The reality is that there’s only one geographic region in the English-speaking world, outside of Britain itself, where the use of the term ‘creek’ survived uncorrupted. It is none other than New England as well as its near abroad (basically New York, the Canadian Maritimes, and the Eastern Townships of Quebec) where New Englanders later settled. Leave it to Yankees – so scholarly and organized and proper – to maintain standards.
Not that you won’t find an odd stream in New England being called a ‘creek.’ However, those few exceptions are all located at the western edge of New England – from northern Vermont down to Litchfield County, Connecticut. What happened is that these watercourses either drained into the Hudson River, which flows wholly within the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, or into Lake Champlain, which the Dutch contested (and, of course, the French up there in Ville Marie, Canada took exception). Consequently, it was the Dutch who first gave them European names.