A short, sharp campaign to crush Creek resistance to removal in Alabama and Georgia, and the prelude to the Marines' service in Florida.
As Creeks driven to desperation by fraud and broken treaties took up arms, burning the town of Roanoke and threatening the frontier, Andrew Jackson ordered a volunteer Marine regiment under Colonel Commandant Archibald Henderson to join the Army in the Creek country. Henderson's battalions reached the Chattahoochee River in the summer of 1836 and spent the following months scouting, patrolling, and escorting the columns of Creeks being forced west, in a campaign that also drew in friendly Creek volunteers fighting alongside the troops. The fighting was limited and the resistance broken relatively quickly, at the cost of one Marine killed. By autumn the regiment was reorganized and sent on to Florida, where Henderson's Marines would take up the far longer and harder war against the Seminoles.
Record no. 303