After the war in 1866, slaves became the owners of the lands they once farmed for their masters. The land they farmed became their own because of the nature of Creek citizenship and land tenure. The 1866 treaty of peace between the United States federal government and the Creek Nation (also known as the Muskogee Nation) declared that freed slaves were full Creek citizens. The treaty explicitly stated that black Creek citizens would enjoy "an equal interest in the soil." This new culturally embedded legal and economic structure, combined with lessons drawn from the Creek oral tradition, favored a remarkable result: in the 1870s Creek citizens of different races built an alliance that defended a vision of the Creek Nation as multiethnic and cosmopolitan. In this article, the author takes a look at how a heterogeneous society emerged in the Creek Nation after the 1866 treaty. The author examines how the Creek people farmed and how they lived from 1866-1889. (Contains 1 map and 84 notes.)