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c only the neutrality, but also the cooperation of the Choctaws. Many Pearl
giver settlers fled the frontier for the safety of Natchez or Mobile. By	^
? f
November only a few hardy souls remained in the Pearl River settlements behind	??
the stockades they had erected, including one at John Ford's.62
The Mississippi Territorial Militia took the field. Marion County's 13th Regiment, commanded by Colonel Nixon and part of Col. Jordan Morgan's 18th Regiment
of Hancock County were among the troops. Their rosters show such familiar present-day
T A
Pearl	River County surnames as Askew, Batson,	Bond,	Breland, Buckley,	Burge,	Favre,
Ford,	Graves, Landrum, Lenoir, Lott, Lumpkin,	McGehee,	Saucier	and	Wheat.63	Colonel
Nixon's command guarded the eastern frontier and, after Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson's
crushing defeat of the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, took the
field to hunt down refugee Creeks along the Escambia and Perdido Rivers in what is
now South Alabama and Northwest Florida.64
J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi's first historian, and a long-time Hancock
County resident, in his 1860 biography of Creek War hero Sam Dale had Dale say
that Nixon was
one of the most active officers in the service. He protected the frontier very efficiently during the desultory war to which it was exposed and was afterwards stationed near the Bay of St.	Louis	to	observe
the enemy, then off Ship Island.65
Some 16 years later, however, on July 4, 1876, addressing his fellow Hancock
Countians during the Centennial of their local history, Claiborne gave this
interesting and enigmatic account of the fight between the British fleet, headed
for New Orleans, which met Lt. Thomas ap Catesby Jones'5gallant little gunboat
flotilla on December 23, 1814 on Lake Borgne just offshore from Bay St. Louis:
A regiment of militia, under Colonel _____________________
from the interior, had been stationed here several days