Following the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, Alabama’s Native Americans ceded millions of acres of land in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Although the treaty was designed to bring peace to the war-torn Alabama territory, it did not make everyone happy. One Native American who appears to have been particularly disgruntled because of the change of events was Savannah Jack. Having lost his property along Line Creek near Montgomery in the land concession, Savannah Jack made threats that he would continue to fight the white settlers, and he kept his word.
Above photo: Capt. William Butler and two companions were brutally murdered by Savannah Jack on March 20, 1818. Two decades later, their remains where reinterred in Pioneer Cemetery in Greenville, county seat of the county named for Captain Butler. [Robin McDonald]
Although less known today than William Weatherford, Savannah Jack was considered “one of the bloodiest villains that ever infested any country” during his own time. Yet so much mystery surrounds Jack’s background and legacy that he has become the stuff of legend.
Settlers who claimed to know him asserted that Jack was a Yuchi or Uchee, a Savannah, and even a Sowanoka Indian. Most likely, he was at least part Shawnee, either by birth or adoption. A few historians claimed that Jack was not an Indian at all, but was instead “the most blood-thirsty, fiendish and cruel white man that ever inhabited any country.” Rumors persisted. Some believe Jack may have been a captured white boy named John Hague, or he may have been Hague’s son or grandson. One account even lists the white trader Simon Girty as Jack’s father and a Uchee Indian as his mother.
Whatever his lineage, that Savannah Jack was hostile and bent on revenge seems to be universally accepted. Of his many supposed crimes against white settlers, one story reigns supreme. In March 1818, Jack led two attacks that resulted in the deaths of at least ten settlers in what is now Butler County. In the first attack, Jack and his men advanced upon the Ogly (or Ogle) homestead near the Federal Road close to Poplar Springs. William Ogly lived in the house with his wife and six children; visiting them were Eli Stroud, his wife Elizabeth, and their infant child. The Strouds were on their way home to Claiborne and had stopped with the Ogly family for the night.
On the evening of March 13, 1818, Savannah Jack and his band set upon the cabin, killing Ogly outright. Eli Stroud and Ogly’s wife escaped without injury, but everyone else was tomahawked, scalped, and left
for dead. Surprisingly, Elizabeth Stroud and two of the Ogly children, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, survived the initial attack. Elizabeth Stroud died en route to Claiborne where she was being taken for medical treatment; she was buried by the side of the road. Mary Ann Ogly died shortly after reaching Claiborne,
but her sister Elizabeth survived into adulthood.
A week after the Ogly massacre, Savannah Jack and his men struck again. On March 20, 1818 Capt. William Butler, a native of Virginia who had become a member of the Georgia legislature, along with Daniel Shaw, William Gardner, John Hinson, and Capt. James Saff old, set out from Fort Bibb to meet Sam Dale, a well-known Indian fighter and pioneer. Savannah Jack and his band ambushed the party. Shaw and Gardner perished instantly, but Hinson and Saff old managed to escape. Jack and his men shot at Butler, who had been thrown from his horse during the attack and who was attempting to flee on foot. Outnumbered, Butler was quickly overwhelmed. Later, when Dale found the bodies of the three slain men, he called what had been done a “horrid butchery”; the men’s heads had been beaten in, and their bodies had been mutilated.
After the two massacres, a reward of $1,000 was offered for the capture or destruction of Savannah Jack and his men. No one ever claimed the bounty, though, for not long after the massacres, Savannah Jack seems to have left Alabama for good. With a price on his head, he may have had no other choice. At least one report had Jack going west to an area known as the Cross Timbers on the Red River. Whether Savannah Jack settled down or continued to wreak havoc is anyone’s guess, but it would not have taken long for westward expansion to catch up with him.
Although the horrors Savannah Jack committed and the body count he left behind come nowhere near the atrocities executed during the massacre at Fort Mims, where reportedly hundreds of settlers died, Jack and others like him instilled fear in settlers coming into what had once been the Creek territory. Still they could not stop the wave of frontiersmen and women who arrived steadily.
Because of his enigmatic background and uncertain fate, Savannah Jack remains a figure shrouded in mystery—a haunting legacy for a man whose actions evoked dread in his own era, and a reminder of the tensions that permeated the Alabama Territory.
This article first appeared in Alabama Heritage magazine, Issue 113, Summer 2014.
Mollie Smith Waters is an instructor of the humanities at Lurleen B. Wallace Community College.
