for the Yamasee War in 1715. In an effort to drive the colonists out, the Ochese Creek joined the rebellion and burned the Ocmulgee trading post. In retaliation, the South Carolina authorities began arming the Cherokee, whose attacks forced the Ochese Creek to abandon the Ocmulgee and Oconee rivers, and move west to the Chattahoochee River. The Yamasee took refuge in Spanish Florida. After the defeat of the Yamasee, former soldier James Oglethorpe established the colony of Georgia, founding the settlement of Savannah on the coast in 1733. Although various development schemes were attempted (silkworm cultivation, production of naval stores), the colony did not become profitable until after Georgia ended its prohibition of slavery. The founders had intended to provide a colony for hardworking yeomen laborers, but not enough people were willing to immigrate from England and bear its hard conditions. The colony began to import enslaved Africans as laborers and to develop the labor-intensive rice, cotton and indigo plantations in the 1750s in the Low Country and on the Sea Islands. These commodity crops, based on slave labor, generated the wealth of the planter class of Georgia and South Carolina. Because of continuing conflicts with European colonists and other Muscogee groups, many Ochese Creek migrated from Georgia to Spanish Florida in the later 18th century. There they joined with earlier refugees of the Yamasee War, remnants of Mission Indians, and fugitive slaves, to form a new tribe which became known as the Seminole. They spoke mostly Muscogee. Relations with the United States The Ocmulgee mounds evoked awe in eighteenth-century travelers. The naturalist William Bartram journeyed through Ocmulgee in 1774 and 1776. He described the "wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients in this part of America." Bartram was the first to record the Muscogee oral histories of the mounds' origins. The Lower Creek of Georgia initially had good relations with the federal government of the United States, based on the diplomacy of both Benjamin Hawkins, President George Washington's Indian agent, and the Muscogee Principal Chief Alexander McGillivray. McGillivray was the son of Sehoy, a Muscogee woman of the Wind Clan, and Lachlan McGillivray, a wealthy Scottish fur trader. He achieved influence both within the matrilineal tribe, because of the status of his mother's family, and among the Americans, because of his father's position and wealth. McGillivray secured U.S. recognition of Muscogee and Seminole sovereignty by the