Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2014 15:11:47 GMT -5
History of the Kingdom of Scow Creek
I. Early History: The Šíníqóq People
For several hundred years, the islands that comprise the Scow Creek Islands Group were inhabited by the Šíníqóq People, who subsisted on the area’s plentiful fish and shellfish populations. The Šíníqóqs pioneered the practice of shaping quahog clams into jewelry and money, and their handiwork can still be found around the world, suggesting an active trading culture. Even today hundreds of such items are found in middens and fire rings that are revealed by the islands’ shifting sands and ocean tides.
Somewhere around the year 1700, the Šíníqóqs began leaving the islands for a mainland location. The reasons for this move are many, and no one explanation seems definitive: a series of brutally cold winters, a period of ocean storms that continually breached the barrier islands, inundating their homes and separating families as new channels were cut; conflict with newly arriving pilgrims from around the globe; and disease epidemics.
In any event the Šíníqóqs abandoned the islands for their new home, and the islands remained without any permanent, year-round settlements for almost 260 years.
II. The Great Migrations (1960 – 2000)
By the year 1960, a brutal empire had established itself on the continental mainland. The Federation Government engaged in invasive spying on its citizens, confiscatory taxation, cruel and unusual punishments (including torture), and arbitrary criminal convictions of political enemies. Slowly, a decentralized underground resistance movement developed; early defeats in their efforts to reform their government caused them to consider alternative courses of actions; many decided to escape in boats and take refuge in the unpopulated marshlands, barrier beaches, and rocky headlands that would eventually come together as the Kingdom of Scow Creek.
Each small group banded together with like-minded souls and established their own insular communities throughout the islands. Conservative Christian homeschooling families established a community at Ocean Beach; Gay and Lesbians escaped to Cherry Grove and The Pines; Nudist families founded a settlement at Kismet; Bootleg Whisky producers left the Prohibitionist Mainland behind them and founded distilleries at what came to be known as Rum Point; enterprising fishermen gave up their over-regulated, over-taxed lives on the mainland for new lives in Davis Park and on the marshlands on either side of Scow Creek, forming the community of Milburn (from which the nation’s currency, the Mill, derives); and criminals – both minor and heinous - whose lives were hopeless after incarceration due to laws restricting their rights, housing and employment – set up veritable pirate’s coves in Saltaire, Oak Island, and Zach’s Bay. Even a rogue military detachment, who could no longer reconcile their personal honor with their service to the Federation Government, commandeered several smaller patrol boats and became a law unto themselves on a base they created on the rocky headlands out at sea.
Over the course of 40 years, each community grew into a tight-knit, closed circle, with a mutual toleration for the other communities that had grown up in the islands; Islanders combined a suspicion towards others with a pragmatic acceptance of the need to interact as necessary for survival in a land known for harsh winter ocean storms. Still fearing the reaches of the Federation, a local code language organically developed among the islanders, known as Atlantican, which has become the Kingdom’s “patois.”
III. The Woods Point Ascendancy (2000 – 2005)
The one community that eschewed interaction with the others completely was Woods Point. Centrally located on the longest barrier island, the residents of Woods Point were unlike their hard-nosed, gritty neighbors; most were extremely wealthy mainland residents who founded their island community as an off-shore haven to hide income and wealth. An enormous, policed harbor guarded their fleet of yachts, and several dozen mansions arose from the dunes. Political Decisions were made at the secretive and heavily guarded Woods Point Club.
In April 2004, the “Pointers” (as they were called by the other communities) shocked island sensibilities by erecting an 8’ tall electric fence along both the east and west ends of the community, and establishing private police guards along the waterfront. Ostensibly to prevent crime against their wealthy community, the action resulted in splitting the island in two, inhibiting trade access between western and eastern communities.
By the summer of 2004, fishing boats had taken up the trade routes to ferry people and goods from one end of the island to the other. Distrusting the fishing boats and accusing them of being ruffians, spies and pirates, Woods Point established a naval blockade across the main navigation channels, turning away – and, according to some reports, boarding and sacking – fishing and transport vessels.
Islanders from across the communities voiced their objections and anger in an uncoordinated fashion, with several communities sending letters to the Woods Point Club, demanding a restoration of free movement on both land and sea. Their demands were met with the infamous Woods Point Club Proclamation of Nov 2004, wherein the founders of Woods Point claimed ownership of all of the communities, “including the marshlands, bays, channels, and adjacent ocean,” referencing a 18th Century deed issued by the Federation Government after the departure of the Šíníqóqs (the original has since been destroyed in the Great Fire, as is explained later.)
