Driftwood Creek is a stream in North Slope Borough, Alaska, in the United States. It is a tributary of the Utukok River.
Driftwood Creek was named for the driftwood collected there by surveyors for their campfires.
Coordinates: 68°51′N 161°07′W / 68.850°N 161.117°W / 68.850; -161.117
Creek may refer to:
The Muscogee (or Muskogee), also known as the Creek, are a Native American people traditionally from the southeastern woodlands.Mvskoke is their name in traditional spelling. Today Muscogee people live primarily in Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Their language, Muscogee, is a member of the Muscogee branch of the Muscogean language family.
The Muscogee are descendants of the Mississippian culture peoples, who built earthwork mounds at their regional chiefdoms located throughout the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries. The historian Walter L. Williams and others believe the early Spanish explorers encountered ancestors of the Muscogee when they visited Mississippian-culture chiefdoms in the Southeast in the mid-16th century.
The Muscogee were the first Native Americans considered to be "civilized" under George Washington's civilization plan. In the 19th century, the Muscogee were known as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", because they had integrated numerous cultural and technological practices of their more recent European American neighbors. Influenced by their prophetic interpretations of the 1811 comet and earthquake, the Upper Towns of the Muscogee, supported by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, began to resist European-American encroachment. Internal divisions with the Lower Towns led to the Red Stick War (Creek War, 1813–1814); begun as a civil war within the Muscogee Nation, it enmeshed the Northern Creek Bands in the War of 1812 against the United States while the Southern Creeks remained US allies. General Andrew Jackson then seized the opportunity to use the rebellion as an excuse to make war against all Creeks once the northern Creek rebellion had been put down with the aid of southern Creeks. The result was a weakening of the Creek Nation and the forced ceding of Creek lands to the US.
A tidal creek, tidal channel, or estuary is the portion of a stream that is affected by ebb and flow of ocean tides, in the case that the subject stream discharges to an ocean, sea or strait. Thus this portion of the stream has variable salinity and electrical conductivity over the tidal cycle. Due to the temporal variability of water quality parameters within the tidally influenced zone, there are unique biota associated with tidal creeks, which biota are often specialised to such zones.
Creeks may often dry to a muddy channel with little or no flow at low tide, but often with significant depth of water at high tide.
In British English and in many other countries in the Commonwealth, as well as some parts of the United States (near the Chesapeake Bay, parts of New England), a creek is a tidal water channel. In the tidal section of the River Thames in London, the names of the rivers that flow into it all become Creeks for the lower section that is tidal; thus, for example the River Lea becomes Bow Creek in its tidal section. In parts of southwest England and Wales, the term 'pill' is used, and is found in placenames such as Huntspill.
Driftwood is wood that has been washed onto a shore or beach of a sea, lake, or river by the action of winds, tides or waves. It is a form of marine debris or tidewrack.
In some waterfront areas, driftwood is a major nuisance. However, the driftwood provides shelter and food for birds, fish and other aquatic species as it floats in the ocean. Gribbles, shipworms and bacteria decompose the wood and gradually turn it into nutrients that are reintroduced to the food web. Sometimes, the partially decomposed wood washes ashore, where it also shelters birds, plants, and other species. Driftwood can become the foundation for sand dunes.
Most driftwood is the remains of trees, in whole or part, that have been washed into the ocean, due to flooding, high winds, or other natural occurrences, or as the result of logging. There is also a subset of driftwood known as drift lumber. Drift lumber includes the remains of man-made wooden objects, such as, buildings and their contents washed into the sea during storms, wooden objects discarded into the water from shore, dropped dunnage or lost cargo from ships (jetsam), and the remains of shipwrecked wooden ships and boats (flotsam). Erosion and wave action may make it difficult or impossible to determine the origin of a particular piece of driftwood.
Driftwood is a 1947 drama film directed by Allan Dwan and starring Natalie Wood as a little orphan girl who adopts a collie. The movie also stars Ruth Warrick, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger and Charlotte Greenwood.
Driftwood (1932–1960) was originally known as Speedy while he was a rodeo horse. Driftwood was known for siring rodeo and ranch horses.
Driftwood was registered as number 2833 with the American Quarter Horse Association (or AQHA). His stud book entry lists him as a bay horse (meaning stallion in this situation) foaled in 1932, and bred by Mr. Childress of Silverton, Texas. His owners at the time of registration were Catherine A and Chaning Peake of Lompoc, California. His breeding was mostly unknown, with only two lines traceable past the grandparents. Both of those lines traced to Lock's Rondo, however. His second dam was a Thoroughbred mare from Kentucky, although her exact breeding was unknown. His paternal grandsire, the Hobart Horse, is of unknown breeding.
Driftwood made a name for himself in the late 1930s as a rodeo horse, when he was known as '"Speedy". He was owned by a man named Asbury Schell, who calf roped, team tied, steer roped and bulldogged off the stallion he called Speedy, as well as occasionally stock saddle races. In 1941, the Peake's tried to buy Speedy, but since Schell earned his living as a rodeo cowboy, they were only able to talk Schell into letting them breed seven mares to the stallion that spring. The next year, with World War II rationing curtailing rodeos, Schell finally sold Speedy to the Peakes for $1500. There was some confusion about the stallion's pedigree, and it took three years before the Peakes were able to track down the previous owners before Schell and find out enough of the horse's breeding to register the stallion with the AQHA, and by that time the name "Speedy" had already been registered, so the horse was registered as Driftwood instead.