Creek Nation Trilogy Part III

The final piece reflects the aftermath of the Creek War and its consequences. Despite alliances and sacrifices, the Creek Nation was forced to cede millions of acres of land, setting the stage for later removals and dislocation. This music is not a victory song—it is a meditation on survival, memory, and continuity. What was lost cannot be restored, but what endured remains carried forward.

title: The Broken Road
style: bluegrass historical lament

[verse]
The smoke had cleared, the guns grown cold,
The treaties inked in lies,
The generals shook their polished hands,
While the broken turned their eyes.
They’d fought beside old Jackson’s men,
At Tohopeka’s deadly shore,
But the ink ran red on the paper’s edge,
And home was theirs no more.

[chorus]
Walk that road, the broken road,
Through rain and frozen tears,
The heart forgets the songs it sang,
Across the vanished years.
The river weeps where the lodges stood,
The pines remember still,
How freedom died in the promise made,
And bent to a stranger’s will.

[verse]
They gathered them in Georgia’s fields,
In Alabama's shade,
The old, the sick, the mother’s arms,
All debts the nation paid.
They marched them west past Tennessee,
Past hunger, death, and snow,
And every mile a memory fell,
Along that sorrow’s road.

[chorus]
Walk that road, the broken road,
Through rain and frozen tears,
The heart forgets the songs it sang,
Across the vanished years.
The river weeps where the lodges stood,
The pines remember still,
How freedom died in the promise made,
And bent to a stranger’s will.

[bridge]
The children dreamed of rivers wide,
Of hunting once again,
Of cedar smoke and drummer’s song,
Beyond the western plain.
But silence met the setting sun,
Where once the voices played,
And the wind still hums their melody,
Through every oak and grave.

[final chorus]
Walk that road, the broken road,
Till memory meets the rain,
The past lies deep beneath the clay,
But the river speaks their names.
From Tallapoosa’s silver bend,
To where the red earth flows,
The land remembers every step,
Upon the broken road.

[outro]
(fiddle reprises the “river” theme from Part I, fading softly with wind and thunder in the distance)