The winter came early that year, and harsh nor’easters battered the islands, followed by mid-winter blizzards that covered the islands in several feet of snow. In January 2005, the saltwater bays froze solid for the first time in over thirty years. At the western end of the island, the community of Ocean Beach housed heating oil stores for all of the communities, and the severe winter led to a rationing of the oil.
But all of the Island’s communities were suffering from the cold – including Woods Point, where the huge mansions continuously consumed oil day and night. On the night of Feb 2, the Private Police Force of Woods Point raided the oil stores in Ocean Beach using an over-the-sand tanker vehicle that none on the islanders had ever seen before. The Ocean Beach stores were completely drained, and while the lights and heat burned bright in Woods Point, the remaining communities began to freeze.
The nearest community to the east of Woods Point was Cherry Grove, which also happened to be exclusively reliant on oil for heat. In an emergency ad hoc meeting held at Er’šun, the local tavern, resident Tunís Qorsa volunteered to lead a force to break through the Woods Point perimeter and demand humane concessions from the Pointers. Several others volunteered to join him, but declined when on the agreed-upon date, three days hence, they were confronted with another brutal winter blizzard.
Trudging through drifting snow along the ocean beach, Qorsa made his way alone to the border fence, where he was met by Woods Point security. His demand for entrance was rebuffed, and a scuffle ensued between the Qorsa and security guard. The scuffle ended when Qorsa shot and killed the guard.
Qorsa made his way to the Clubhouse, but his passionate demands for a release of oil stores were met with a beating by the security in the Clubhouse. He was placed in handcuffs and confined in the cold, wet stone basement of the Clubhouse.
The residents of Cherry Grove waited for Qorsa’s return in vain. Cold day turned into frigid night, with no word. Finally, towards the end of April 2005, the sun appeared and the weather turned favorable.
The Pointers used the spring thaw as an opportunity to issue the Mošís Declaration, which declared that the Woods Point Club was taking property from one end of the island to the other by Eminent Domain for a new paved roadway linking Woods Point with the far west and far east ends of the island. Officers from the Woodhouse Bank fanned across the island, offering property owners in the way of the proposed route 10% of the value for their homes and property.
While the effort by Woods Point proved unsuccessful, it galvanized opposition to its assumed rule, and nowhere was this opposition fiercer than in Cherry Grove. The bankers were surrounded by local residents, demanding to know of Tunís Qorsa’s fate; the bankers revealed his location under questioning, and swiftly left.
IV. The Rebellion Begins (April 2005)
With the bays thawed and once again passable, the residents of Cherry Grove organized a campaign to gather the island residents from all communities to confront Woods Point and rescue Qorsa. Messengers were sent by boat to all corners of the islands, deftly avoiding the Woods Point blockade by night through dangerous routes through the cuts in the marshes.
On April 27, 2005, the hoped-for flotilla appeared. Over 60 boats carrying islanders from every community arrived on the bay side of Woods Point and confronted the blockade in an effort to enter the marina and storm the Clubhouse.
While most boats were sunk, a band broke through and made their way to the cellar. There they found Qorsa, weak and sick from almost two months of solitary confinement in often sub-freezing temperatures. Finding their boats sunk, they carried Qorsa into the heavily-vegetated upland dunes, heading east towards Cherry Grove. After an hour of crawling and hacking through catbriar, holly, and thick scrub oak, they came upon the home of George and Mchelle Oakley.
The Oakleys were Pointers, but fiercely opposed to the ruling regime at the Clubhouse. As they fed Qorsa and tended to his wounds, they discussed the current state of affairs on the Islands, and offered to secretly assist the Islanders to loosen the grip of the Clubhouse on the area; with that, the Oakley’s helped Qorsa return home to Cherry Grove to a hero’s welcome.
In the meantime, most of the Islander’s flotilla was largely destroyed by the Woods Point blockade, whose larger boats simply rammed and sunk many of the islanders smaller vessels.
V. The Burning of the Sedges (June 2005)
Woods Point had been caught off-guard by the flotilla’s arrival, and remained frustrated by the islander’s refusal to acquiesce to the eminent domain effort. Though victorious, they were embarrassed at having lost track of Qorsa; the Clubhouse decided to launch an offensive of its own, and it turned its attention to the Sedges, the low-lying marshes where many of the ‘invaders’ had originated.
