Twenty years earlier de Soto’s forces suffered tremendous losses from a carefully orchestrated assault at the chiefdom of Mabila, somewhere in central Alabama. Although warriors were slaughtered, perhaps in the thousands, the attackers destroyed many supplies and disabused the Spaniards of their invincibility.43 Well-organized armies enabled paramount chiefs to conduct the wars that secured their religious and tributary preeminence.
Any discussion of networks requires that we examine a second perspective, that of trade. Were chiefs the only mediators of Mississippian intertown exchange? As important as the question is for an understanding of local politics and regional exchange, it is frustratingly difficult to answer. Few non-elite goods have lasted long enough for archaeologists to find them and trace their provenance. Nonetheless, John Lawson’s early eighteenth-century memoir of his visit to the North Carolina piedmont offers a tantalizing glimpse. During the annual harvest celebrations of the boosketuh, people gathered “from all the Towns within fifty or sixty Miles round, where they buy and sell several Commodities, as we do at Fairs and Markets.” Here, then, is a possible arena in which townspeople interacted and traded with friends, kin, and strangers, a time for clan members to reaffirm their intertown relationships, perhaps an opportunity for them to share the ideas and skills that enabled people of the thirteenth-century Chattahoochee Valley or the environs of sixteenth-century Coosa to develop similar styles of pottery. But outside this ceremonial context, community leaders likely exercised more control. When the trader John Lederer traveled to the same region in 1670, his hosts shared his penchant for “higgling” over the rate of any exchange, but they also made it clear that he first had to present his goods to the town’s influential elders. Part of the reason for this interposition might have been that even friends could be part-time enemies. Towns met not only to celebrate the harvest but also (and probably simultaneously) to play the ball game. This violent and grueling ancestor of lacrosse allowed peaceable neighbors to vent their hostilities without going to war against each other (hence the game’s nickname: “the little brother of war”). Because spectators often wagered everything they possessed on the fortunes of their town, victors and vanquished could meet after games to exchange outside the presumed influence of their chiefs. The imbalanced nature of such interactions and the competition and violence that underwrote them probably limited the depth of such bonds, though. And perhaps this fact as much as any reminds us of the danger of trade and helps us appreciate further the ceremonial wailing that welcomed Cacique Juan back to his town, back, as it were, from the dead.44
All of this leaves us with a sense that chiefs enjoyed significant power if they negotiated carefully. Ocute and Coosa might personify their towns, but they could not control all of the relationships that supported their towns and their leadership. The fact that they achieved some success at controlling the people and things involved in intertown trade suggests, too, the importance of relationships to the power of the chief and the town. And when chiefs lost power at the end of the early colonial period, it should be no surprise that their followers concerned themselves more with building and maintaining networks of exchange than with restoring the power of their humbled elite. Consequently, when Chekilli told his story of his people’s sacred origins in 1735, he spoke of how Cussitas, the townspeople, rather than Cussita, a chief, accepted the Apalachicolas’ sacred feather.45
Enduring Mississippian Spirits
Despite such significant changes in the contours of Creek stories, these histories still carry the echoes and the power of the Mississippian past and demonstrate quite clearly how they shaped the colonial world. In them, Creek historians explained and today continue to explain why towns remain fundamental political units of southeastern Native life and how exchange has sustained them. Such connections can at times be quite elusive. If stories are legacies of Mississippian life-ways and indeed products of generations of exchanges of information, then how could Chekilli’s story, the oldest and most detailed published account, neglect any mention of mounds? The eighteenth-century trader James Adair put the problem best during a visit to the Ocmulgee Old Fields, near today’s Macon, Georgia. His Creek friends revered the site, with its remains of mounds more than six hundred years old and of a town and trading house that Indians and English had abandoned after war divided them in 1715. “They strenuously aver, that when necessity forces them to encamp there, they always hear, at the dawn of the morning, the usual noise of Indians singing their joyful religious notes, and dancing, as if going down to the river to purify themselves, and then returning to the old townhouse: with a great deal more to the same effect.” So claimed his hosts, but, “Whenever I have been there,” continued Adair, “. . . all hath been silent.”46
Sometimes, though, it is a matter of listening more for stories than for specters. In 1773–74, some two decades after Adair frequented the locale, the naturalist William Bartram visited the mounds of the Old Fields as part of his itinerant study of southeastern plants and animals. There, his Creek guides taught him some of their history.
And, if we are to give credit to the account the Creeks give of themselves, this place is remarkable for being the first town or settlement, when they sat down (as they term it) or established themselves, after their emigration from the west, beyond the Mississippi, their original native country. On this long journey they suffered great and innumerable difficulties, encountering and vanquishing numerous and valiant tribes of Indians, who opposed and retarded their march. Having crossed the river, still pushing eastward, they were obliged to make a stand, and fortify themselves in this place, as their only remaining hope, being to the last degree persecuted and weakened by their surrounding foes. Having formed for themselves this retreat, and driven off the inhabitants by degrees, they recovered their spirits, and again faced their enemies, when they came off victorious in a memorable and decisive battle. They afterwards gradually subdued their surrounding enemies, strengthening themselves by taking into confederacy the vanquished tribes.47
As in Chekilli’s story, Creeks’ ancestors faced numerous military challenges on their journey east. Unlike this earlier account, mounds played prominent roles, providing strength and succor. In ways that Bartram only hinted at in his summary, Mississippians and their Creek descendants were sharing ideas that connected them to each other and to old sources of power.
In fact, Creeks frequently mentioned mounds when they explained the foundations of their talwas’ autonomy. In 1800, Benjamin Hawkins, the United States Superintendent of the Creeks, related the account that Tussekiahmico of Cussita gave for the origin of the Creeks and their sacred fire. Much of the account paralleled Chekilli’s story from six decades earlier. At one point in their migration, though, the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws stopped at two mounds west of the Mississippi River when sacred beings from each of the four corners of the world came to them. Giving the three peoples fire, the four visitors explained that the sacred flame would preserve them and inform Esaugetuh Emissee (the Master of Breath) of their wants. Sitting around the fire on one of the mounds, the four beings also taught the traveling peoples the knowledge of the sacred plants. After the teachers departed, the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws migrated east to the Coosa River, where they met the Abecas. In a four-year war to obtain scalps and determine seniority, Cussitas achieved the highest rank, followed by the Cowetas, Chickasaws, and Abecas. The Cussitas defeated another people inhabiting some mounds further to the east before continuing on to the Atlantic Ocean, where the recently arrived whites forced them to return inland.48
Another story, related by Ispahihta of Cussita to James Gregory circa 1900, described how the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws abandoned their lands in the west because of the spread of evil. Determining that the sun was the last pure object in their tainted world, they headed east in search of its origin. After crossing the great river with the Cowetas and Cussitas, the Chickasaws abandoned the quest, preferring to live on the fertile lands along the river. Traveling far ahead of the Cowetas, Cussitas built a mound into which they dug a chamber to purify themselves. Once purified, the warriors set out against unnamed enemies living nearby. The Cowetas, angry that the Cussita warriors had gone to war without them, threatened to kill the Cussita women and children remaining in the town. Alerted to the Cowetas’ malicious intentions, the Cussita warriors
