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After Galvez captured West Florida the British defenders of Pensacola were shipped off to Havana and thence to Long Island, where they would wait out the remainder of the “rebellion” in paroled status. What this meant was that they were forbidden to fight against Spain and her allies, but perfectly free to get back into the fray with anyone else. Spain had an alliance with her Bourbon neighbor, France, but was not formally allied with the newly independent United States. So according to the rules of 18th century warfare – still a gentlemanly pursuit – the British army could still send Bowles and his regiment off to kill Americans.

Not long after the paroled prisoners arrived in New York, the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown virtually ended armed conflict in the war. But it would be two more years until a formal treaty was signed. In the meantime Long Island was packed with idle British soldiers who needed to be fed. The paroled prisoners were put to work scouring the Long Island countryside for food, draft animals, firewood and other supplies to help sustain these troops.

During this period Bowles spent a good deal of time acting in stage productions, often in the starring role, sometimes as a female (this honor fell to ensigns, the lowest officer rank). He was court-martialed for taking scalps while dressed as an Indian in Pensacola, but was exonerated based on the testimony of his many admiring compadres. He also fought a duel during this period.

When it was clear in 1783 that the United States would get to keep its colonies and that the presence of the British army on American soil would no longer be tolerated, a mad scramble to get out of the country ensued. Soon-to-be ex-British soldiers had a few places to choose from, but none was really appealing. Many of William’s fellow Marylanders, no longer welcome in Frederick, chose to sail north to Nova Scotia, where they soon founded the city of Halifax. Native Brits went home to England. A few took their chances in more far-flung places within the Empire, such as Bermuda. William Bowles packed his books and his various costumes and joined a troupe of actors who had decided to try their luck in Nassau, on tiny New Providence Island in the Bahamas.

Nassau was an isolated, sleepy town in 1783. The inhabitants who lived there prior to the American Revolution, mostly fishermen and scavengers of shipwrecks, known as salvors, were intent on maintaining their current occupations. They came to be known in Bahaman politics as the “Old Settlers” to distinguish them from the “New Settlers” who brought African slaves and plantation agriculture from the American South. Friction between the two political factions became quite heated as the islands filled up with exiled Tories.

Bowles was given 500 acres of land on the nearby island of Eleuthera in exchange for his service to the Crown. There he was expected to settle down and produce crops to sustain himself. Nothing could have been more repugnant to the ambitious young Bowles, now 19 and eager for adventure.

The next several years of William’s life are hard to trace with precision. He was usually in the Bahamas, but often in Georgia or with his Indian families near the forks of the Apalachicola. He is known to have painted portraits for cash in Savannah, and is thought to have frequented the seat of government in Augusta, probably serving as a spy for the Creeks as the Georgia Assembly conceived schemes to deprive the Indians of their ancestral lands.

By 1785 William Bowles, by birth an upper-class Englishman, was nearly always dressed as an Indian. The tribe that had adopted him as one of their own had conferred upon him a rank of distinction. He was not one to let that fact go unnoticed.

“Frequently he wore a knee-length hunting jacket and buckskin leggings, but on formal occasions, since after his return he was made a chief, he donned his cloth turban with an ostrich feather plume, a half-moon silver gorget hanging from his neck, and a white man’s shirt and breeches. At his side was a ceremonial silver pipe tomahawk signifying he was a war chief.” (Wright 24-25)

What the Georgians were up to was ever on the minds of the Creeks. They were pushing further west into Indian country, encroaching on traditional hunting grounds. The land they were pushing into, which today makes up much of the states of Alabama and Mississippi, was claimed by both the United States and Spain. And Spain, as you remember, possessed Florida, which at that time stretched all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans.

It was in everyone’s best interest to keep the Indians happy. American settlers needed docile, friendly Indians as neighbors if they hoped to live in peace on the frontier. The Spanish needed to maintain a healthy alliance with the tribes so they would continue to serve as a buffer against American encroachment. If the Georgians pushed their settlements all the way to the Mississippi it would be nearly impossible for the Spanish to control trade on that river. And whoever controlled the Mississippi controlled the vast interior of the continent.

Waiting in the wings, poised to take advantage of any opportunity to get back in the game, were the British — still smarting from defeat by the colonials, but firmly in control of Canada, much of the Caribbean, and closely allied with many tribes on American soil.

For their part the Indians wanted desperately to continue their way of life and to have access to the resources that had always been available to them. They understandably had a difficult time distinguishing between white, English-speaking Americans and white, English-speaking Britons. The outcome of the Revolution was of little consequence to them, as long as they had access to their traditional deerhunting grounds and a convenient place to trade the deerskins for manufactured goods.

In the two decades preceding the American Revolution Great Britain had indirectly transformed the economy of the southeastern Indians by becoming their sole source of now indispensible goods. British-American traders had penetrated deep into Indian country, often marrying Creek women, fathering children, and installing their own mixed-blood sons as representatives, or factors, in the villages. The livelihood of Creek men, and also of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee men across the South, had become inexorably linked to their ability to obtain deerskins to trade with the British in exchange for cloth, tools, iron pots, rum and weapons. The southeastern Indians, once sedentary farmers and subsistence hunters, had been transformed, in the course of a single generation, into large-scale commercial hunters.

When the United States kicked the Tories out of the country after the American Revolution they inadvertently expelled their leading Indian experts. The same thing happened when Galvez took over the Floridas in 1781. The individuals who had controlled the lucrative Indian trade were now exiles in Halifax, London or Nassau. It didn’t take long for the Spanish governors of East and West Florida to realize they were not up to the task of supplying the Indians the way their British predecessors had. So in 1783 the Spanish swallowed their pride and awarded an exclusive contract to the British firm of Panton, Leslie and Company to supply the southern Indians on behalf of His Catholic Majesty, Carlos III.

William Panton had been in the Indian trade since arriving in South Carolina from Scotland in the early 1760s. He started as a clerk in Charleston and by the late 1770s, having been expelled from the Carolinas because of his Loyalist sympathies, was in St. Augustine running the Indian trade for Governor Tonyn of East Florida. Pushed off the continent altogether when Florida was lost to the Spanish, he and his partners, including John Forbes, John Leslie, Charles McLatchy and William Alexander, became influential members of the New Settler faction in Nassau.

Panton, Leslie and Company was launched in 1783 and went to work for the Spanish government. By the mid-1780s the firm had connections throughout the disputed no-man’s land west of the Chattahoochee, including resident factors in every major Indian village.

William Panton was wildly successful as an Indian trader; it has been claimed he was North America’s first millionaire. But the road to that success was very bumpy. One of his larger obstacles was William Augustus Bowles, who was determined to get a piece of Panton’s trade for himself. But Bowles would not stop there. The Indian trade was only a means to an end. Bowles was determined to become the greatest Indian leader in history, to push the Spaniards back into the sea, and to take the Floridas back as a gift to King George.

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