Today, the Braves, Indians, Blackhawks, Seminoles, Chiefs, and the Washington NFL team claim to honor native peoples with iconography such as Chief Wahoo, arrowheads, and tomahawks. It is easy to assert that the name of your favorite team expresses solidarity with the survivors of the long, sordid history of Indian dispossession. But what if sports lore included the specifics of how the U.S. acquired the land below your team’s home field?
Atlanta Braves fans can recite Jason Heyward’s batting average and on-base percentage. Perhaps they should also know that Turner Field sits on land ceded in 1821 by William McIntosh, the son of a Scottish trader and a Creek Indian woman. McIntosh was irredeemably corrupt, and he had a hand in selling almost 20,000 square miles—fully one-third of the state of Georgia—to the U.S. against the will of most Creek leaders.
When the Braves leave Turner Field behind in a few years for Cobb County’s greener pastures, they will settle on land again ceded by McIntosh in another duplicitous treaty. In 1825, as punishment for McIntosh’s treasonous role in the land cessions, Creek braves set fire to his house and executed him when he emerged from the flames. Nonetheless, Creek title in Georgia was almost entirely extinguished, and the state then turned its attention to the Cherokees, forcing them in 1838 to walk the infamous Trail of Tears west to join the Creeks in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).