Zamumo's Gifts. Joseph M. Hall, Jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