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Chapter 1

The Spirit of a Feather: The Politics of Mississippian Exchange

The Cussitas were always Bloody minded But the Pallachucola [Apalachicola] People made them Black Drink as a Token of Friendship And told them their Hearts were white And they must have White Hearts and lay down their Bodies in Token That they Should be White. . . . [The Cussitas] strove for the Tomahawk but the Apalachicola People by fair persuasion gained it from them And Buried it under their Cabin[.] The Pallachucola People told them their Captain Should all one with their People and gave them White feathers. . . . Ever Since they have lived together And they Shall always live Together and bear it in remembrance.—Chekilli, 1735 ¹

In 1735, Chekilli, the principal leader of the Creek town of Coweta, told a story of his people’s origins to the British of Savannah, Georgia. The British secretary’s summary of the two-day account, which includes descriptions of migration, the acquisition of sacred knowledge, and encounters with friends and foes, also includes the above description of the “bloody minded” Cussitas’ peace and union with the Apalachicolas. Two centuries after Zamumo had received his gift with such enthusiasm and long after mounds had ceased to serve as monuments to chiefly power and town cohesion, feathers remained symbols of power, encapsulating a spiritual iconography as old as Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. But while feathers lacked the durability of stone, Zamumo’s and Chekilli’s small gifts sealed human relationships that were no less weighty.

What endowed insubstantial objects with such power? Marcel Mauss, one of the first anthropologists to consider the power of things in people’s lives, argued that gifts were the product of an obligation to offer, to receive, and to reciprocate that he located in the “spirit” of the gift. As he explained, the object of exchange possessed its own spiritual power that compelled recipients to become givers in order to avoid suffering the ill-effects of holding on to this power too long. Exchange in turn maintained the relationships that held society together. Such gifts, as objects that had no price and offered no material gain, were different from (and, for Mauss, more important than) the commodities that promised profit through the manipulation of monetary values. Where the former promoted relations between giver and recipient, the latter promoted relations between individuals and the objects they sought. Subsequent students of giving have refined Mauss’s ideas, saying that the power of any object resides not in the object itself but in the relationships that exist between giver and recipient. They have also noted how Mauss exaggerated the distinction between gifts and commodities, showing that commodities could become gifts and vice versa depending on the context of the exchange. Whatever their take, these scholars all agree that bonds within and between societies depend in some part on individuals’ spirit of giving, their willingness to seal intangible relationships with material exchanges.²

Gifts mattered so much to Zamumo and Chekilli because reciprocity ensured the strength of the towns they led. Exchange among townspeople maintained equilibrium and hierarchy within the town while exchanges with outsiders provided leaders with rare and powerful objects. Both sets of relationships enabled townspeople to regulate their cosmos with appropriate ceremonies and to maintain friends and resist enemies with large, well-fed, and well-armed populations. Zamumo said as much when he exulted over the feather from de Soto: large harvests, powerful armies, and growing populations would all reinforce his power and perhaps his town’s independence from Ocute. The calculations that informed these conclusions derived their power from centuries of practice. Zamumo was the heir to some six centuries of cultural practices that had first begun in 900 c.e., when people near today’s St. Louis began constructing what would become the largest city in North America. The people of this city called Cahokia introduced a new architecture of massive earthen temple mounds, but they also introduced new relations of exchange. Other southeastern communities adopted Cahokia’s new political economy, but as these successor societies grew in number and competed with one another, they expanded the networks and volume of prestige goods circulating throughout the Southeast. It was in this fluid environment of the sixteenth century that leaders like Zamumo sought new patrons like de Soto even as they acknowledged old ones like Ocute. It was also from these competitive networks of exchange that southeastern townspeople would fashion new relations with their new European neighbors, keeping the Mississippian spirit of giving alive long after mounds had become memorials to the distant (if still sacred) pasts of people like Chekilli. And stories like his testify to the capacity of ancestors to leave their descendants with gifts that could cross time as well as space. The durability of these stories that tellers adapted over generations of colonization speak as richly as any feather to the power of exchange and the resilience of local autonomy.³

The Birth and Rise of Mississippian Towns

Chekilli’s story, the oldest and one of the longest written accounts of Creek origins, provides a useful point of departure for this discussion of towns, gifts, and the power of the Mississippian past. The story was written down in 1735, when Chekilli, the mico (or headman) of the talwa (or town) of Coweta, described the origins of the peoples of the Chattahoochee River and their allies to Georgian colonial dignitaries gathered in Savannah. According to a secretary’s paraphrasing of the two-day talk, the people known as the Cussitas emerged from the earth somewhere to the west and migrated eastward toward the rising sun. Crossing a wide, muddy river and then a red, bloody one, they eventually came to a thundering mountain that shot fire straight upward. Taking some of this fire, they combined it with some that came to them from the north to make their sacred fire. Near this same mountain they also met three other peoples, the Chickasaws, Alabamas, and Abecas. Together the four peoples learned the attributes of the sacred plants, how some of them were necessary for purification before their annual Green Corn Ceremony, or boosketuh, and how menstruating women could destroy the power of the plants if they came too close. In order to determine which of the four peoples was the eldest and most powerful, they decided to erect four poles. The first to cover their pole with the scalps of their enemies would be considered the highest rank. The Cussitas finished the challenge first, followed by the Chickasaws, the Alabamas, and the Abecas, who were unable to “raise their heap of scalps higher than the knee.”⁴

