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Chapter 2

Floods and Feathers: From the Mississippian to the Floridian

On the fourth day the relatives and friends of the snake-man gathered at the Tcook-u’thlocco [the “Big House” or council house], as had been requested, and many others came near but remained on the outside. Presently the snake-man made his appearance, coming from the stream in which he had taken refuge, and he was followed by a stream of water. When he entered the grounds occupied by the public buildings they all sank along with the people gathered there, and this was the origin of the Coosa River. . . . The residue of the Cosa people, having thus formed a town, bitterly lamented on account of the calamity that had thus robbed them of so many of their valuable citizens. In grievous distress they cried out, “Woe is our nation!”—Caley Proctor, ca. 1910 ¹

Through the construction and maintenance of their mounds, plazas, and homes, Mississippian townspeople created monuments to their communities and their communities’ relationship to the cosmos. Through the exchange of sacred objects and knowledge, they built networks that supported these towns. After 1492, they met peoples from the land called Spain who also recognized that power could come from exchange. The difference lay in the newcomers’ preference for extraction over reciprocity. They hoped to incorporate Mississippian wealth and labor for the use of the distant centers across the Atlantic Ocean. As Mississippian peoples quickly realized, Spanish visions of exploitation threatened the continued existence of towns as centers of their own worlds. Although armed entrepreneurs achieved legendary success in Mesoamerica and the Andes, the peoples of the Southeast did not succumb to these so-called conquistadors so famously. Only after a half century of failed conquests did Spaniards learn to blend royal support, personal ambition, missionary zeal, and generous gifts to secure a North American beachhead at St. Augustine in 1565. As Spaniards abandoned their military conquest in favor of offering gifts, peoples who bitterly resisted them in the early sixteenth century were seeking them out in the early seventeenth. Spanish influence in the region after 1565 depended on colonists’ ability to develop cooperative relations with their Native neighbors.²

Spaniards had to adapt, but the invasions of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of a new era in southeastern history, an era that saw the end of a Mississippian world and the beginnings of a colonial one. For some the results were catastrophic. The descendants of the once great chiefdom of Coosa recalled these years of transition as a great flood that swallowed most of their town. For others, like the residents of Zamumo’s town of Altamaha, Spanish gifts provided opportunistic leaders with a new route to independence from unwanted superiors like Ocute. Throughout changes great and small, the peoples of the Southeast sought to preserve the towns that defined their worlds, and much of that stability continued to depend on exchange with outsiders. Spaniards took advantage of this fact with calculated generosity.

By the first decades of the seventeenth century, St. Augustine was the center of a new network of exchange that linked town squares throughout the region to the Atlantic outpost. Although Spanish administrative control around 1610 did not extend beyond a chain of missions near the coast, the transformative impact of Spanish Florida was regional.³ Native networks of exchange carried Spanish gifts far inland; by the early 1600s, the peoples of the interior were gaining access to European materials. When Mississippian leaders accepted a gift such as a white feather or glass beads from St. Augustine, they probably hoped that they could incorporate these new objects into old norms regarding peace and power. Even when they succeeded in this conservative effort, Indians participated in radical change. By using European power to rebuild and maintain southeastern towns, they were connecting their lives and fortunes directly or indirectly to the people of St. Augustine. They were helping make a Mississippian region into a Floridian one.

Conquistador Invasions

This process began haltingly. Spaniards initially sought to force Indians into networks rooted in the dominance of a single center rather than the autonomy of many. They followed a well-established pattern. Ambitious men of middling means, including tailors, merchants, and lower nobility, staked their fortunes and lives on dreams of conquest, wealth, and higher social status. Although these dreams were usually tinted gold and silver, aspiring conquistadors all hoped to secure access to Native tributaries and some product of their labors. Because successful conquistadors always outnumbered the encomiendas, or grants of Indian tributaries, that their leaders distributed, those who lacked rank and connections were forced to seek new peoples to subdue. Consequently, Indians throughout the Americas quickly became acquainted with men seeking personal fortune in the name of a distant monarch.⁴ These ad hoc designs, however grand, met universal failure in the lands called La Florida. When disease and inadequate supplies did not dash Spanish plans, Mississippian warriors did.

Shortly after Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, Florida Natives became acquainted with a dangerous and unpredictable mix of slave raiders and shipwrecked sailors. By the time Juan Ponce de León explored the peninsula’s coast in 1513, the peoples of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were thoroughly convinced of the strangers’ unfriendly intentions. Ponce’s efforts to establish a colony in southwestern Florida ended in 1521 with his death from an arrow wound.⁵ The aborted settlement marked an inauspicious start to four decades of unsuccessful Spanish entradas, or explorations, into the immense territory Ponce named La Florida. Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón brought 600 colonists to the coast of South Carolina in the summer of 1526, but disease ended his and most others’ lives within months. Only 150 returned to Cuba before the end of the year. In 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez and all but 4 of his 400 soldiers died from arrows, disease, shipwreck, or enslavement, and fellow Spaniards learned of their horrible fate only when Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and three companions crossed paths with a Spanish detachment in northwestern Mexico eight years later. Hernando de Soto, flushed with the riches obtained during the conquest of the Inka, led 600 hopefuls in a fruitless search for a new empire in the southeastern interior between 1539 and 1543. When the roughly 300 survivors arrived in Veracruz, de Soto was not among them.