The Sedges are a group of over 100 low-lying marshlands lying north of the barrier beaches; their residents were largely self-reliant fishermen, whose stout, wooden homes were built on pilings in the marshes in an effort to keep them dry during seasonal high tides. Their only other income was made by harvesting the plentiful salt-hay that grew on the marshes; it was cut, dried, and bundled for export to agricultural towns on the mainland, where it commanded a premium price.
On the night of June 15, Woods Point boats entered Scow Creek, the major waterway running between the western Sedges. Using accelerants and torches, the Pointers set fire to the salt hay growing on Sea Dog Island, High Meadow, and West High Meadow on both sides of Scow Creek. The fire spread quickly along the now-dry hay, and soon engulfed the homes in the marshes.
By the next morning, the sedges were smoking, blackened ruins; in addition to the year’s hay crop, five dozen homes were incinerated. In fact, only one home on Scow Creek remained; Ironically, it was known as the ‘firehouse’ because it’s owner had been a fire fighter before moving to the sedge from the mainland.
At about the same time, the Woods Point road construction crews began bulldozing operations in the community of Kismet for the new road.
VI. The Oakleyville Plot (July 2005)
After the Burning of the Sedges, community leaders from throughout the Islands met in an ad hoc council at the tavern in Cherry Grove, facilitated by dispatches facilitated by the Oakleys. At that meeting, Tunís Qorsa insisted – to the enthusiastic agreement of leaders from Kismet and the other Sedges – that the time had come to destroy the power base in Woods Point. For the first time since the crisis began, the leadership of the independent military detachment from the Headlands attended, and agreeing to provide support for the plan that was hatched.
The next day, the patrol boats from the headlands entered the bays from the west, positioned between the burned sedges and the Woods Point Marina, both to act as a decoy, and to prevent further reprisals on the sedges. At the same time, a group of Islanders met at the Oakley’s home to carry out the main plot.
As a strong east wind picked up, the plot was ready. Using the same tactics at the Pointers had, the Rangers set a line of fire along the east side of Woods Point, from bayside to ocean. The hot wind, tangled underbrush, and wooden houses provided all the fuel the fire needed, and soon the entire community was aflame. Lacking a fire department of their own, Pointers panicked and escaped on their own boats in a mad rush. Unwilling to confront the patrol boats west of the marina, most Pointers headed east, to points far beyond the eastern wilderness lands of the soon-to-be-birthed Kingdom. Later reports indicated that most Pointers re-settled in the eastern Kingdom of Qúpsóg.
Woods Point was entirely destroyed, and the conflagration led to many referring to the entire barrier beach as “Fire Island,” as it could be seen for miles. Later, scavengers would make good use of the remaining timbers and stone foundations, transporting them elsewhere for building projects. A winter storm in 2007 breached the dunes and flooded much of the interior of the old Wood Point community, turning it into a brackish swamp and leading locals to begin referring to the former community as “The Sunken Forest.” The Oakley home, being the headquarters of the plot and located on the far eastern edge of the community, was saved from the torching. The Oakleys would later be granted a square mile of land by the Kingdom, upon which some dozen homes were established; the area is fondly known as “Oakleyville” and is considered part of the Department of Cherry Grove.
VII The Kingdom established (Jul - Aug 2005)
After the defeat of the Pointers, the leaders that had planned the effort turned their attention to the destitute condition of the residents of Scow Creek. Flotillas were organized to assist in the rebuilding of the homes on the sedges. During the rebuilding, the Islanders agreed that they needed to overcome their traditional isolation and join together to survive the ravages of both nature and man.
On August 1, a Constitution was adopted by the rebuilding team, declaring the Kingdom of the Scow Creek Islands Group, in honor of the victims of the Burning of the Sedges. Tunís Qorsa, who had led both the Oakleyville Plot and the Rebuilding effort, was named as the Kingdom’s first King; he chose the title King Tuathal I, after St. Tuathal, a patron saint of both the arts and physical strength. The Constitution was taken back to each community, and adopted in each by consensus in each. In September of that year, the first Assembly was elected, and the “firehouse” on Scow Creek was purchased as the new meeting hall of the Assembly.
VIII. Aftermath
The history, as recounted above, explains some of the strong ethics and beliefs held by Creekers: a strong embrace of civil liberties and community diversity; a wariness of wealth, privilege, and big business; an identity with the fishing and maritime industry; an antipathy towards roads, cars, and pavement; the removal of national oil stores to an impregnable location with Coast Guard protection; a desire for renewable energy independence; and a prohibition of banks (all financial transactions are handled through locally-owned credit unions.)
