Recalling his travels among the Creeks in the 1770s, William Bartram wrote,

To this day, Europeans and Americans have caricatured, idealized, and even invented Indians in order to critique Western civilization. Bartram was not immune from the practice. This collector of plants and seeds who was given the name Puc-Puggy, or flower hunter, by his Creek hosts, surely had in mind in this passage the selfishness and oneupmanship of his Philadelphia brethren. Bartram, however, was too keen an observer to fabricate his description. Despite its romantic overtones, his account suggests that Creeks and colonists had notably different relationships to property. The Creeks' generosity did not create an Edenic world – their enthusiasm for torturing and killing enemies dispels such notions – but it did set them at odds with the expanding colonial settlements. In Creek country, where the possession and accumulation of things meant so little, property could not command people.

Compared with their colonial neighbors, Creeks possessed few material goods in the first half of the eighteenth century.