To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Hawkins, 6 November 1800
From Benjamin Hawkins
Creek agency 6 novr. 1800
I wrote you some time past and sent on the Creek and Chickasaw, I now add the Choctaw words required by you. The Cherokee is at best doubtful. The seperate communication requested by you will be made as soon as I can obtain a book or paper to transcribe it on. My residence has been lately changed and is two hundred miles from the frontiers of Georgia and that frontier a great distance from regular supplies: my last order for stationary has been sent three months and I do not expect a supply till the next week.
I request you to accept of my sincere wishes for your health and happiness and to believe me with the truest esteem and regard
My dear sir, yr. obedient servt.
Benjamin Hawkins
RC (DLC); at foot of text: “The Honble Mr. Jefferson”; endorsed by TJ as received 1 Dec. and so recorded in SJL. Enclosures: vocabularies of Choctaw and possibly Cherokee, neither found, presumably incorporated into the “Comparative Vocabulary” described at Hawkins to TJ, 12 July 1800.
Hawkins’s letter of some time past was that of 12 July.
Residence has been lately changed: Hawkins was probably at Tuckabatchee, a principal town of the Upper Creeks (Upper Muskogees) and the site of their national councils. It was in the same part of Alabama as the present city of Montgomery, some distance to the west of Hawkins’s first permanent agency, which had been on the Chattahoochee River. He subsequently established his agency on the Flint River in Georgia (Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World [Boston, 1991], 93–6, 135–6; Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography,4 vols. [Chicago, 1921], 2:1332; Hawkins to TJ, 1 Mch. 1801).