I. Early History: The Šíníqóq People
For several hundred years, the islands that comprise the Scow Creek Islands Group were inhabited by the Šíníqóq People, who subsisted on the area’s plentiful fish and shellfish populations. The Šíníqóqs pioneered the practice of shaping quahog clams into jewelry and money, and their handiwork can still be found around the world, suggesting an active trading culture. Even today hundreds of such items are found in middens and fire rings that are revealed by the islands’ shifting sands and ocean tides.
Somewhere around the year 1700, the Šíníqóqs began leaving the islands for a mainland location. The reasons for this move are many, and no one explanation seems definitive: a series of brutally cold winters, a period of ocean storms that continually breached the barrier islands, inundating their homes and separating families as new channels were cut; conflict with newly arriving pilgrims from around the globe; and disease epidemics.
In any event the Šíníqóqs abandoned the islands for their new home, and the islands remained without any permanent, year-round settlements for almost 260 years.
II. The Great Migrations (1960 – 2000)
By the year 1960, a brutal empire had established itself on the continental mainland. The Federation Government engaged in invasive spying on its citizens, confiscatory taxation, cruel and unusual punishments (including torture), and arbitrary criminal convictions of political enemies. Slowly, a decentralized underground resistance movement developed; early defeats in their efforts to reform their government caused them to consider alternative courses of actions; many decided to escape in boats and take refuge in the unpopulated marshlands, barrier beaches, and rocky headlands that would eventually come together as the Kingdom of Scow Creek.
Each small group banded together with like-minded souls and established their own insular communities throughout the islands. Conservative Christian homeschooling families established a community at Ocean Beach; Gay and Lesbians escaped to Cherry Grove and The Pines; Nudist families founded a settlement at Kismet; Bootleg Whisky producers left the Prohibitionist Mainland behind them and founded distilleries at what came to be known as Rum Point; enterprising fishermen gave up their over-regulated, over-taxed lives on the mainland for new lives in Davis Park and on the marshlands on either side of Scow Creek, forming the community of Milburn (from which the nation’s currency, the Mill, derives); and criminals – both minor and heinous - whose lives were hopeless after incarceration due to laws restricting their rights, housing and employment – set up veritable pirate’s coves in Saltaire, Oak Island, and Zach’s Bay. Even a rogue military detachment, who could no longer reconcile their personal honor with their service to the Federation Government, commandeered several smaller patrol boats and became a law unto themselves on a base they created on the rocky headlands out at sea.
Over the course of 40 years, each community grew into a tight-knit, closed circle, with a mutual toleration for the other communities that had grown up in the islands; Islanders combined a suspicion towards others with a pragmatic acceptance of the need to interact as necessary for survival in a land known for harsh winter ocean storms. Still fearing the reaches of the Federation, a local code language organically developed among the islanders, known as Atlantican, which has become the Kingdom’s “patois.”
III. The Woods Point Ascendancy (2000 – 2005)
The one community that eschewed interaction with the others completely was Woods Point. Centrally located on the longest barrier island, the residents of Woods Point were unlike their hard-nosed, gritty neighbors; most were extremely wealthy mainland residents who founded their island community as an off-shore haven to hide income and wealth. An enormous, policed harbor guarded their fleet of yachts, and several dozen mansions arose from the dunes. Political Decisions were made at the secretive and heavily guarded Woods Point Club.
In April 2004, the “Pointers” (as they were called by the other communities) shocked island sensibilities by erecting an 8’ tall electric fence along both the east and west ends of the community, and establishing private police guards along the waterfront. Ostensibly to prevent crime against their wealthy community, the action resulted in splitting the island in two, inhibiting trade access between western and eastern communities.
By the summer of 2004, fishing boats had taken up the trade routes to ferry people and goods from one end of the island to the other. Distrusting the fishing boats and accusing them of being ruffians, spies and pirates, Woods Point established a naval blockade across the main navigation channels, turning away – and, according to some reports, boarding and sacking – fishing and transport vessels.
Islanders from across the communities voiced their objections and anger in an uncoordinated fashion, with several communities sending letters to the Woods Point Club, demanding a restoration of free movement on both land and sea. Their demands were met with the infamous Woods Point Club Proclamation of Nov 2004, wherein the founders of Woods Point claimed ownership of all of the communities, “including the marshlands, bays, channels, and adjacent ocean,” referencing a 18th Century deed issued by the Federation Government after the departure of the Šíníqóqs (the original has since been destroyed in the Great Fire, as is explained later.)
