did not have to live on Franciscan zeal alone. These developments did not erase the human and natural obstacles to extracting wealth from the colony, though, and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had few reasons to expect a prosperous legacy when he died in Spain in 1574.
In fact, it seemed that Spanish successes were best measured not by what Spaniards acquired but by what they gave away. De Soto was not the only Spaniard who recognized the power of gifts such as beads, feathers, metal tools, and cloth. As one missionary to La Florida explained in 1549, Indians’ “friendship and affection was obviously based on what they could get from us. This world is the route to the other,” he consoled himself, “. . . gifts can break rocks.”22 Not surprisingly, then, the colony’s brightest developments during its first violent decade frequently followed presentations of gifts to visiting leaders. Gifts convinced a number of Mocamas in the immediate environs of St. Augustine to accept missionaries in the early 1580s, and Spanish military support against the Mocamas’ inland enemies sealed these alliances by the middle of the decade. Southeastern Indians had compelled Spaniards to abandon the pike and harquebus for quieter means of conquest.23
Opportunity for more significant successes came in 1593, when the king provided La Florida’s governor with funds to purchase gifts for visiting friendly caciques. By offering the “clothes and tools and flour” that King Felipe II stipulated, the governor would demonstrate not only his kindness but also his power. The disbursement of three years of belated situado payments in 1594 provided officials with the resources to meet these regulations. By 1597, they were offering hatchets and hoes; cloth of wool, linen, and a little silk; shirts, stockings, hats, glass beads, and even a pair of shoes. The Native dignitaries who received these small quantities of goods recognized them as unusual new equivalents for the copper ornaments, finely dressed skins, and shell beads that confirmed their high status and spiritual power. The new goods even began joining more familiar ones in the burials of their dead possessors.24
If the gifts possessed an air of familiarity that encouraged Indian leaders to accept them, they also offered possible security against the diseases that were ravaging St. Augustine’s neighbors. The archaeologist Rebecca Saunders has found that by the end of the 1500s, inhabitants of one town near the Georgia coast began to decorate their pottery with an increasing number of ceremonial motifs in a much “sloppier” manner than their predecessors. Less experienced potters, apparently deprived of the benefits of their stricken elders, sought to confront these invisible scourges and sustain their societies as best as their crafts-womanship would allow.25 While Guale potters reconceptualized their craft, chiefs had good reason to pursue remedies of a different sort. Chiefs in Guale and elsewhere sought Spanish goods with an interest that grew with Spanish generosity. They did so for reasons we can only imagine four centuries later, but two considerations likely figured prominently. Not only did Spaniards’ beads, metal tools, and cloth exhibit an unusual crafting of familiar objects, but the Franciscans who frequently accompanied these gifts exhibited a remarkable power of their own. Most obviously, they walked unarmed among unfamiliar peoples and enjoyed the respect of governors and military men. They did not succumb as readily to disease as their Indian neighbors. Perhaps more relevant for peoples actually suffering disease, these spiritual men had already encountered these maladies in Europe and confidently promoted a variety of ceremonies of repentance that might end these outbreaks that they believed to be God’s castigations.26
Spanish organization of the missions frequently confirmed Native leaders’ expectation that they were adding a new and powerful people into old networks of power. Franciscans, like their new charges, preferred to organize their churches around large, settled populations. They reinforced pre-contact settlement hierarchies by establishing their missions (known as doctrinas) in the principal towns, making occasional visits to the outlying villages, which became visitas. As respectful followers were expected to do, converts had to plant a communal field, or sabana, for the friar’s support and also gave him game from the hunt. Governors made explicit their claims to superior status by confirming the successors of deceased caciques of doctrinas, but they also made sure not to contravene Natives’ choices. Chastened by years of failure, Spanish officials had abandoned the impositions of empire in favor of the flexibility of chiefly influence. Not surprisingly, friction remained. Indian converts did not necessarily submit fully to Roman Catholic doctrine and governors’ efforts to collect tribute from townspeople directly challenged chiefly prerogatives of receiving and distributing their towns’ harvests. Mission revolts during the next century exposed the limits of Indian acquiescence.27
But precisely because gifts could not purchase the obedience Spaniards craved, they also likely helped secure these gifts’ widespread prominence. Hundreds of miles from the missions, few people had met Spaniards, but they knew of their goods and they probably heard rumors of the spiritual power that accompanied their makers. Much like the people of Coosa before them, the people of St. Augustine enjoyed regional prominence thanks to the reciprocal rather than extractive relations they had to build with their neighbors. This influence, however unintentional from the Spanish perspective, provided inland peoples with new resources to maintain their towns in a new world.
Gifts and the Reorganization of the Oconee Valley
It is not easy to determine how southeastern Indians effected these changes. The best evidence comes from the missions, but Indians there confronted other Spanish pressures and so could not always adapt as they saw fit. Nonetheless, enough fragmentary evidence exists regarding the Oconee Valley to show that Spaniards had learned well some of the norms of Mississippian gift-giving. More important, it hints at the ways that at least part of old Mississippian exchange networks were becoming part of a Floridian one. The rise of Spanish influence (or at least Spanish goods) in the Oconee Valley followed a decade of Spanish successes in St. Augustine’s immediate environs. Spanish spiritual power and material generosity spurred a string of evangelical successes after 1587, including conversions among the Timucuan Mocamas and Potanos north and west of St. Augustine and even among the Guales after 1595. Hoping to build on these successes, in 1597 Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo sent additional expeditions north, west, and south, beyond the limits of the mission towns. The ambitious Méndez hoped that these evangelical forays could transform the region’s political and religious landscape. Although the expedition west into the peninsula would be the only one to lead to later conversions, Spaniards had a significant if subtle influence on the peoples of central Georgia. Thanks to the arrival of Spanish goods after 1597, the Indians of the Oconee Valley began to reorganize their polities. They did so within older patterns of chiefdom rivalry, but we should not overestimate the significance of such continuities. Disease may have followed these goods inland, and although chiefs and followers may have enjoyed relatively good health, the political fortunes of their societies were increasingly linked to the possession of Spanish objects.
Two Franciscans, Fr. Pedro de Chozas and Francisco de Veráscola, led the evangelical expedition north to the Oconee Valley early in the summer of 1597. Accompanying them were Gaspar de Salas, a soldier and interpreter who spoke Guale, and an escort of thirty Indians led by Don Juan, the mico of Guale’s principal town of Tolomato. Chozas loaded them, as the Franciscan Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo put it in his epic poem, La Florida, “with Castillian blankets, with knives, fish hooks, and scissors, and with very fine glass beads, with sickles and cutting axes.” The party set out from the Guale mission of Tolomato, expecting that the people of Altamaha and Ocute “would know the power of our people and the little which they enjoyed in their western lands.” Chozas supplemented these material demonstrations with suitably dramatic preaching, and the formidable Veráscola further exhibited the power of the Spaniards and their god by successfully wrestling “chest to chest” many challengers in the towns they visited. Escobedo was writing an epic of Franciscan achievement, and we should expect some exaggeration, but even his heroic narrative described the material, physical, and cosmological power that resided in St. Augustine and east across the ocean in terms that chiefs and their followers would appreciate.28
One day after reaching the valley and its immense fields of ripening corn, beans, grapes,
