alafarmnews

Big Sam Dale
Frontiersman, Indian Fighter and Politician

Sam Dale and his men waited patiently at the river’s edge. Ever vigilant, his wary eyes looked first up the river and then down river. With the massacre at Fort Mims fresh in his mind, he was aware Indians could appear anywhere anytime in this wilderness called Alabama. Dale’s party of white citizens had been organized to seek out the “Indians responsible for the deaths of over 500 white men, women and children at the fort.”

Knowing Indians used the Alabama River for transportation, Dale and his colleagues lay in wait for an opportunity to take a measure of revenge.

Standing tall and erect at over six feet,

Big Sam Dale’s statue at his burial site near Daleville, Mississippi, north of Meridian.

Sam Dale was a big man. Though built on a slender frame he had strong hands with a sharp jaw and nose resembling the Indians he now sought. Being of Scotch-Irish decent, Big Sam was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia in 1772; his family moved to Greene County, Georgia around 1783. In both places the Dales lived in or near where there were stockades, due to the threat posed by Indians and their savage warfare.

Historical marker about Sam Dale and his burial site in Mississippi.

Big Sam spotted canoes coming down river. It was Indians! As they came closer he counted eleven Creek warriors. Three against eleven was fair enough for him. He assigned the job of rowing the boat to Caesar, a slave, leaving Dale, James Smith and Jeremiah Austill to fight the Indians. They engaged them in hand to hand fighting in the middle of the Alabama River. All eleven Indians were killed and none of the whites. It was reported that the last Indian to die exclaimed, “Sam Tholocco” as Big Sam choked his life from his body with those massive hands. In the Muscogee language Tholocco means “big and brave.”

Sam Dale’s fame spread throughout the wilderness frontier as an army scout and Indian fighter. As General Andrew Jackson prepared for the Battle of New Orleans against the British during the War of 1812, Big Sam was ordered to carry dispatches from

Milledgeville, Georgia to New Orleans. He accomplished this feat in only 8 days and on only one horse. In 1814, while serving in the army, he commanded a battalion of Kentucky volunteers against the Creek Indians in south Alabama. After the war he became a trader and was appointed as a Colonel in the militia.

Over the years Dale held several local and state offices, including the office of State Representative in Alabama and later in the same capacity in Mississippi. In 1816 he was a delegate to the convention that eventually separated the territory of Mississippi into the two states of Alabama and Mississippi. In 1821, he was part of a commission to locate a road from Tuscaloosa to Fort Claiborne in Monroe County and on to Pensacola. On completion of this duty he was awarded the rank of Brigadier-General and received a life pension.

In 1831, he was appointed by the Secretary of War to remove the Choctaw Indians from Alabama and Mississippi to their new homes on the Arkansas and Red Rivers in Oklahoma. With the removal of the Indians, Dale led many wagon trains of pioneers from Georgia to new lands along the Tombigbee River in west Alabama. He died in Lauderdale County, Mississippi, in 1841 and is buried there in a community named for him.

Today Big Sam’s name is known in the states of Alabama and Mississippi, but not as a historical character. We know the name Dale because of Dale County, Alabama; Daleville, Alabama; Daleville, Mississippi and even Fort Dale Academy, a private school in Greenville, Alabama. All of these get their names from the frontiersman Big Sam Dale. But most of us did not know that. Maybe if Walt Disney had made a movie about the life of Big Sam Dale we would find the name more familiar, but he made a movie about another historical character of the same period, a young sergeant in the same army in which Big Sam Dale served–Davy Crockett.

This marker shows the site of Ft. Dale, built in 1818. It was one of a series of posts built as outposts to protect against Indian attack. The fort no longer exists, but is now the name of a private school.