The winter came early that year, and harsh nor’easters battered the islands, followed by mid-winter blizzards that covered the islands in several feet of snow. In January 2005, the saltwater bays froze solid for the first time in over thirty years. At the western end of the island, the community of Ocean Beach housed heating oil stores for all of the communities, and the severe winter led to a rationing of the oil.
But all of the Island’s communities were suffering from the cold – including Woods Point, where the huge mansions continuously consumed oil day and night. On the night of Feb 2, the Private Police Force of Woods Point raided the oil stores in Ocean Beach using an over-the-sand tanker vehicle that none on the islanders had ever seen before. The Ocean Beach stores were completely drained, and while the lights and heat burned bright in Woods Point, the remaining communities began to freeze.
The nearest community to the east of Woods Point was Cherry Grove, which also happened to be exclusively reliant on oil for heat. In an emergency ad hoc meeting held at Er’šun, the local tavern, resident Tunís Qorsa volunteered to lead a force to break through the Woods Point perimeter and demand humane concessions from the Pointers. Several others volunteered to join him, but declined when on the agreed-upon date, three days hence, they were confronted with another brutal winter blizzard.
Trudging through drifting snow along the ocean beach, Qorsa made his way alone to the border fence, where he was met by Woods Point security. His demand for entrance was rebuffed, and a scuffle ensued between the Qorsa and security guard. The scuffle ended when Qorsa shot and killed the guard.
Qorsa made his way to the Clubhouse, but his passionate demands for a release of oil stores were met with a beating by the security in the Clubhouse. He was placed in handcuffs and confined in the cold, wet stone basement of the Clubhouse.
The residents of Cherry Grove waited for Qorsa’s return in vain. Cold day turned into frigid night, with no word. Finally, towards the end of April 2005, the sun appeared and the weather turned favorable.
The Pointers used the spring thaw as an opportunity to issue the Mošís Declaration, which declared that the Woods Point Club was taking property from one end of the island to the other by Eminent Domain for a new paved roadway linking Woods Point with the far west and far east ends of the island. Officers from the Woodhouse Bank fanned across the island, offering property owners in the way of the proposed route 10% of the value for their homes and property.
While the effort by Woods Point proved unsuccessful, it galvanized opposition to its assumed rule, and nowhere was this opposition fiercer than in Cherry Grove. The bankers were surrounded by local residents, demanding to know of Tunís Qorsa’s fate; the bankers revealed his location under questioning, and swiftly left.
IV. The Rebellion Begins (April 2005)
With the bays thawed and once again passable, the residents of Cherry Grove organized a campaign to gather the island residents from all communities to confront Woods Point and rescue Qorsa. Messengers were sent by boat to all corners of the islands, deftly avoiding the Woods Point blockade by night through dangerous routes through the cuts in the marshes.
On April 27, 2005, the hoped-for flotilla appeared. Over 60 boats carrying islanders from every community arrived on the bay side of Woods Point and confronted the blockade in an effort to enter the marina and storm the Clubhouse.
While most boats were sunk, a band broke through and made their way to the cellar. There they found Qorsa, weak and sick from almost two months of solitary confinement in often sub-freezing temperatures. Finding their boats sunk, they carried Qorsa into the heavily-vegetated upland dunes, heading east towards Cherry Grove. After an hour of crawling and hacking through catbriar, holly, and thick scrub oak, they came upon the home of George and Mchelle Oakley.
The Oakleys were Pointers, but fiercely opposed to the ruling regime at the Clubhouse. As they fed Qorsa and tended to his wounds, they discussed the current state of affairs on the Islands, and offered to secretly assist the Islanders to loosen the grip of the Clubhouse on the area; with that, the Oakley’s helped Qorsa return home to Cherry Grove to a hero’s welcome.
In the meantime, most of the Islander’s flotilla was largely destroyed by the Woods Point blockade, whose larger boats simply rammed and sunk many of the islanders smaller vessels.
V. The Burning of the Sedges (June 2005)
Woods Point had been caught off-guard by the flotilla’s arrival, and remained frustrated by the islander’s refusal to acquiesce to the eminent domain effort. Though victorious, they were embarrassed at having lost track of Qorsa; the Clubhouse decided to launch an offensive of its own, and it turned its attention to the Sedges, the low-lying marshes where many of the ‘invaders’ had originated.