Of these early invasions, de Soto’s probably had the greatest impact on southeastern history. At the head of 600 men, a handful of women, and thousands of horses and pigs necessary to transport and feed them, de Soto commanded a force larger than most chiefdom towns. What was significant, though, was not the entrada’s size—Narváez and Ayllón had pursued projects of a similar scale—but the extent of its contact with interior peoples. After landing near Tampa Bay, the expedition headed northeast in search of a kingdom reputedly rich with pearls. The army traveled through central Georgia and the chiefdom of Ocute before crossing the abandoned Savannah River Valley that separated it from its rival Cofitachequi. There the Spaniards were greeted by a “lady” carried forth on a litter who offered them lodging, visits to some of her temples, and freshwater pearls.⁶ Many of de Soto’s followers urged him to establish his new colony among the mounds of piedmont South Carolina. Fertile lands, abundant pearls, and supposedly easy access to Spanish shipping on the Atlantic seemed a perfect combination for future encomiendas. The former lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro, apparently intent on “another treasure like that of Atabalipa, the lord of Peru,” disagreed, and he directed his followers west in search of the chiefdom and ruler known as Coosa. Crossing the Appalachians and entering the Tennessee River Valley, the expedition met Coosa’s tributaries. When the Spaniards finally reached the paramount’s central town, they took him hostage to guarantee their safe passage and their access to people as porters. As with Cofitachequi, Coosa’s renown failed to translate into riches worthy of de Soto’s avarice, and when the expedition reached the limits of Coosa’s dominions, they released the chief, who returned, crying and humiliated, to his now distant home.⁷

Neither Cofitachequi nor Coosa resisted these brazen intruders, but as word of the Spaniards spread, so too did plans for retaliation. De Soto’s next host, Chief Tascaluza, initially bided his time, offering his hospitality and accompanying the Spaniards as hostage through most of his chiefdom in central Alabama while he called on tributaries and even rivals like Coosa in a desperate bid to halt the Spanish advance. At the town of Mabila, Tascaluza sprang a massive trap. After welcoming de Soto and a small number of his party into the pallisaded town for festivities, the chief gave his order. Warriors poured from the houses, killing five almost immediately. De Soto narrowly escaped the town to rally his forces. With cavalry charges and coordinated assaults with firebrands, Spaniards breached the walls and set the town ablaze. An estimated 2,500 warriors died. Superior armor and discipline kept Spanish losses much lower, but with approximately 20 killed and 150 wounded, not to mention the loss of supplies and the freshwater pearls that constituted their meager plunder, the victors had little to celebrate.⁸ And so the first year of the expedition ended. Three more remained. After wintering outside Mabila, the force headed west in the spring of 1541, crossing the Mississippi and spending much of the next year and a half living among and fighting with chiefdoms in present-day Arkansas. With de Soto’s death in 1542, the survivors attempted to head overland to Mexico. When the land became inhospitable, they returned to the Mississippi River, which they followed to its mouth before 300 or so survivors sailed makeshift vessels back to Mexico in the summer of 1543.⁹

The contractual conquests that had secured Spanish control of the Greater Antilles, Mesoamerica, and the Peruvian highlands failed in the Southeast. Mississippians required new tactics, and the Spanish court’s growing interest in securing the peninsula, which controlled the shipping (and silver) that flowed from the Caribbean across the Atlantic, meant that after 1550 Spain’s Council of the Indies took the unusual measure of financially backing the new ventures. But unusual tactics yielded familiar results. Supply problems and poor relations with Coosa forced Tristán de Luna y Arellano to abandon his colony near modern Pensacola two years after its establishment in 1559. Frustrations abounded, but when King Felipe II learned that French Huguenots under the command of René de Laudonnière were settling Florida’s Atlantic coast, he personally sponsored yet one more attempt. Under the naval commander Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Spaniards established the fortified outpost of St. Augustine and exterminated the French colony in 1565. St. Augustine became Spain’s first permanent foothold in North America in part because the region’s inhabitants had forced Spaniards to adjust the principles and means of empire building. The crown helped finance a new colony and, for the first time, sent professional soldiers instead of entrepreneurial conquistadors. These would not be the first adjustments that European empires would make to the interests of southeastern towns.¹⁰

Of course, the residents who imparted these difficult lessons were making their own uncomfortable adjustments. The conquistadors’ violence, hunger, diseases, and cultural practices destabilized many chiefdoms. De Soto frequently resorted to force when hosts did not immediately accommodate his demands, and his infrequent military engagements such as at Mabila exacted a catastrophic toll on local populations. Many communities also lost significant numbers of able-bodied men and women when Spaniards seized them as porters and sexual slaves. Feeding the visitors also took its toll. Spaniards emptied granaries and even cooked up what dogs they could find. It is little wonder that Ocute, where de Soto’s chroniclers recalled a friendly reception, displayed outright hostility to missionaries entering the province fifty-seven years later. Spaniards like de Soto were dangerous and unwelcome visitors even when they were (to their minds at least) friendly.¹¹

For Mississippians, such discomforts and insults initiated a series of profound social changes that convinced many to forsake their mounds and some to abandon their homes. Unfortunately, the roots of these changes continue to baffle scholars. New epidemic diseases from Europe and Africa probably had the greatest impact on the region in the two centuries after Ponce, but what exactly happened? Despite five major Spanish ventures and countless smaller raids and shipwrecks, there are no documented instances of epidemics in the interior before 1696, when a smallpox epidemic ravaged southeastern towns from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River.¹² Though the documents say nothing, archaeologists have noticed that settlements diminished in number and size after contact, but the absence of concrete evidence probably means that the horrors of the conquistadors’ violence and rapine may have inflicted more damage than their diseases. Regardless of what caused some communities to struggle after 1540, the region avoided the pandemics that some have previously assumed.¹³ Even when southeastern communities were spared devastating encounters with death, life also presented a host of new challenges after 1550. The dozen or so towns of Apalachees who farmed the hill country around modern Tallahassee had driven out Narváez and de Soto thanks in part to well-coordinated leadership, but political crises seem to have diminished the power of chiefs so much that by the end of the sixteenth century they had abandoned the mounds at the hearts of their communities. The people of Ocute in central Georgia also abandoned their mounds at about the same time. Altamaha, a tributary chiefdom of Ocute at the time of de Soto, moved its town away from its central mound and, by 1610, severed its tributary ties to Ocute. The peoples of the upper Coosa Valley— including the once mighty Coosa chiefdom—consolidated their shrinking populations in a series of downstream migrations. Descendants of the paramount center were now joining their former tributaries, but they came as refugees. Such movements and the shrinking populations that accompanied them also disrupted the exchange networks that had buttressed chiefly authority. As tributary populations declined and new exotic goods from Europeans became more widely available, burial goods no longer readily distinguished leaders from followers. Many southeastern peoples began to build council houses instead of maintaining chiefly mounds. In slow steps that are difficult to trace in detail, the hierarchical structures of the chiefdoms were giving way to new societies less likely to ascribe great distinction solely on the basis of birth.¹⁴