Also at about this time, a terrible blue bird was regularly killing these peoples. They killed their assailant with the help of a rat who was the child of the fierce bird. They then followed a path that was white, the color of peace, until they reached the Coosas. There they learned that a lion was eating one of the Coosas every seven days, and so they set a fatal trap baited with a “motherless child.” After four years among the Coosas, the Cussitas relocated to a site along the river they called Calosahutchee, where they struggled to feed themselves for lack of corn. Eventually, they resumed following the white path until they came to a town that they hoped was the home of the path’s makers. Unfortunately, when scouts fired white arrows into the town to indicate the Cussitas’ peaceful intentions, the residents responded with red arrows of war. Displeased, the Cussitas prepared to attack the town, but when they arrived they found it abandoned, the people having apparently disappeared beneath the nearby river. When they came to another town that responded with red arrows, they attacked it and killed all but two of the inhabitants. After chasing these survivors, they came again upon the white path, which led them to the town of the Apalachicolas. The Apalachicolas welcomed the travelers, and hoping to calm their bloody-minded visitors, the hosts offered them black drink, a purificatory tea made from leaves of the cassina plant. Professing that their hearts were white, the Apalachicolas convinced the Cussitas to bury their hatchet under the meeting benches at the Apalachicolas’ square ground and offered them feathers as symbols of friendship. The two peoples lived together from that point onward, with the Cussitas settling two towns, Cussita and Coweta, that became “the Head Towns of the Upper and Lower Creeks.”⁵

Chekilli’s story explained to his listeners the origins of his people’s most important life-ways even as it also established the bonds of friendship and power that held together the Abecas, Coosas, Alabamas, Apalachicolas, and Cussitas as the people that the British colonists called “Creeks.” In making their sacred fire with the fire that came to them from the north, the Cussitas first refused the fires that came to them from the west, east, and south. These four directions organized Creek space and provided Creeks with the sacred number four. Square grounds, where they met to discuss issues of general interest, always adhered to the cardinal points, with the sacred fire in the middle, and the meeting benches of the leaders facing east. One of the most important ceremonies performed at the square grounds was the Green Corn Ceremony, which the Creeks celebrated at the time of the first maize harvest, purifying themselves for the beginning of a new year. Chekilli also mentioned the importance of particular medicines and the need to protect them from the uncontrolled power of menstruating women, alluding to the division of tasks that followed lines of gender. Only women could provide children with a clan identity that would make them Creeks, which explains why the Cussitas baited their lion trap with a “motherless child.” Red was the color of war and white the color of peace, and as much as war was part of Creek life, the black drink could purify and bring calm to the drinker.⁶

This account of political and cultural origins was in many respects a case for the world as Chekilli thought it should be.⁷ Most basically, though, he was claiming that towns made history. Even when Creeks from other towns contested Chekilli’s claim to superiority, they and many subsequent Creek historians have presented the talwas as the source of action and allegiance. Also like Chekilli, they have emphasized the prominence of their talwa in the origins of the Creeks. When two Coosas told their origin stories to the ethnologist John Swanton early in the twentieth century, they both explained that their people were the first Muskogees. Some Tukabatchees, in contrast, averred that their talwa came from the sky above before migrating north, south, and then finally east to settle lands among the Creeks.⁸ In another version, Tukabatchees came out of the earth, later meeting the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws. In the contest of scalps to determine seniority, the Tukabatchees and Cussitas tied, with the Cowetas following them and the Chickasaws not participating at all. For their part, Alabamas described their migration as separate from the others.⁹ The Hitchitis claimed they, like the Cussitas, migrated toward the rising sun, but they did so and arrived at the sea long before the Cussitas and their companions. Thus they were revered by the later arrivals as those who went to see from where the sun came.¹⁰ Although the differences matter a great deal, the stories agree on a number of levels, including the recurrence of sacred motifs like the sun and the cardinal directions. In every case, they also emphasize the importance of towns as the centers of historical action.

As Chekilli and others suggested in their stories, towns were old. They might move or reconfigure themselves, but their square grounds had been defining and celebrating the southeastern cosmos for centuries. But this way of life, like Chekilli’s ancestors, had come from somewhere, and that somewhere lay at the American Bottom, where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers join to create a fertile bottomland and where the city of Cahokia grew some time after 900 c.e. Still today, the city’s imposing Monk’s Mound rises thirty meters above the outskirts of East St. Louis, covering roughly seven hectares at its base.¹¹ This was among the largest of hundreds of truncated pyramids that punctuated the landscape of the American Bottom. The leaders who lived, worshiped, and were sometimes buried atop these mounds enjoyed ties of exchange with societies for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Stored up surpluses of corn fed the people who maintained these monuments. More than large, Cahokia was unprecedented. In 1050 its population of eight thousand to fifteen thousand dwarfed any North American population center before Boston, New York, and Philadelphia reached similar sizes some seven centuries later.¹²

Unlike prior residents of eastern North America, Cahokia’s builders planned their community before they built it. Some time around 1000, in one massive act of what the archaeologist Timothy Pauketat calls “urban renewal,” Cahokians leveled a nineteen-hectare grand plaza and constructed the first six meters of Monk’s Mound immediately to the north of the plaza. Residents even built their houses according to a prescribed layout that probably mobilized the same collective effort as the plaza and mound.¹³ Equally important, this growing city promoted and depended upon an exchange network that allowed it to acquire marine shells from the Gulf Coast, copper from the Great Lakes, chert from the Ozarks, and mica from the Appalachian Mountains. From these materials Cahokian craftsmen and craftswomen made idols, tools, and ceramics that became prestigious goods exchanged throughout the Mississippi Valley. Whether peoples from the upper Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta accepted Cahokian crafts as tributaries, allies, or outlying Cahokian trading colonies is unclear, but their participation in these exchanges enabled Cahokians to define themselves and their power in the American Bottom in terms of the peoples who lived far beyond its horizons.¹⁴ Such contacts promoted but could not guarantee Cahokian influence, however. Between 1100 and 1300 environmental degradation, internal and external conflicts, and deepening popular dissatisfaction with the city’s elite all contributed to Cahokia’s collapse.¹⁵