The Sedges are a group of over 100 low-lying marshlands lying north of the barrier beaches; their residents were largely self-reliant fishermen, whose stout, wooden homes were built on pilings in the marshes in an effort to keep them dry during seasonal high tides. Their only other income was made by harvesting the plentiful salt-hay that grew on the marshes; it was cut, dried, and bundled for export to agricultural towns on the mainland, where it commanded a premium price.
On the night of June 15, Woods Point boats entered Scow Creek, the major waterway running between the western Sedges. Using accelerants and torches, the Pointers set fire to the salt hay growing on Sea Dog Island, High Meadow, and West High Meadow on both sides of Scow Creek. The fire spread quickly along the now-dry hay, and soon engulfed the homes in the marshes.
By the next morning, the sedges were smoking, blackened ruins; in addition to the year’s hay crop, five dozen homes were incinerated. In fact, only one home on Scow Creek remained; Ironically, it was known as the ‘firehouse’ because it’s owner had been a fire fighter before moving to the sedge from the mainland.
At about the same time, the Woods Point road construction crews began bulldozing operations in the community of Kismet for the new road.
VI. The Oakleyville Plot (July 2005)
After the Burning of the Sedges, community leaders from throughout the Islands met in an ad hoc council at the tavern in Cherry Grove, facilitated by dispatches facilitated by the Oakleys. At that meeting, Tunís Qorsa insisted – to the enthusiastic agreement of leaders from Kismet and the other Sedges – that the time had come to destroy the power base in Woods Point. For the first time since the crisis began, the leadership of the independent military detachment from the Headlands attended, and agreeing to provide support for the plan that was hatched.
The next day, the patrol boats from the headlands entered the bays from the west, positioned between the burned sedges and the Woods Point Marina, both to act as a decoy, and to prevent further reprisals on the sedges. At the same time, a group of Islanders met at the Oakley’s home to carry out the main plot.
As a strong east wind picked up, the plot was ready. Using the same tactics at the Pointers had, the Rangers set a line of fire along the east side of Woods Point, from bayside to ocean. The hot wind, tangled underbrush, and wooden houses provided all the fuel the fire needed, and soon the entire community was aflame. Lacking a fire department of their own, Pointers panicked and escaped on their own boats in a mad rush. Unwilling to confront the patrol boats west of the marina, most Pointers headed east, to points far beyond the eastern wilderness lands of the soon-to-be-birthed Kingdom. Later reports indicated that most Pointers re-settled in the eastern Kingdom of Qúpsóg.
Woods Point was entirely destroyed, and the conflagration led to many referring to the entire barrier beach as “Fire Island,” as it could be seen for miles. Later, scavengers would make good use of the remaining timbers and stone foundations, transporting them elsewhere for building projects. A winter storm in 2007 breached the dunes and flooded much of the interior of the old Wood Point community, turning it into a brackish swamp and leading locals to begin referring to the former community as “The Sunken Forest.” The Oakley home, being the headquarters of the plot and located on the far eastern edge of the community, was saved from the torching. The Oakleys would later be granted a square mile of land by the Kingdom, upon which some dozen homes were established; the area is fondly known as “Oakleyville” and is considered part of the Department of Cherry Grove.
VII The Kingdom established (Jul - Aug 2005)
After the defeat of the Pointers, the leaders that had planned the effort turned their attention to the destitute condition of the residents of Scow Creek. Flotillas were organized to assist in the rebuilding of the homes on the sedges. During the rebuilding, the Islanders agreed that they needed to overcome their traditional isolation and join together to survive the ravages of both nature and man.
On August 1, a Constitution was adopted by the rebuilding team, declaring the Kingdom of the Scow Creek Islands Group, in honor of the victims of the Burning of the Sedges. Tunís Qorsa, who had led both the Oakleyville Plot and the Rebuilding effort, was named as the Kingdom’s first King; he chose the title King Tuathal I, after St. Tuathal, a patron saint of both the arts and physical strength. The Constitution was taken back to each community, and adopted in each by consensus in each. In September of that year, the first Assembly was elected, and the “firehouse” on Scow Creek was purchased as the new meeting hall of the Assembly.
VIII. Aftermath
The history, as recounted above, explains some of the strong ethics and beliefs held by Creekers: a strong embrace of civil liberties and community diversity; a wariness of wealth, privilege, and big business; an identity with the fishing and maritime industry; an antipathy towards roads, cars, and pavement; the removal of national oil stores to an impregnable location with Coast Guard protection; a desire for renewable energy independence; and a prohibition of banks (all financial transactions are handled through locally-owned credit unions.)