What this meant for the peoples of the region is nearly impossible to determine, but one tantalizing hint comes from the collective memory of the Coosas. In the 1920s, the anthropologist John Swanton published several accounts of the great town’s disappearance beneath the waters of the Coosa River. In the longest version, a pair of Coosa men out hunting came across a pool of rainwater in the hollow of a tree, and in the water were fish. These were no ordinary fish. Because they were creatures of the water living on land, they transgressed a fundamental boundary of the Coosa universe. The first hunter recognized this fact, but his companion cooked and ate them. Almost immediately, the second hunter began to change into a water snake, itself one of the most dangerous creatures in Creek mythology because of its amphibian ambiguity. The first hunter then left his transformed friend in the nearby river and returned to Coosa with the sad news. Returning to the river, he signaled to his snake-friend by firing off his gun, and the two arranged a reunion with the grieving kin. When these relatives gathered in the council house and square ground to meet the snake, his visit caused the council house, the square grounds, and all of the other public buildings to sink beneath the waters of the Coosa River. Only those outside the square grounds remained to lament, “Woe is our nation! We were the greatest of all the nations; our tus-e-ki-yås (great warriors) were numerous, reaching out and known and dreaded the world over. . . . But it is not so now. . . . Shame and humiliation are our portion.” Another version of the story recalled that some of the engulfed townspeople survived beneath the river, where “people could hear a drum beaten there when they were dancing and having their times.” All of the versions agreed that the humbled and humiliated Coosa survivors decided to continue on with their town, renaming themselves Tulsa, because “ulsee signif[ied] in the Muscogee language ‘to be ashamed.’”¹⁵

It is possible to read such stories as allegories for the Creeks’ own humbled state in the early twentieth century, when the creation of Oklahoma in 1907 deprived them of the last vestiges of their political independence and the discovery of oil on their lands in 1913 provided their European American neighbors with new excuses to defraud them of great wealth, but the roots of this story go much deeper. After Coosa’s decline sometime in the late sixteenth century, the town never returned to greatness; the trader James Adair recalled it in 1775 as “an old beloved town, now reduced to a small and ruinous village.” Whatever layers of tragedy later generations placed on Coosa’s demise, they lay them on top of a collapse that followed the conquistadors.¹⁶

But the story recalled more than tragedy; it centered that tragedy and the act of survival on the town. The people that comprised the town and the civic architecture that organized it all vanished together. That no mound existed to share this fate likely suggests some of the ways that the story had been adapted to resemble the world that tellers and listeners knew (much as the first hunter called to his snake-friend with a gun). Mounds had disappeared, but the people of the old Coosa chiefdom still spoke to their descendants, if perhaps in the muffled tones of those who are submerged. These memories of powerful warriors and great populations still had life in part because those who remained above the water did not abandon each other. Whether they in fact became Tulsas or carried on as Coosas, survivors proved the resilience of the institution of the town by establishing a new one.

Lessons in Southeastern Politics

But to say the chiefdoms were losing their luster after 1550 is not to say that their residents were losing their sense of their past or confidence in their present. However great the changes that Indians faced, Spaniards remained interlopers in a region where the world was still best understood, honored, and regulated in the town square or atop the temple mound. All of these towns needed to regulate their relations with the powerful forces that surrounded them, and all of them recognized the importance of the exchange of gifts for regulating those relations. Spaniards would have done well to take lessons from the French Huguenots they had so ruthlessly dispatched in 1565. When Laudonnière arrived off of the coast of Florida in 1564 near the “River of Dolphins” (the harbor entrance to the future St. Augustine), he paid particular attention to Native forms of generosity, which at times exceeded French notions of propriety. “Though they endeavored by every means to make us trade with them and explained by signs that they wanted to give us some presents, nevertheless for various good reasons I decided not to stay.” Unwilling to accept (and potentially become beholden to) such largesse, Laudonnière continued north to the mouth of the St. Johns River, where the chief Satouriona welcomed the French commander with a deerskin painted with designs so beautiful “that no professional artist could find fault with them.” The engraver Theodor de Bry depicted both of these friendly encounters, perhaps with an eye to assuring prospective colonists of the friendly receptions that awaited them. Laudonnière appreciated them with a more practical eye. For him, accepting and reciprocating this Native American brand of Southern hospitality was critical “to keep[ing] [the] friendship alive.”¹⁷

As de Soto had shown with Zamumo, Spaniards were capable participants in such political ceremonies, but Menéndez de Avilés preferred to put more stock in his military experience and the support of Europe’s most powerful monarch. He would learn soon enough that the colony would flourish or flounder less on the dreams of two great men and more on the very real and varied interests of the new colony’s numerous neighbors. With a combination of violence and apathy, Native southeasterners taught Spaniards some painful lessons in Mississippian politics. Menéndez de Avilés had many tutors. In lands stretching from the Atlantic to the Gulf coasts lived perhaps fifty thousand Timucuas whose chiefs exercised significant influence over the people of their towns and who in turn acknowledged the power of one of several leaders. These paramount chiefs struggled with one another for preeminence in the lands between the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Among these politically diverse and linguistically related peoples were the Mocamas of the coast just north of St. Augustine. Just to the north of the Mocamas lived the Guales. Unlike the more politically cohesive Timucuas, the Guale towns of the Georgia coast accorded a wavering allegiance to the paramount leaders of two or three towns and spoke a Muskogean language distinct from the Timucuas but related to the peoples of inland Georgia and Alabama. Northwest from Guale, the peoples of central Georgia’s Oconee Valley, including Zamumo’s town of Altamaha, inhabited dispersed towns that acknowledged the primacy of Ocute. The peoples of the Deep South—even those immediately adjacent to the fledgling colony—resisted a simple template.¹⁸