The great city’s legacy was far greater than even its unprecedented size would suggest. Archaeologists acknowledge its impact in their terminology. Cahokia is the standard against which they define the successor societies called chiefdoms, societies whose leaders enjoyed marked privileges compared to the commoners they ruled but who also depended on personal connections and hereditary privileges rather than bureaucracies or standing armies—institutions frequently associated with states. Mississippian chiefdoms distinguished themselves from the earlier polities most obviously in their construction of planned towns, earthen mounds, and plazas. Atop their mounds, chiefs lived, preserved their sacred fires, and celebrated communal rituals with townspeople gathered in the plaza below. When townspeople gathered to add a new layer of soil to their mounds, they affirmed their connection to one another as well as to the earth. Because most layers were added following the interment of a principal leader, mound construction also expressed a community’s connection to (and elevation of ) its chief. As Chekilli would have understood well, no mound and no chief existed without an associated town. However wide his ties to other farming hamlets, tributary towns, or allies, a chief resided in one particular town, where he consulted other members of the elite and conducted the ceremonies of cosmic order.¹⁶ Not surprisingly, even after southeastern Natives ceased to define their communities through mound building, powerful chiefs, and tributary ties, they still placed their towns at the political and ceremonial heart of their world. Towns and the exchanges that supported them began with Cahokia and endured long after Zamumo and de Soto offered each other tokens of friendship and power.¹⁷

No southeastern community would ever reproduce Cahokia’s size or success, but many would imitate it. By 1100, peoples of Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee began building new town and mound centers of their own.¹⁸ Archaeologists still understand relatively little about the early Mississippian societies of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, and it is difficult to determine what role regional exchange played in their fortunes. By the thirteenth century, however, their successors participated in complex networks of exchange that stretched across and beyond the Southeast. Mississippian exchange provided leaders from Georgia to Oklahoma with beautifully crafted objects of copper, shell, and stone that were inscribed with a sacred iconography of bird-men, snake-birds, and other deities who blended the power of various animals and the elements of earth, air, and water.¹⁹

Map 1. The Mississippian Southeast, 1000–1500. Although these various chiefdoms were not contemporaneous, later communities built upon their cultural, and sometimes physical, remains.

After 1200, residents of the Black Warrior River Valley in western Alabama used their place in these networks to build a Mississippian center second only to Cahokia in size. Although Moundville’s population of some fifteen hundred to three thousand people was a fraction of Cahokia’s, its leaders were especially effective at harnessing the dynamics of exchange and ceremony to their own quests for influence. By gaining control of the production and distribution of the finely crafted ceramics, copper ornaments, and other symbols of power, Moundville’s chiefs maintained close contact with and control over neighbors who depended on these objects for their authority. By the end of the thirteenth century, peoples as far north as the Tennessee River recognized the power of Moundville and its sacred crafts, and scattered villages and hamlets began to replace more densely clustered towns in the Black Warrior Valley. Perhaps people dispersed in part because Moundville’s power reduced valley residents’ need for dense settlements with protective walls, but whatever the reason, this pax Moundvilliana incorporated the persuasive power of what its leaders gave and received.²⁰

Meanwhile, between about 1250 and 1375, chiefs in western Georgia were attempting something similar. Leaders of Etowah, in northwestern Georgia, gained influence over much of the rest of the eponymous river valley, oversaw the construction of beautiful crafts, and placed these objects and themselves atop three mounds, one of which eventually grew to 21 meters in height. Etowah supported some of its influence through its access to an important route that connected chiefdoms of the Gulf Coast, Chattahoochee River, and upper Tennessee River.²¹ Two hundred forty kilometers south of Etowah, elites in the Chattahoochee Valley constructed similarly large centers at Rood’s Landing and Singer-Moye thanks in part to their association with prestigious goods, including the exchange of fine pottery used by elites from the Gulf Coast to the Chattahoochee fall line. Unlike the case of Moundville, it is unclear whether inhabitants of the valley produced these ceramics in their respective towns or acquired them from one town that monopolized their production. Much like their contemporaries at Moundville, though, the leaders of Singer-Moye and Rood’s Landing believed that the ideas and symbols of power were best shared regionally. Leaders from the Gulf Coast to Rood’s Landing 250 kilometers to the north drank from similarly decorated ceramics. Indeed, the relative similarity among commoners’ pottery styles for 90 kilometers south of Rood’s Landing further suggests how many people participated in the connections that bound the Mississippian world.²²

The political and cultural integration among elites and, to a lesser extent, commoners did not last much beyond the end of the fourteenth century, when the global cooling of the “Little Ice Age” reduced the crop yields that supported these large chiefdoms. Moundville’s scattered population ceased using nearly all of the mounds in the once-great town at about this time. To the northeast, external threats convinced the people of Etowah to ring their town with a trench and palisade, but new defenses could not prevent invaders from burning Etowah’s palisade and desecrating its temple around 1400. Survivors abandoned the site shortly afterward. The residents of Rood’s Landing also abandoned their mound center at about the same time. Only residents of Singer-Moye managed to maintain their large town for another generation or two, perhaps because they lived at some distance from the rivers that perhaps carried more war parties than prestige goods.²³

When other chiefly polities emerged after 1400, none of these so-called Late Mississippian chiefdoms were able to replicate the success of their predecessors. The Late Mississippian Southeast—the world Zamumo inhabited and de Soto visited—was a more competitive environment than the one Moundville and Etowah had dominated. Wars flared more frequently and prestigious goods moved more abundantly, if also less widely.²⁴ Leaders like Ocute might enjoy the tribute of other chiefs like Zamumo, but even these lesser leaders still used their own mounds to conduct ceremonies and perhaps cast a watchful eye for enemies and a hopeful gaze for new exchange partners. In their localism, their competitiveness, and their need for allies and exchange partners, these chiefdoms were the progenitors of Chekilli’s talwas.

