. Osceola was named Billy Powell at his birth in 1804 in the Upper Creek village of Talisi, which means "Old Town". The village site, now the city of
Tallassee, Alabama, was located on the banks of the
Tallapoosa River about upstream from
Fort Toulouse where the Tallapoosa and the
Coosa rivers meet to form the
Alabama River. The residents of the original Talisi village and of the current city of Tallassee were a mixture of several ethnicities. The
Muscogee Creek were among the
Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, and some of them held enslaved black people. Powell was believed to have ancestors from all of these groups. His mother was Polly Coppinger, a mixed-race Creek woman, and his father was most likely William Powell, a
Scottish trader. Polly was also of Muscogee and European ancestry, as the daughter of Ann McQueen and Jose Coppinger. Because the Muscogee had a
matrilineal kinship system, Polly and Ann's children were all born into their mother's
clan. They were reared by their mothers and their maternal male relatives following Muscogee cultural practices, and they gained their social status from their mother's people. Ann McQueen was also mixed-race Muscogee Creek; her father, James McQueen, was Scottish. Ann was probably the sister or aunt of
Peter McQueen, a prominent Muscogee leader and warrior. Like his mother, Billy Powell was raised in the Muscogee Creek confederacy. Billy Powell's maternal grandfather, James McQueen, was a ship-jumping Scottish sailor who in 1716 became the first recorded white person to trade with the Muscogee Creek Confederacy in Alabama. He stayed in the area as a
fur trader and married into a Muscogee family, becoming closely involved with these people. He was buried in 1811 at the Indian cemetery in
Franklin, Alabama, near a
Methodist missionary church for the Muscogee. In adulthood, as part of the Seminole, Powell was given his name
Osceola ( or ). This is an anglicized form of the
Creek Vsse Yvholv (pronounced ), a combination of
vsse, the ceremonial
black drink made from the
yaupon holly, and
yvholv, often translated "shouter" but referring specifically to the one who performs a special whoop at the Green Corn Ceremony or archaically to a tribal town officer responsible for offering the black drink. In April 1818, during the
First Seminole War, Osceola and his mother where living in Peter McQueen's village near the
Econfina River, when it was attacked and destroyed by the Lower Creek allies of U.S. General
Andrew Jackson that were led by
William McIntosh. Many surviving Red Stick warriors and their families, including McQueen, retreated south into the Florida peninsula. In 1821, the United States acquired Florida from Spain (see the
Adams-Onis Treaty), and more European-American settlers started moving in, encroaching on the Seminoles' territory. After early military skirmishes and the signing of the 1823
Treaty of Moultrie Creek, by which the U.S. seized the northern Seminole lands, Osceola and his family moved with the Seminole deeper into the unpopulated wilds of central and southern Florida. Lt. John T. Sprague mentions in his 1848 history
The Florida War that Osceola had a wife named "Che-cho-ter" (Morning Dew), who bore him four children. == 1830s resistance and war leader ==