Figure 3. Theodor de Bry, “The Promontory of Florida, at Which the French Touched; Named by them the French Promontory.” From La Floride Française: Scènes de la vie Indiennes, peintes en 1564 (facsimile of the 1564 original [Paris, 1928]). When de Bry showed Indians meeting Laudonnière’s landing party in 1564 near the future St. Augustine (alias “F. Delfinium,” or the River of Dolphins), he conveyed some sense of Europeans’ and Natives’ mutual interest in exchange even as he masked the disparate political interests that inspired both groups. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. F314.L33.

Map 2. La Florida and its neighbors, 1590–1620. St. Augustine’s relationships with Natives were not extensive, but Floridanos did have contact with the Oconee Valley by 1600 and with Apalachees by 1620.

Spaniards nonetheless sought to impose one. In the five years following the establishment of St. Augustine, Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and colonists experienced breathtakingly rapid success and failure. After founding a string of posts along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and inland into South Carolina, Menéndez de Avilés watched helplessly as a series of Indian uprisings destroyed nearly everything. By 1570, Spaniards in St. Augustine and Santa Elena inhabited European islands in a sea of Indians who were at best mildly friendly and at worst openly hostile. Another revolt against the newly established Jesuit mission on the Chesapeake in 1571 convinced the religious order to abandon La Florida, and many colonists followed suit after Guales and their coastal allies drove their Spanish neighbors out of Santa Elena in 1576. The Spanish colonial template had been simple, but the consequences, for Menéndez de Avilés, were simply devastating.¹⁹

In 1573 the increasingly frustrated governor requested permission to conduct a war that would crush the rebellious Natives and provide needed revenues from the sale of enslaved captives to Caribbean islands. The king refused, fearing that such retribution would only escalate the cycle of violence.²⁰ The historian Henry Kamen believes that Felipe II’s distress at the violence in La Florida may have inspired his Orders for New Discoveries. Issued in 1573, the regulations required colonists throughout the Americas to incorporate “unpacified” peoples into the empire through kindness rather than conquest.²¹ Menéndez de Avilés had two new resources to help him implement the new policy. Franciscans arrived in the colony in 1573 to resume the Jesuits’ proselytizing mission. Equally important, beginning in 1571, a new royal subsidy, or situado, ensured that the colonists did not have to live on Franciscan zeal alone. These developments did not erase the human and natural obstacles to extracting wealth from the colony, though, and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had few reasons to expect a prosperous legacy when he died in Spain in 1574.

In fact, it seemed that Spanish successes were best measured not by what Spaniards acquired but by what they gave away. De Soto was not the only Spaniard who recognized the power of gifts such as beads, feathers, metal tools, and cloth. As one missionary to La Florida explained in 1549, Indians’ “friendship and affection was obviously based on what they could get from us. This world is the route to the other,” he consoled himself, “. . . gifts can break rocks.”²² Not surprisingly, then, the colony’s brightest developments during its first violent decade frequently followed presentations of gifts to visiting leaders. Gifts convinced a number of Mocamas in the immediate environs of St. Augustine to accept missionaries in the early 1580s, and Spanish military support against the Mocamas’ inland enemies sealed these alliances by the middle of the decade. Southeastern Indians had compelled Spaniards to abandon the pike and harquebus for quieter means of conquest.²³

Opportunity for more significant successes came in 1593, when the king provided La Florida’s governor with funds to purchase gifts for visiting friendly caciques. By offering the “clothes and tools and flour” that King Felipe II stipulated, the governor would demonstrate not only his kindness but also his power. The disbursement of three years of belated situado payments in 1594 provided officials with the resources to meet these regulations. By 1597, they were offering hatchets and hoes; cloth of wool, linen, and a little silk; shirts, stockings, hats, glass beads, and even a pair of shoes. The Native dignitaries who received these small quantities of goods recognized them as unusual new equivalents for the copper ornaments, finely dressed skins, and shell beads that confirmed their high status and spiritual power. The new goods even began joining more familiar ones in the burials of their dead possessors.²⁴

If the gifts possessed an air of familiarity that encouraged Indian leaders to accept them, they also offered possible security against the diseases that were ravaging St. Augustine’s neighbors. The archaeologist Rebecca Saunders has found that by the end of the 1500s, inhabitants of one town near the Georgia coast began to decorate their pottery with an increasing number of ceremonial motifs in a much “sloppier” manner than their predecessors. Less experienced potters, apparently deprived of the benefits of their stricken elders, sought to confront these invisible scourges and sustain their societies as best as their crafts-womanship would allow.²⁵ While Guale potters reconceptualized their craft, chiefs had good reason to pursue remedies of a different sort. Chiefs in Guale and elsewhere sought Spanish goods with an interest that grew with Spanish generosity. They did so for reasons we can only imagine four centuries later, but two considerations likely figured prominently. Not only did Spaniards’ beads, metal tools, and cloth exhibit an unusual crafting of familiar objects, but the Franciscans who frequently accompanied these gifts exhibited a remarkable power of their own. Most obviously, they walked unarmed among unfamiliar peoples and enjoyed the respect of governors and military men. They did not succumb as readily to disease as their Indian neighbors. Perhaps more relevant for peoples actually suffering disease, these spiritual men had already encountered these maladies in Europe and confidently promoted a variety of ceremonies of repentance that might end these outbreaks that they believed to be God’s castigations.²⁶

