going up and down just outside your window,” explained Lynne Wisner. Her husband, daughter, and son-in-law had all seen similar things, and her horse, Dancer, refused to let anyone approach the mound. By 1998 they had gained local renown for the ghosts, but the Wisners had no desire to remove the mound or to leave their home.59 Whether one believes them or not, ghost stories have an inescapable pull because they describe the past unexpectedly manifesting itself in the present. In a sense, they are like the spirit that Mauss described: they represent the remains of a past event, a relationship, that continues to live with (and perhaps haunt) giver and receiver long after an object has been exchanged. It should perhaps not surprise that Creek ghosts still haunt the lands that Indians ceded to European conquerors. It should also not surprise if those ghosts predate the nineteenth-century land cessions. They dance among towns whose roots reach back a half millennium.
Late Mississippian towns were the centers of the Mississippian world, places of sowing and harvest, tribute and bestowal, war and peace, life and death. Around each, a cosmos turned. They were the products of centuries of Mississippian development, but they were more than just smaller, distant offspring of Cahokia. They were the fractious products of the Little Ice Age and the collapse of regional centers like Moundville, Etowah, and Rood’s Landing. They inhabited a more competitive world than their predecessors, one whose exchange networks provided more chiefs with more symbols of power, whose chiefs faced persistent challenges from elite rivals as well as assertive followers. When European colonizers disrupted these societies, they destroyed much of the complex ceremonies and hierarchies as well as the mounds where they were celebrated. Nonetheless, the foundations of that Late Mississippian world remained. However altered, towns survived as guarantors of cosmic balance and communal harmony. So too did the relationships, the spirit of giving, that bound them to others and ensured their survival.
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,