The Spirit of the Late Mississippian Gift

Among these new dynamics, older patterns remained. Finely crafted objects, frequently of rare materials, still occupied the focal point of ceremonies of cosmological order, communal cohesion, and military strength. As the sites of chiefly residences and temples, the mounds continued to assert the authority of the men and (occasional) women who oversaw southeastern chiefdoms. One example of such mound-centered ceremonial power comes from a resident of South Carolina’s coast, Francisco Chicorana, who spoke with the Spanish imperial historian Peter Martyr D’Anghera in the early 1500s. He explained that the Duhares, a people neighboring his own, venerated two idols “as large as a three-year old child, one male and one female,” which “had their residence in the palace” atop the town’s mound. Twice a year, during sowing season and harvest season, the chief of Duhare displayed these idols for the necessary ceremonies of supplication and thanksgiving. Appearing atop his mound with the idols on the appropriate days, “he and they are saluted with respect and fear by the people.” During the two days of rituals, Duhare remained closely associated with these idols, which assured “rich crops, bodily health, peace, or if they are about to fight, victory.”²⁵ Much as earlier invaders had recognized in their destruction of Etowah’s temple and Zamumo later proclaimed in his speech to de Soto, sacred objects were crucial to a town’s survival.

Broader access did not erase the power of these objects or the perils of acquiring them. Although most exchange probably occurred between near neighbors rather than over long distances, travel beyond the immediate protection of one’s kin and community entailed significant risk. Late Mississippian ceremonies of return acknowledged both the danger that a traveler faced and the prestige that accompanied success. In 1595, the leader of the recently converted village of San Pedro, just north of St. Augustine, returned from a journey. When the man, named Juan, and his wife entered the town, the entire populace greeted them by “wailing in a high voice as if they had dropped dead before their eyes,” and townspeople repeated these lamentations in Juan’s presence for “many days.” The Franciscan missionary who recorded this event did not allude to death accidentally. After the missionary reached St. Augustine, he learned that nearby mission Indians cried in a similar manner to honor a recently deceased leader.²⁶ Chekilli’s own story of Cussita-Apalachicola union suggests a simple reason for this association between long-distance travel and death. It was only after many “fair persuasions” that Apalachicolas managed to calm their bellicose visitors enough to accept white feathers of peace. Beyond the norms and protections of their societies, travelers seeking peace and the goods that marked it remained vulnerable to the violence of strangers. The power of the objects that came home from these journeys, then, lay not just in their physical characteristics but also in the ways in which they were acquired.

Exchange also involved another relationship of power. Giving and receiving established relations of mutual obligation. Although a recipient acquired an obligation to reciprocate and a giver demonstrated power through generosity, a gift did not imply the unquestioned superiority of the giver. Context mattered. As Spaniards, British, and French would all learn later, when givers gave from a position of weakness rather than strength, Indians frequently accepted these offerings as tribute instead of gifts.²⁷ But even tributaries had claims on their supposed superiors. De Soto and his followers had good reason to believe that their weapons certainly often cowed their hosts, but when the would-be conqueror of La Florida arrived in the chiefdom of Casqui near the Mississippi River, the chief, also known as Casqui, offered “to serve” the Spaniards because, according to de Soto’s chronicler Luys Hernández de Biedma, de Soto was “from heaven.” In return, the chief requested help in the form of rain for his parched fields. De Soto agreed, instructed him to make a cross of two pines, and promised to return the next day with the needed heavenly sign. Casqui did not wait on his supposed superior, though; instead, as Biedma recounted, he arrived the next morning, berating de Soto for his delays despite his people’s willingness “to serve us and follow us.” The Spaniards were moved by the chief’s devotion, but they might also have noticed that his fervor was born of a sense expectation of spiritual power the Spaniard had yet to provide. Mutual obligation confirmed the personal nature of all exchanges, but the exchange of people emphasized it more clearly still. In most instances, it is impossible to determine the motivations of the many peoples who offered men and women as burden bearers and sexual partners to the invaders, but Casqui at least acknowledged the power of human gifts when he offered captive women to the Spaniards and gave his daughter to de Soto out of his supposed “desire to unite his blood with so great a lord as he [de Soto] was.”²⁸ Centuries later, Chekilli recounted how Cussitas had encountered a mountain where they acquired the sacred knowledge, fire, and medicines necessary to keep their world in balance. For Chekilli as well as Casqui, the capacity of a town to survive and prosper came from without. Casqui demonstrated how that survival and prosperity involved a delicate balance of generosity and obligation.

Leaders, Followers, and the Meaning of Late Mississippian Power

If it is difficult to understand this balance among towns, it is even more difficult to look within towns. To speak of the power of Mississippian towns usually implies speaking of the power of chiefs over towns. Although rare and sacred goods (and the mounds where many were buried) seem to justify this perspective, chiefs depended on the people who accorded them respect, provided them fine foods, manufactured their ornaments, and built the mounds atop which they lived and worshipped. Through the reciprocal relations of leaders and followers, of men and women, and of friends and relations, commoners negotiated the bonds that held their towns together. Such negotiations in turn influenced exchanges among towns. As much as Zamumo would have liked to convince de Soto otherwise, chiefs were not the only ones who exchanged things.