Spanish organization of the missions frequently confirmed Native leaders’ expectation that they were adding a new and powerful people into old networks of power. Franciscans, like their new charges, preferred to organize their churches around large, settled populations. They reinforced pre-contact settlement hierarchies by establishing their missions (known as doctrinas) in the principal towns, making occasional visits to the outlying villages, which became visitas. As respectful followers were expected to do, converts had to plant a communal field, or sabana, for the friar’s support and also gave him game from the hunt. Governors made explicit their claims to superior status by confirming the successors of deceased caciques of doctrinas, but they also made sure not to contravene Natives’ choices. Chastened by years of failure, Spanish officials had abandoned the impositions of empire in favor of the flexibility of chiefly influence. Not surprisingly, friction remained. Indian converts did not necessarily submit fully to Roman Catholic doctrine and governors’ efforts to collect tribute from townspeople directly challenged chiefly prerogatives of receiving and distributing their towns’ harvests. Mission revolts during the next century exposed the limits of Indian acquiescence.²⁷

But precisely because gifts could not purchase the obedience Spaniards craved, they also likely helped secure these gifts’ widespread prominence. Hundreds of miles from the missions, few people had met Spaniards, but they knew of their goods and they probably heard rumors of the spiritual power that accompanied their makers. Much like the people of Coosa before them, the people of St. Augustine enjoyed regional prominence thanks to the reciprocal rather than extractive relations they had to build with their neighbors. This influence, however unintentional from the Spanish perspective, provided inland peoples with new resources to maintain their towns in a new world.

Gifts and the Reorganization of the Oconee Valley

It is not easy to determine how southeastern Indians effected these changes. The best evidence comes from the missions, but Indians there confronted other Spanish pressures and so could not always adapt as they saw fit. Nonetheless, enough fragmentary evidence exists regarding the Oconee Valley to show that Spaniards had learned well some of the norms of Mississippian gift-giving. More important, it hints at the ways that at least part of old Mississippian exchange networks were becoming part of a Floridian one. The rise of Spanish influence (or at least Spanish goods) in the Oconee Valley followed a decade of Spanish successes in St. Augustine’s immediate environs. Spanish spiritual power and material generosity spurred a string of evangelical successes after 1587, including conversions among the Timucuan Mocamas and Potanos north and west of St. Augustine and even among the Guales after 1595. Hoping to build on these successes, in 1597 Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo sent additional expeditions north, west, and south, beyond the limits of the mission towns. The ambitious Méndez hoped that these evangelical forays could transform the region’s political and religious landscape. Although the expedition west into the peninsula would be the only one to lead to later conversions, Spaniards had a significant if subtle influence on the peoples of central Georgia. Thanks to the arrival of Spanish goods after 1597, the Indians of the Oconee Valley began to reorganize their polities. They did so within older patterns of chiefdom rivalry, but we should not overestimate the significance of such continuities. Disease may have followed these goods inland, and although chiefs and followers may have enjoyed relatively good health, the political fortunes of their societies were increasingly linked to the possession of Spanish objects.

Two Franciscans, Fr. Pedro de Chozas and Francisco de Veráscola, led the evangelical expedition north to the Oconee Valley early in the summer of 1597. Accompanying them were Gaspar de Salas, a soldier and interpreter who spoke Guale, and an escort of thirty Indians led by Don Juan, the mico of Guale’s principal town of Tolomato. Chozas loaded them, as the Franciscan Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo put it in his epic poem, La Florida, “with Castillian blankets, with knives, fish hooks, and scissors, and with very fine glass beads, with sickles and cutting axes.” The party set out from the Guale mission of Tolomato, expecting that the people of Altamaha and Ocute “would know the power of our people and the little which they enjoyed in their western lands.” Chozas supplemented these material demonstrations with suitably dramatic preaching, and the formidable Veráscola further exhibited the power of the Spaniards and their god by successfully wrestling “chest to chest” many challengers in the towns they visited. Escobedo was writing an epic of Franciscan achievement, and we should expect some exaggeration, but even his heroic narrative described the material, physical, and cosmological power that resided in St. Augustine and east across the ocean in terms that chiefs and their followers would appreciate.²⁸

One day after reaching the valley and its immense fields of ripening corn, beans, grapes, and watermelons, the travelers arrived in the town of Altamaha, where Chozas met the members of the leading family in the council house and presented to each a blanket. Impressed with the offer, the leaders permitted him to speak to the town. The following day, Chozas had “the king” place a cross in the center of the plaza, and then he and Veráscola called the community to meet inside the council house, where, after observing a grave and prolonged silence, Chozas proceeded to instruct the people about the Christian faith. A sudden rain shower convinced his listeners of his cosmological connections, and the town accepted baptism en masse and reciprocated with gifts to the Spaniards. In both acts, Altamahas expressed their own desire to build a deeper relationship.²⁹ Continuing inland one more day to Ocute, the visitors were again “well received.” They noted with surprise and hope that the women of Ocute wore shawls similar to those of New Spain. All seemed well, but as soon as they indicated a desire to continue further on their journey, perhaps to determine the proximity of New Spain itself, the chief Ocute “obstructed them with much pleading and crying,” explaining that many of those further inland still recalled de Soto’s visit and hoped to kill some of those related to the ruthless invader. More troubling, the valley residents’ ardor was cooling, and the missionaries failed to convert anyone in Ocute. The situation became downright perilous when, on their return through Altamaha, the formerly friendly chief sent a warrior to scalp Chozas. The Franciscan evidently possessed great power, and the chief had decided that the hair on his head—rather than the ideas in it—might improve the chief ’s chances of winning an imminent competition against a neighboring leader. Only a timely shot from Salas’s harquebus saved the missionary. Chozas apparently could not imagine this disappointing reversal was in earnest: the next day, he still insisted on asking for porters to carry his goods. The chief’s emphatic refusal made enough of an impression to send his visitors scurrying home.³⁰

