History of Montgomery AL

The next recorded European encounter occurred more than a century later, when an expedition from Carolina went down the Alabama River in 1697. The first permanent European settler in the Montgomery area was James McQueen, a Scots trader who settled there in 1716. He married a high-status woman in the Coushatta or Alabama tribe. Their mixed-race children were considered Muskogean, as both tribes had a matrilineal system of property and descent. The children gained status in their mother's clan.

In 1785, Abraham Mordecai, a war veteran from a Sephardic Jewish family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, established a trading post. The Coushatta and Alabama had gradually moved south and west after the French defeat by the British in 1763 in the Seven Years War. They moved to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, areas of Spanish rule, which they thought more favorable than the British. By the time Mordecai had arrived, Creek had settled in the area, under pressure from Cherokee and Iroquois warfare to the north. Mordecai married a Creek woman. When her people had to cede most of their lands after the Creek War, she joined them in removal. Mordecai brought the first cotton gin to Alabama.

The Upper Creek were able to discourage most European-American immigration until after the conclusion of the Creek War. Following their defeat by General Andrew Jackson in August 1814, the Creek tribes were forced to cede 23 million acres to the United States, including remaining land in Georgia and most of central and southern Alabama. In 1816, the territory organized Montgomery County, and its lands were sold off the next year