Common people, like their leaders, tended to live on their stored agricultural surpluses, especially corn, squash, and, after about 1200 c.e., beans.²⁹ They supplemented this diet with nuts, berries, fish, water-fowl, and deer.³⁰ Mississippians organized many of the tasks of subsistence along lines of gender. The men and women of pre-contact Tukabatchee, a prominent town on the Tallapoosa River, manufactured the tools necessary for their tasks in separate spaces in their homes. The stone flakes left over from men’s manufacture of arrowheads litter one corner while the broken pottery from women’s ceramic making lies in another. If the activities of their colonial-era descendants are any guide, Mississippian men probably cleared the agricultural fields and hunted while women cultivated the crops and gathered other seasonal foods that grew wild. Language reflected these divisions, with Muskogean grammar and vocabulary varying according to the gender of the speaker.³¹ Much to their chagrin, French traders among the Natchez learned about a similar linguistic divide, for “by chiefly frequenting the women, [they] contracted their manner of speaking, which was ridiculed as effeminacy by the women, as well as the men, among the natives.”³² Men’s and women’s complementary roles in family and social life carried into political life as well. Among elite families, men apparently had greater access to the chieftaincy than women, and those few commoners who earned burial in or near a temple mound were usually distinguished warriors.³³ Women’s importance as the principal providers of food endowed them with significant influence in the household, and senior women could help shape the ideas of their clan members who dwelled with and near them.³⁴ Bound together in relationships in which each provided and each received, men’s and women’s power depended less on control than interdependence.

Sharing also joined clans and chiefs. If the geography of the chief was the town, that of the clan was the house. Most Mississippian people inhabiting modern Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee lived in large, square homes whose floors were dug slightly below ground level and whose walls were banked with earth to provide greater insulation in the winter. Adjacent to their homes, families built raised open-air structures that could be used as summer dwellings. In the same way that chiefs buried their prominent ancestors under new layers of the mound or interred them in the nearby charnel house, many people honored their recently deceased kin by burning the homestead before burying the dead kin and rebuilding a new home over them. As further evidence of the power of kin ties, clan members within a town often built their homes near each other. Children probably grew up among their mother’s family, and the most respected members of the clan were likely the occupants of the larger homes located closest to the open plaza that spread out before every temple mound.³⁵

The power of clans also appeared in later stories of Creek origins, too. In some versions, clans rather than towns emerged from the earth, each clan enveloped in a fog that prevented its members from seeing the world around them. Gradually a wind began to blow, and as it did so, the clans began to recognize one another in the dissipating mist. The first to emerge from the fog became known as the Wind clan, and as others began to see the world around them, they saw different animals that became their clan’s totem. As the first clan to be free of the fog, the Wind clan gained a certain prominence above all others.³⁶ Clans provided a fundamental bond for Creeks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The strongest link in Creek political and social standing,” noted the Creek historian George Stiggins in 1836, “is their clanship or families.” According to Thomas Nairne a century earlier, even as clans grew, fragmented, and migrated to other towns, their members continued to acknowledge ties to distant kin, with “divers Tribes or nations of Different Languages . . . having constant quarrels one with the other, yet at the same time pretending kindred.”³⁷ The connections of clans mitigated conflict by providing a network that transcended locality.

Mississippian clans were important, but their members still offered the choicest portions of the hunt and harvest to their chief, and they reaffirmed their association with the mound and its privileged occupants through their participation in the initial process of town planning and layout and the recurring rituals of mound renewal. The reciprocal relations that encouraged followers to provide labor and goods in exchange for local and cosmic security promoted the power of the few over the many. Although clan ties extended beyond the limits of the town and seemed to defy a leader’s local influence, some skillful leaders could also influence neighboring chiefdoms. Mississippian titles reflected these levels of influence. Although Spanish explorers frequently referred to late Mississippian leaders by the Arawak term “caciques,” Muskogean speakers like those in the Coosa paramount chiefdom differentiated their leaders with a variety of titles. An orata, which the chronicler Juan de la Bandera translated as señor menor, led small villages or groups of villages. These recognized the influence of a mico,or gran señor, who, in addition to enjoying the respect of oratas, also headed a town of his own. At the apex of the Coosa paramouncy was a “cacique grande” named “Cosa.”³⁸ Apparently, the mico of a paramount town did not need a new title; he simply embodied the town and province over which he ruled.

Such networks enabled Coosa and other leaders with similar resources and wherewithal to integrate neighboring communities and even distant chiefs into larger regional, or paramount, chiefdoms. During his invasion of the Southeast in 1540, Hernando de Soto heard rumors of the “great lord” named “Coça” who had other towns subject to him. De Soto capitalized on Coosa’s regional influence when he kept the chief as a hostage to guarantee the Spaniards safe passage through a host of towns. Only when he reached somewhere in the environs of central Alabama was this chief from northwestern Georgia no longer of any use to him. Another, more localized integration appears in the material record as well. As the town of Coosa became increasingly prominent during the fifteenth century, for example, the pottery styles of neighboring towns converged.³⁹ But did the bonds of hierarchy imply the bondage of commoners? Massive earthworks and the carefully crafted objects they conceal suggest that Mississippian elites claimed a monopoly on the sacred based on ancestry and knowledge of the arcane. Despite mounds’ imposing stature, though, no material remains conclusively illustrate that chiefs exercised power beyond their immediate towns.⁴⁰ Sixteenth-century explorers claimed that they did, but de Soto and others spoke incessantly about chiefs and their power in part because they were hoping to find another Moctezuma or Atahualpa. Amid the ambiguity and scanty evidence, two perspectives offer some insight into the question of chiefly power.