For the Spanish, the expedition accomplished little. Chozas, Veráscola, and Salas returned from the province they called La Tama with glorious accounts of conversions and tantalizing rumors of silver mines, but nothing ever came of either of these chimeras. Altamahas and Ocutes, and especially their leaders, had much more to appreciate from the visit. They had acquired items from the powerful new people of the coast, and perhaps the Spaniards’ ally and subordinate, Juan of Tolomato, might return by way of the newly blazed trail with more such items.³¹ For his part, Ocute could proudly reflect that he had maintained effective control over his subordinates and his guests. Altamaha’s sudden interest in Chozas’s scalp probably had something to do with Ocute’s refusal to accept conversion, so the shift probably reassured the paramount leader in Ocute that the chief of Altamaha remained loyal to him. The Spaniards had heeded his injunction against venturing further inland, and they had left respectful of but not angered by Ocute’s and Altamaha’s displays of independence. From Ocute, prospects looked good.

Despite these positive developments, Oconee peoples’ hopes of deriving new benefits from St. Augustine, whether via the hands of Franciscans, Guales, or others, took an unexpected turn shortly after Chozas’s hasty departure. Late in September 1597, Guales revolted, destroying the missions, killing five Franciscans, and capturing a sixth. Despite Spaniards’ two years of successes with gifts, old coercive habits died hard. Franciscans had already stacked ample tinder by attacking important Guale traditions and restricting converts’ movements among the province’s towns. Disputes about marriage and authority provided the incendiary spark. When Juan refused to observe monogamy as required by Christian practice, Franciscans sought to oust him in favor of his more tractable uncle Francisco. The outraged mico “went into the interior among the pagans, without saying anything or without obtaining permission as they were wont to do on other occasions.”³² After “a few days,” Juan returned to Tolomato with some of these inland supporters (probably Guales who had fled the missions) and rallied Francisco and other followers against the missionaries.³³

Although not directly involved in the revolt, Altamahas were never far from the minds of those who were. In the spring of 1598, Governor Méndez met with Guale leaders to ransom the captive Franciscan, offering axes, hoes, and blankets for the return of the priest. When the Guale leaders demurred, insisting on the return of some of their own sons who had been living in St. Augustine for several years, the governor became enraged and threatened to send for three hundred soldiers, “and put them to the sword, and cut down all their maize and food, and follow them as far as La Tama.”³⁴ Guales promptly returned the missionary. Spaniards and Guales both recognized that the Oconee Valley’s residents, however distant, played a pivotal role; they could be the refuge to which Guales might flee or the anvil against which Spaniards could crush them. Although they were not the only peoples that Spaniards courted, Oconee peoples’ potentially pivotal role encouraged Spaniards to remain in indirect contact with them. This contact, coupled with gifts, enabled Altamahas to challenge Ocute’s primacy in the valley. Indeed, Spanish gifts in the hands of Indian emissaries altered the valley far more thoroughly than de Soto or Chozas did with swords or crosses.

Altamaha’s opportunity and Ocute’s problems appear only fleetingly, but they were tied inextricably to Floridanos’ experiments with gifts as diplomatic tools. These experiments began with Méndez’s decision to pacify Guale with a new round of gift giving. The governor contented himself with this imperfect strategy because he had little choice. Despite his earlier threats of scorched-earth campaign, he acknowledged to the king that because the rebels had retreated so far inland, “there was no way that one could punish them there unless it were by the hand and order of the same Indians.” Méndez’s generosity, though, did enjoy some success. Raids from Spaniards and their Indian allies convinced many Guales to make peace by early 1600, and newly conciliatory Guale leaders offered to bring some of their followers to St. Augustine to work in the agricultural fields that supported the presidio and private citizens. Despite the advantages of the new labor draft—also called the repartimiento—for securing food supplies for St. Augustine, the new friendship had its shortcomings. Guale’s nominally pacified towns continued to defy Spanish authority by welcoming French traders, and they would continue to do so for another three years. Before 1602, no Spaniard was foolish enough to think that Guales were ready to welcome new missionaries.³⁵ The Oconee Valley loomed increasingly large as one remedy to this persistent instability in Guale. These initial successes confirmed the value of generosity, but Floridanos were also learning that the meaning of gifts depended in part on the power of those who gave them away. If offerings were to appear as gifts rather than tribute, the colonists had to show themselves to be a formidable chiefdom in their own right. The expansion and organization of the missions served as one indicator of Spanish strength, and in 1598 one royal official believed that the governor favorably impressed “inland Indians” when he raised tribute payments among those Indians still loyal to St. Augustine.³⁶ And yet, two months later, as the governor sent sixteen soldiers to help defend the Mocama mission of San Pedro, the same official noted that the governor needed to send rations with these soldiers instead of expecting the Mocamas to feed them because “the inland Indians are watching to see how we aid our friends.”³⁷ By exacting appropriate tribute from subordinate polities and providing necessary support for these same dependents, Spaniards could demonstrate their power—and the power of their goods—to observant Oconee peoples.

