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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