First, the forms of warfare that secured late Mississippian power were themselves the product of a careful, if also unequal, balance between the interests of leaders and followers. Elites’ inability to control sacred power as effectively as their predecessors had at Etowah, Rood’s Landing, and Moundville meant that warfare served a vital role for maintaining chiefly stability after 1400, but because armies consisted of men who spent most of their time farming, hunting, and making the tools necessary for their subsistence, collective unwillingness could cripple chiefly power. Even when they did serve in massed formations at a chief’s command, individuals sought to distinguish themselves through daring exploits. Individual martial skill provided families with captive slaves. Warriors often displayed the scalps of their victims from the top of a high pole, but rather than place that symbol of their prowess atop the mound of the chief, they erected it in the town’s central plaza. With this act, warriors emphasized their role in a military success that belonged to their community, not their chief.⁴¹

But there were limits to the autonomy of warriors. However much fighting men celebrated their actions as victories for their towns and located their most basic loyalties with their homes and the clan members living in them and buried under them, chiefs organized the disciplined warriors who kept tributaries in thrall and Spanish conquistadors off balance. In 1560, Coosa convinced Spanish explorers under Tristan de Luna to join his large military conquest of wayward tributaries on the Tennessee River.⁴² Twenty years earlier de Soto’s forces suffered tremendous losses from a carefully orchestrated assault at the chiefdom of Mabila, somewhere in central Alabama. Although warriors were slaughtered, perhaps in the thousands, the attackers destroyed many supplies and disabused the Spaniards of their invincibility.⁴³ Well-organized armies enabled paramount chiefs to conduct the wars that secured their religious and tributary preeminence.

Any discussion of networks requires that we examine a second perspective, that of trade. Were chiefs the only mediators of Mississippian intertown exchange? As important as the question is for an understanding of local politics and regional exchange, it is frustratingly difficult to answer. Few non-elite goods have lasted long enough for archaeologists to find them and trace their provenance. Nonetheless, John Lawson’s early eighteenth-century memoir of his visit to the North Carolina piedmont offers a tantalizing glimpse. During the annual harvest celebrations of the boosketuh, people gathered “from all the Towns within fifty or sixty Miles round, where they buy and sell several Commodities, as we do at Fairs and Markets.” Here, then, is a possible arena in which townspeople interacted and traded with friends, kin, and strangers, a time for clan members to reaffirm their intertown relationships, perhaps an opportunity for them to share the ideas and skills that enabled people of the thirteenth-century Chattahoochee Valley or the environs of sixteenth-century Coosa to develop similar styles of pottery. But outside this ceremonial context, community leaders likely exercised more control. When the trader John Lederer traveled to the same region in 1670, his hosts shared his penchant for “higgling” over the rate of any exchange, but they also made it clear that he first had to present his goods to the town’s influential elders. Part of the reason for this interposition might have been that even friends could be part-time enemies. Towns met not only to celebrate the harvest but also (and probably simultaneously) to play the ball game. This violent and grueling ancestor of lacrosse allowed peaceable neighbors to vent their hostilities without going to war against each other (hence the game’s nickname: “the little brother of war”). Because spectators often wagered everything they possessed on the fortunes of their town, victors and vanquished could meet after games to exchange outside the presumed influence of their chiefs. The imbalanced nature of such interactions and the competition and violence that underwrote them probably limited the depth of such bonds, though. And perhaps this fact as much as any reminds us of the danger of trade and helps us appreciate further the ceremonial wailing that welcomed Cacique Juan back to his town, back, as it were, from the dead.⁴⁴

All of this leaves us with a sense that chiefs enjoyed significant power if they negotiated carefully. Ocute and Coosa might personify their towns, but they could not control all of the relationships that supported their towns and their leadership. The fact that they achieved some success at controlling the people and things involved in intertown trade suggests, too, the importance of relationships to the power of the chief and the town. And when chiefs lost power at the end of the early colonial period, it should be no surprise that their followers concerned themselves more with building and maintaining networks of exchange than with restoring the power of their humbled elite. Consequently, when Chekilli told his story of his people’s sacred origins in 1735, he spoke of how Cussitas, the townspeople, rather than Cussita, a chief, accepted the Apalachicolas’ sacred feather.⁴⁵

Enduring Mississippian Spirits

Despite such significant changes in the contours of Creek stories, these histories still carry the echoes and the power of the Mississippian past and demonstrate quite clearly how they shaped the colonial world. In them, Creek historians explained and today continue to explain why towns remain fundamental political units of southeastern Native life and how exchange has sustained them. Such connections can at times be quite elusive. If stories are legacies of Mississippian life-ways and indeed products of generations of exchanges of information, then how could Chekilli’s story, the oldest and most detailed published account, neglect any mention of mounds? The eighteenth-century trader James Adair put the problem best during a visit to the Ocmulgee Old Fields, near today’s Macon, Georgia. His Creek friends revered the site, with its remains of mounds more than six hundred years old and of a town and trading house that Indians and English had abandoned after war divided them in 1715. “They strenuously aver, that when necessity forces them to encamp there, they always hear, at the dawn of the morning, the usual noise of Indians singing their joyful religious notes, and dancing, as if going down to the river to purify themselves, and then returning to the old townhouse: with a great deal more to the same effect.” So claimed his hosts, but, “Whenever I have been there,” continued Adair, “. . . all hath been silent.”⁴⁶

Sometimes, though, it is a matter of listening more for stories than for specters. In 1773–74, some two decades after Adair frequented the locale, the naturalist William Bartram visited the mounds of the Old Fields as part of his itinerant study of southeastern plants and animals. There, his Creek guides taught him some of their history.

And, if we are to give credit to the account the Creeks give of themselves, this place is remarkable for being the first town or settlement, when they sat down (as they term it) or established themselves, after their emigration from the west, beyond the Mississippi, their original native country. On this long journey they suffered great and innumerable difficulties, encountering and vanquishing numerous and valiant tribes of Indians, who opposed and retarded their march. Having crossed the river, still pushing eastward, they were obliged to make a stand, and fortify themselves in this place, as their only remaining hope, being to the last degree persecuted and weakened by their surrounding foes. Having formed for themselves this retreat, and driven off the inhabitants by degrees, they recovered their spirits, and again faced their enemies, when they came off victorious in a memorable and decisive battle. They afterwards gradually subdued their surrounding enemies, strengthening themselves by taking into confederacy the vanquished tribes.⁴⁷

As in Chekilli’s story, Creeks’ ancestors faced numerous military challenges on their journey east. Unlike this earlier account, mounds played prominent roles, providing strength and succor. In ways that Bartram only hinted at in his summary, Mississippians and their Creek descendants were sharing ideas that connected them to each other and to old sources of power.