Although Méndez probably did not decide to provision the San Pedro garrison, he was doing his best to convince inland peoples like the Altamahas that his friendship could be of great service to them. Not surprisingly, he also had need of their friendship. As he had already acknowledged to the king, Indians would be crucial to suppressing the last of the insurgents, and Altamaha assistance would prevent the insurgents from fleeing further inland. The Spaniards knew that gifts would make this alliance possible, but to distribute these gifts Governor Méndez enlisted the help of two Christian chiefs from Mocama, Cacica María of the mission town of Nombre de Dios and Cacique Juan of San Pedro. Each cacique received gifts valued at 350 ducats—roughly equivalent to three years’ pay for a common soldier—to take “into the interior land to the caciques with whom they have contact.” Offering such gifts to their friends, the Christian leaders could also explain that all who joined the Spaniards could expect similar generosity from His Most Catholic Majesty.³⁸ Such generosity might encourage recalcitrant Guales to reciprocate with allegiance rather than continued hostility. If not, then perhaps by attracting inland peoples the governor could expand the mission system and simultaneously pressure Guales from the south and the interior.³⁹

It is difficult to say with certainty what impact Governor Méndez’s initiative had because he could not document it any more than he could control it. No longer orchestrating the ceremonies of “rendering obedience” in the course of presenting their gifts, Spaniards were supplying Native leaders with valuable items that they then introduced to the southeastern political economy on their terms. Cacique Juan clearly molded Spanish interests to fit his own. Two years earlier, in 1598, Governor Méndez had noted approvingly that “he spends himself into poverty giving gifts to other caciques to bring them to our obedience.”⁴⁰ While Spaniards doubtless approved of such generosity in the service of their temporal and divine monarchs, Juan also had more personal interests in mind. Sometime before receiving the governor’s gifts in 1600, he asked Méndez to appoint him head cacique of Guale. Perhaps the Mocama leader hoped that his growing influence among Spaniards and Indians would enable him to capitalize on the apostacy of Guale’s most recent head cacique. Not surprisingly, the governor balked at the request. Juan apparently did not respond to the rejection before he died later that year, perhaps from disease.⁴¹ Cacica María also harbored ambitions of her own: within six years of Juan’s death, this cacica of Nombre de Dios included the deceased Juan’s town of San Pedro in her “chiefdom” and appointed her son there as its cacique.⁴² Juan’s and María’s fates varied, but what is significant is that Spaniards were placing gifts in the hands of Native intermediaries who were free to introduce them into older networks of exchange and influence.

Altamahas—especially their chief Altamaha—used this influx of gifts to challenge Ocute’s prominence. Although there is no documentation of these gift exchanges, evidence of their consequences appears in the shifting political fortunes of Altamaha in the Oconee Valley. In 1540, when Zamumo met de Soto, Altamahas owed some allegiance to Ocute’s chief. When Chozas fled the Oconee Valley in 1597, it was probably the result of Ocute’s influence over the actions of its downriver tributary. Despite this long-standing relationship, Altamahas had evidently severed ties with Ocute by 1601, when they joined Guales and a number of other peoples in a final decisive attack on the remaining Guale recalcitrants. In 1602, a year after the final defeat of the Guales, another Spanish visitor noted Altamaha’s independence and perhaps rising prominence when he referred to it as “the capital of the province.” Such success, though, came at the expense of hostility with Ocute: when the visitor expressed interest in continuing northward toward Ocute, his hosts urged him to reconsider “so that they might not kill him.”⁴³ With a warning that echoed the one Ocute issued to Chozas and his companions, Altamahas proclaimed a new line of independence and even hostility in the Oconee Valley. As had happened many times in previous centuries, an upstart chiefdom was moving out from the shadow of its superior. The difference was that Floridian rather than Mississippian goods had helped make this possible.

When they cautioned their Spanish visitor against traveling inland to Ocute, Altamahas made clear how much they recognized the significance of this change for their own political stability, and stability remained a precious commodity for the chiefdoms. The struggles among elites masked more fundamental shifts among the general population of the Oconee Valley. The fact that Spaniards placed these goods in the hands of leaders probably encouraged southeastern elites to draw upon these new resources in a time of political flux, but the results did not always favor chiefs’ authority. One suggestive clue appears in 1604, when Governor Pedro de Ibarra met Altamahas in Guale and gave only passing mention to the “cacique of La Tama.” Rather than the head of the famed inland province, he appeared in a list as one of many other dignitaries. Perhaps Spanish contact with Altamaha had become routine, or perhaps the visiting cacique was not the chief of Altamaha but one of his subordinates. Regardless, the lack of emphasis suggests that this leader was not as powerful as his Spanish title suggested. Archaeologists have uncovered additional clues regarding this power shift. For more than a century before Cacique Juan or any other emissaries ventured with gifts from St. Augustine, the Altamahas, Ocutes, and their neighbors were abandoning their towns, dispersing their homes throughout the valley. By 1580, valley residents no longer used their mounds. In other words, Altamaha leaders probably sought Spanish goods not just to escape Ocute’s influence but also to maintain their own influence over an increasingly segmented population.⁴⁴

In some respects, Altamaha’s leaders were simply using new goods to confront old challenges of political instability. In other respects, these adaptations introduced far more radical consequences. Following the turn of the century, at a time when many interior populations were consolidating dwindling communities at the fall-line frontiers between piedmonts and coastal plains, Oconee peoples were also relocating. While many peoples moved in order to build new communities at locations that afforded the greatest opportunities for subsistence, some residents of the Oconee Valley were actually moving downstream of the fall line to the coastal plain. Although they now inhabited lands less ecologically diverse than their former homes, they had much easier access to the respected clothing, beads, and tools from St. Augustine. Like other inland peoples, they once again began settling in more nucleated towns rather than dispersed farmsteads, and this shift may have been a product of their leaders’ rising authority.⁴⁵ Chiefs may have sought additional Spanish support for their precarious prominence by requesting Franciscans at the short-lived mission of Santa Isabel on the Altamaha River, which lasted from 1616 to about 1635. If diseases were following gifts inland, these new mission residents may have also been seeking relief from this new challenge as well. Depopulation from epidemics could have just as easily caused a dwindling population to seek the mutual protection of towns and the spiritual protection of Franciscans. Whether dealing with the old problems of inter-elite rivalry or newer ones of depopulation and community cohesion, Altamahas were looking to St. Augustine for some solutions.⁴⁶

