaniards drove these Indians 
from their position with considerable loss, but were prevented from 
following up their success by an unfordable river behind the stockade, 
across which the greater part of the Indians escaped. Garcilasso, 
who, as usual, passes this entire affair under a magnifying glass, 
calls the fort "Fort Alibamo,"^ but it so happens that not one of the 
three standard authorities applies this term to it. Two of them, as 
we have seen, give the name to a small village in which they had 
camped two days earlier. Nevertheless Biedma's reference to a 
"Province of Alibamo" seems to indicate that the Spaniards were 
actually in a region occupied by Alabama Indians, although we do 
not know whether the entire tribe was present or only one section 
of it. It has been supposed by some that the Ulibahali mentioned 
before the great Mobile encounter were the later Alabama or con- 
stituted an Alabama town, but while it is true that the name bears 
some resemblance to that of a possible Alabama town, the Alabama 
word for village being oh, it is quite certain that we must seek in 
it the name of a true Muskogee town. 4 
After 1541 the Alabama disappear entirely from sight until 
the French settlement of Louisiana, when we find them located in 
their well-known later historic seats on the upper course of the 
river which bears their name. The first notice of them occurs in 
March, 1702, after the foundation of the first Mobile fort had been 
begun, where they appear together with the Conchaque — by which 
is evidently meant the Muskogee — as enemies of the Mobile tribes 
whom they had caused to abandon many of their former settle- 
ment^. Penicaut says that Iberville sent messengers from Mobile 
to the Choctaw and Alabama., and that their chiefs came to him to 
sing the calumet of peace along with the chiefs of the Mobile; 5 
1 Bourne, Narr. of De Soto, n, p. 24. ^See p. i">4. 
» Ibid., i, pp. 108 109. 'Margry, D6c, v, p. 425. 
» Garcilasso, in Shipp, De Soto and Fla., pp. 401-403. 
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