In fact, Creeks frequently mentioned mounds when they explained the foundations of their talwas’ autonomy. In 1800, Benjamin Hawkins, the United States Superintendent of the Creeks, related the account that Tussekiahmico of Cussita gave for the origin of the Creeks and their sacred fire. Much of the account paralleled Chekilli’s story from six decades earlier. At one point in their migration, though, the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws stopped at two mounds west of the Mississippi River when sacred beings from each of the four corners of the world came to them. Giving the three peoples fire, the four visitors explained that the sacred flame would preserve them and inform Esaugetuh Emissee (the Master of Breath) of their wants. Sitting around the fire on one of the mounds, the four beings also taught the traveling peoples the knowledge of the sacred plants. After the teachers departed, the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws migrated east to the Coosa River, where they met the Abecas. In a four-year war to obtain scalps and determine seniority, Cussitas achieved the highest rank, followed by the Cowetas, Chickasaws, and Abecas. The Cussitas defeated another people inhabiting some mounds further to the east before continuing on to the Atlantic Ocean, where the recently arrived whites forced them to return inland.⁴⁸

Another story, related by Ispahihta of Cussita to James Gregory circa 1900, described how the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws abandoned their lands in the west because of the spread of evil. Determining that the sun was the last pure object in their tainted world, they headed east in search of its origin. After crossing the great river with the Cowetas and Cussitas, the Chickasaws abandoned the quest, preferring to live on the fertile lands along the river. Traveling far ahead of the Cowetas, Cussitas built a mound into which they dug a chamber to purify themselves. Once purified, the warriors set out against unnamed enemies living nearby. The Cowetas, angry that the Cussita warriors had gone to war without them, threatened to kill the Cussita women and children remaining in the town. Alerted to the Cowetas’ malicious intentions, the Cussita warriors returned in time to prevent the attack, punishing their partners by beating them with canes. Again the Cussitas departed, leaving the Coweta warriors to purify themselves inside the mound. When Cherokees came to attack what they thought was an undefended town, they saw, much to their astonishment and dismay, that Coweta warriors “poured up from the bowels of the earth.” After routing the Cherokees, the Cowetas joined the Cussitas in a series of military victories that led them to the Atlantic Ocean. Seeing the sun rise out of the sea the following morning, they understood that the water kept the sun bright and pure. Once they had conquered neighboring peoples, the Cowetas challenged the Cussitas to the ball game to avenge their earlier caning. This contest established the distinction between the red war towns led by Coweta and the white peace towns led by Cussita.⁴⁹

The stories that Hawkins and Gregory recorded reveal additional details about Creek culture. In the ball game, towns competed only against others that were “of the opposite fire,” that is to say, red or white towns never competed against towns of the same color. Hawkins’s synopsis explains the sources of this division between red towns responsible for war and white towns that took a leadership role in making peace.⁵⁰ The arrival and brief stay at the ocean shore that Hawkins described becomes more meaningful and poignant in Gregory’s version. The convergence at the horizon of the Middle World where people resided with the Above World of air and order and with the Under World of water and chaos must have been a powerful sight for the migrants and for those like Ispahihta and Gregory who recounted their experience.⁵¹ Most important, as with Bartram’s account, the mounds in both stories serve as the sites of rebirth. Atop one mound, migrating peoples learned the sacred ways that would be the foundation of their common culture. Emerging from another mound, as if “from the bowels of the earth,” Cowetas and Cussitas repeated their initial emergence in the west. In each case, the mounds made new people.

The people were new, but many of their basic institutions were not. Towns no longer had mounds, but by emerging from them, later Creeks acknowledged their Mississippian antecedents. Exchange also gave these towns life and strength. In the story told by Tussekiahmico and summarized by Hawkins, towns received the sacred knowledge necessary to balance the power of the cosmos; in Chekilli’s account, Cussita received a feather to secure bonds of peace. Finally, the stories themselves were products of exchange. Whatever the variations among towns, the congruences also speak to centuries of people sharing information among talwas and across generations.

Consequently, stories that apparently deny these connections, these acts of sharing, raise interesting questions. Even with mounds figuring as prominently as they did as a rallying point in Bartram’s relation and Gregory’s mention that Cussitas actually built a mound as part of their migration eastward, many Creeks did not consider their ancestors responsible for them. At the end of the 1700s, Creeks claimed no knowledge of the builders of the earthworks. By 1900, some Creeks stridently asserted that neither they nor any Indian people would consent to building the mounds. As Gregory himself wrote to a Cherokee friend interested in Creek history, “None of them would entertain for one moment digging and carrying wet clay by thousands of tons by hand and building firm clay mounds a hundred feet high 400 feet long by sixty feet wide . . . No Sir! No North American Indian tribe done these things.” The mounds, Gregory continued, were the product of an inferior, non-Indian people, the Mound-builders, whom the Creeks drove from the Southeast and out of North America shortly after their arrival in the Southeast.⁵² Gregory made explicit what the oral histories imply: the Creeks had no ancestors other than those talwa or clan members who emerged from the earth.⁵³