They did not pursue this strategy alone. In 1612, Governor Fernández de Olivera claimed that unnamed southeastern Natives’ widespread interest in missionaries signified both “God’s miraculous work” and the influence of the gifts and aid the governor offered to those who came. The most significant sign of this attractive power was that “[some] have arrived here from the very Cape of Apalachee and from much further away.” Furthermore, explained the governor, “They assured me that they have been walking for two and a half months and that all along the way they have had safe passage and warm reception knowing that they come here.”⁴⁷ Seven decades after the Apalachees of the Florida panhandle had hounded de Soto’s forces out of their province, their descendants were joining others to seek Spanish friendship and trade goods. More strikingly, other peoples were journeying eastward perhaps five hundred miles to do so.⁴⁸ St. Augustine’s inhabitants, who numbered less than one thousand in 1612, were reshaping relations among thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of Native inhabitants of the Southeast.⁴⁹ Gifts and the power that they conferred and confirmed gradually insinuated themselves into the power structures of a variety of peoples beyond the echoes of Spaniards’ cannon or the peal of their mission bells.

As in the Oconee Valley, these developments probably owed much to pre-contact patterns of diplomacy and exchange, but not all of the consequences would prove so familiar to southeastern townspeople. Governor Fernández’s diplomatic triumph of 1612 also marked the eve of tragedy. Between 1613 and 1617, epidemics killed eight thousand mission Indians, half of the newly converted population.⁵⁰ Whether these devastating contagions followed these new routes of travel and exchange remains an open question: continuing visits from Native dignitaries and the contemporaneous establishment of the mission of Santa Isabel may have carried the lethal microbes inland or may serve as proof of how little disease disrupted those wider contacts. Regardless, the four-year scourge stood as the most painful evidence that Spaniards were introducing more than new objects for old patterns.⁵¹

This conjunction of gifts and diseases may help explain the suddenness of Spaniards’ success in the region. The diseases and violence that accompanied the Spaniards disrupted chiefs’ efforts to maintain the populations and cosmic harmony that would build the inspiring mounds and harvest the crucial food surpluses. As chiefs struggled, so too did skilled craftspeople lose the time and the expertise to endow their pottery, shells, deerskins, or copper with the powerful designs that leaders and followers both needed for social stability. In the midst of these crises—some grave, some merely troubling—chiefs recognized the opportunities that accompanied the people of St. Augustine. Some found answers in the new religion of the Spaniards; many saw the advantages of their gifts. Possessing a spiritual power rooted in their foreign origins and the military strength and religious zeal of their purveyors, these objects offered potential solutions for the challenges that beset southeastern elites after 1550. By 1630, Spanish beads were arriving in towns as far west as Alabama and as far north as Tennessee.⁵²

Roughly one century after Ponce’s entradas, Spaniards finally secured a stable colony, one that influenced its neighbors and altered the lives of those who never heard a mission bell. Their success, such as it was, was born of hard lessons. What began with invasions of entrepreneurial conquistadors became next a military venture and then an evangelical one. Each phase certainly involved elements of the others—missionaries accompanied Luna, Menéndez de Avilés sought personal profit, and Franciscans depended on soldiers to prevent or suppress neophyte revolts. Nonetheless, the shifts were crucial to Spanish success, and they occurred because Indians forced Spaniards to rethink their efforts. However disruptive the floods that swallowed some towns, plenty of chiefs and their townspeople had the power to enforce the norms of Mississippian intertown diplomacy. Only after 1587, when royal and religious officials regularly offered gifts to potential Native allies, effectively purchasing a friendship they could not compel, did the missions expand with any predictability. Feathers and lace accomplished much more than fire and steel. Southeastern peoples had reshaped an outpost of empire to resemble a paramount chiefdom. For the Spanish, the expansion of empire required the gifts of empire.

For many Indians, though, the gifts of empire also entailed the acceptance of empire. As the Guales knew in 1597, the missionaries who followed these gifts had more than just religious power. They also had strong ideas about how that religious power should shape Native societies. Franciscan insistence on settled communities reduced Native mobility and their access to food sources that lay outside their maize fields and the immediate environs of their missions. Chiefs might have preserved much of their authority thanks to the support of Spanish officials, but they increasingly exercised their authority in the interests of royal and religious officials, whether it was to collect tribute, enforce church attendance, or organize the labor drafts that took their towns-people to the fields of St. Augustine.⁵³ Along with the situado, the repartimiento labor of Indians was the only resource available for Florida elites to exploit for their personal benefit. As the archaeologist Jerald Milanich has noted and mission Indians must have increasingly realized, “Missions were colonization.”⁵⁴ True as this was, this form of colonization was nonetheless conditioned by the demands of gift exchanges that built and maintained it. Floridians were gradually colonizing the Southeast, but they were doing so within some of the constraints of Mississippian norms. This fact would become especially apparent during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.

Profound changes were also underway in the interior: Indians were adjusting to and helping to create a new Spanish ecumene far inland from the colony’s coastal foothold. Spaniards were offering items that corresponded well with the indigenous objects of copper, shell, and deerskin that traditionally marked Native leaders’ ceremonial and political power. Indians of the Southeast came to recognize these new and rare objects not just as simple analogs of older symbols but also as creations from people who possessed impressive (if not overwhelming) military power and deep religious fervor. Political, economic, and perhaps epidemiological upheavals of the late 1500s and early 1600s led some Native American elites to seek these symbols of stability and strength with additional urgency. By offering gifts instead of presenting arms, Spaniards repeatedly acknowledged the failure of imperial imposition in their quest for regional influence. Accepting these items into their political and religious practices, Indians began building their eventually unbreakable ties to peoples far beyond their Atlantic shores. Subsequent observers from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first would note the transformative consequences of European goods, but most associated them with the English and French commerce that grew after 1690. Though certainly more profound after 1690, these transformations had modest but still portentious roots in the decades immediately preceding and following 1600.⁵⁵ From those roots grew a new set of relations that reworked the practices of gift exchange to fit a developing Atlantic world bound by trade and war.