Zamumo's Gifts

Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

Joseph M. Hall, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780812222234
• eBook ISBN: 9780812202144
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.

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, 1735¹

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-bird...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Spirit of a Feather: The Politics of Mississippian Exchange
• 2. Floods and Feathers: From the Mississippian to the Floridian
• 3. Seeking the Atlantic: The Growth of Trade
• 4. Following the White Path: Migration and the Muskogees’ Quest for Security
• 5. Creating White Hearts: Anxious Alliances amid the Slave Trade
• 6. The Yamasee War: Trade Reformed, a Region Reoriented
• 7. Cries of “Euchee!”: Imperial Trade in a Creek Southeast
• Conclusion: Gifts and Trade, Towns and Empires
• Notes
• Glossary of Native Place Names
• Index
• Acknowledgments