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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