Creeks recall their origin stories to remind themselves who they are, but even in the many stories they have shared with non-Creeks, they are asserting their sense of themselves in relation to outsiders, usually their colonizers. Statements like Gregory’s suggest how Europeans’ involvement in southeastern exchange networks included ideas as well as objects. They also highlight the importance of the historical contexts of these stories from the last three centuries. Most briefly, Chekilli presented Georgia’s leaders with his history lesson to assert his preeminence among the Creeks and also his power in relation to the new Georgia colony. Sixty years later, Tussekiahmico sought to remind Hawkins that Creeks already possessed a civilization and did not need to subscribe to the American version that Hawkins championed. When Ispahihta spoke with Gregory (and, by extension, the anthropologist John Swanton), the Creeks faced the joint political crises of allotment and Oklahoma statehood; the former threatened their land base and the latter their political independence. To assert a Creek power rooted in warfare and migration to the distant Atlantic Ocean (and to tell this to an anthropologist working for the U.S. government) offered a symbolic challenge to a nation that seemed intent on destroying them. Nearly a century later, the stories I heard during a brief visit to Oklahoma came from people who were proud of their history but who were also insistent that their history of emerging clans and migrating towns could not be entirely understood from documents in the archives or books in the library. By way of example from my own experience, when I asked Keeper Johnson about the Creeks’ origins, he confidently explained his own theory, what he called a “Keeperism,” that included Creek descent from the Aztecs who had fled Hernán Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. His story was unique, but his attitude was not.⁵⁴

In these stories spanning nearly three centuries lies an intellectual history of Creeks charting their future in recollections of their past. The assistance or at least the understanding of outsiders can help, but Creeks always derive their power from their traditions. As the Creek literary scholar Craig Womack contends, by presenting their own history through stories that can only be understood through Creek symbols and cosmology, Creeks “are setting themselves apart as a nation of people with distinct worldviews that deserve to be taken seriously. This is an important exercise of sovereignty.”⁵⁵ In other words, the talwa is not just a fundamental unit of Creek identity and history, a unit important to the mound-builders as much as the mound-born; it is also the basic unit of interaction with and resistance to the last half millennium of European colonization. The Creeks rarely succeeded entirely on their terms, but when they tell stories about towns born from Mississippian mounds, they affirm centuries of exchange—of things and ideas—that created and supported their towns. This is perhaps the Mississippian period’s greatest legacy, and the Creeks were among those Indians with the good fortune to keep the memory and themselves alive.

But their fortune has not always seemed so good. When the federal government forced Creeks to sell the Ocmulgee Fields in 1828, land-hungry Georgians made every effort to erase signs of the former inhabitants, who had long revered the nearby mounds. Reporting on the sale of the lands, the newspaper of the new town of Macon proclaimed, “We may expect shortly to see the springing up in these romantic retreats, handsome country seats, gardens, orchards, etc. etc. The shadows of superstition which overhung these scenes on the first settlement of the country, concealing beneath their dark mantle the spectral forms of another age, are in a manner dispersed. The goblins and spectres that were supposed to haunt the place some years back are all fled. Of late, we do not hear of unearthly phantoms, nor of unearthly voices.”⁵⁶ In asserting the rights of the new occupants, it was not enough for the reporter to banish ancestral ghosts that Creeks had seen there for decades.⁵⁷ Unless any doubt remained about the Creeks’ title to Georgia’s lands, the reporter went on to assert that their historic roots had never been very deep to begin with. No race of “modern Indians” could have constructed earthworks reaching nearly fifty feet in height because “they exhibit in general too much labor.”⁵⁸ In a short article celebrating the growth of the new town, the article affirmed the silence Adair had pondered over a half century earlier, effacing the memory of the Creeks and the work of their ancestors.

But Macon’s ghosts apparently did not abandon the region. One hundred fifty kilometers northwest, Lynne and Mark Wisner bought a house near Grovetown on the banks of Euchee Creek some time in 1985, happy for the bucolic setting and even for the twenty-foot-high Indian mound located behind their house. Shortly after moving into their home, however, they were disturbed to learn that the unexcavated mound was haunted. Strange lights, drumbeats, and phantom figures dancing in the woods frequently disturbed the Wisners’ sleep. “Imagine getting up in the middle of the night, looking out in the back yard and seeing this strange light going up and down just outside your window,” explained Lynne Wisner. Her husband, daughter, and son-in-law had all seen similar things, and her horse, Dancer, refused to let anyone approach the mound. By 1998 they had gained local renown for the ghosts, but the Wisners had no desire to remove the mound or to leave their home.⁵⁹ Whether one believes them or not, ghost stories have an inescapable pull because they describe the past unexpectedly manifesting itself in the present. In a sense, they are like the spirit that Mauss described: they represent the remains of a past event, a relationship, that continues to live with (and perhaps haunt) giver and receiver long after an object has been exchanged. It should perhaps not surprise that Creek ghosts still haunt the lands that Indians ceded to European conquerors. It should also not surprise if those ghosts predate the nineteenth-century land cessions. They dance among towns whose roots reach back a half millennium.

Late Mississippian towns were the centers of the Mississippian world, places of sowing and harvest, tribute and bestowal, war and peace, life and death. Around each, a cosmos turned. They were the products of centuries of Mississippian development, but they were more than just smaller, distant offspring of Cahokia. They were the fractious products of the Little Ice Age and the collapse of regional centers like Moundville, Etowah, and Rood’s Landing. They inhabited a more competitive world than their predecessors, one whose exchange networks provided more chiefs with more symbols of power, whose chiefs faced persistent challenges from elite rivals as well as assertive followers. When European colonizers disrupted these societies, they destroyed much of the complex ceremonies and hierarchies as well as the mounds where they were celebrated. Nonetheless, the foundations of that Late Mississippian world remained. However altered, towns survived as guarantors of cosmic balance and communal harmony. So too did the relationships, the spirit of giving, that bound them to others and ensured their survival.