Native Americans had been living on the Coosa Valley for millennia before
Hernando de Soto and his men became the first Europeans to visit it in 1540. The
Coosa chiefdom was one of the most powerful chiefdoms in the southeast at the time. Over a century after the Spanish left the Coosa Valley, the British established strong trading ties with the
Muscogee Creek bands of the area around the late 17th century, much to the dismay of France, which had some early settlements on the coast, specifically
Mobile. The French had traveled from there upriver and believed that the Coosa River was a key gateway to the entire
South; they wanted to control the valley. The main transportation of the day was by boat. The confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers formed the
Alabama River, which has its mouth at
Mobile Bay, the port used by the French for travel around the Caribbean and to France. They wanted to retain control of both the Coosa and the Alabama rivers. In the early 18th century, almost all European and Indian trade in the southeast ceased during the tribal uprisings brought on by the
Yamasee War against the
Carolinas. After a few years, the Indian trade system was resumed under somewhat reformed policies. The conflict between the French and English over the Coosa Valley, and much of the southeast in general, continued. It was not until after Britain had defeated France in the
Seven Years' War (also known as the
French and Indian War) that France relinquished its holdings east of the Mississippi River to Britain. This was part of the
Treaty of Paris, signed by both nations in 1763 to mark the end of the war. By the end of the American Revolutionary War, the Coosa Valley was occupied in its lower portion by the
Creek and in the upper portion by the
Cherokee peoples, who had a settlement near its origin in northwest Georgia. They were beginning to feel pressure from European-American encroachment throughout their territories. After the
Fort Mims massacre near Mobile, General
Andrew Jackson led American troops, along with Cherokee allies, against the Lower Creek in the
Creek War. This culminated in the Creek defeat at the
Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Afterward, the
Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814 forced the Creek to cede a large amount of land to the United States, but left them a reserve between the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers in northern Alabama. Even there the Creeks were encroached on by European-American settlers who began as squatters from the United States. Finally, during the 1820s and 1830s the Creek, Cherokee, and virtually all the southeastern Indians were removed to
Indian Territory (present-day
Oklahoma). The Cherokee removal is remembered as the
Trail of Tears. The Cherokee capital city of
New Echota was located on the headwater tributaries of the Coosa River, in Georgia, until the tribe's removal. The Creek and Choctaw removals were similar to the Cherokee Trail of Tears. After the removals, the Coosa River valley and the southeast in general was wide open for American settlers. The invention of the
cotton gin at the turn of the 19th century had made short-staple cotton profitable to process. It could be easily grown in the upland areas of the South, and demand was high for this cotton in the US and Europe. Large-scale migrations known as "Alabama Fever" filled Alabama with new settlers developing large cotton plantations worked by enslaved African Americans. The first river town to form in the Coosa Basin was at the foot of the last waterfall on the Coosa River, the "Devil's Staircase." Settlers soon adopted the native name
Wetumpka (meaning "rumbling waters" or "falling stream") for this new community. The Coosa River was an important transportation route into the early 20th century as a commercial waterway for
riverboats along the upper section of the river for 200 miles south of Rome. However, shoals and waterfalls, such the Devil's Staircase along the river's lowest 65 miles, blocked the upper Coosa's riverboats from access to the Alabama River and the
Gulf of Mexico. Through its building of dams on the Coosa in the early 20th century — Lay, Mitchell and Jordan — Alabama Power began to pioneer new methods of controlling and eliminating
malaria, which was a major health issue in rural Alabama in the early 1900s and in other river valley areas. So successful were their pioneering efforts, that the Medical Division of the
League of Nations visited Alabama to study the new methods during the construction of Mitchell Dam. == Impoundments and sections ==