Zamumo, the chief of Altamaha, had to think carefully in the early spring of 1540. Hundreds of unknown men were apparently a two-day journey to the southwest, and they were headed toward his town in the Oconee Valley of today’s central Georgia. Although the intruders did not seem violent, their strange metal weapons and the paucity of women in their party suggested a disturbing aversion to peace. Of course, Zamumo was not without power of his own. From the summit of the flat-topped pyramid of earth that his townspeople had constructed, he had close ties with the spirits who shaped...

In 1735, Chekilli, the principal leader of the Creek town of Coweta, told a story of his people’s origins to the British of Savannah, Georgia. The British secretary’s summary of the two-day account, which includes descriptions of migration, the acquisition of sacred knowledge, and encounters with friends and foes, also includes the above description of the “bloody minded” Cussitas’ peace and union with the Apalachicolas. Two centuries after Zamumo had received his gift with such enthusiasm and long after mounds had ceased to serve as monuments to chiefly power and town cohesion, feathers remained symbols of power, encapsulating a spiritual...

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...

In the first years of the twentieth century, long after Altamahas weighed the potential advantages of gifts and long after the Spanish missions promoted by those gifts had crumbled, the people called Creeks lived in a land called Oklahoma. Although their homes in Georgia and Alabama and later Oklahoma had never been close to the ocean, the Atlantic still played a prominent role in many stories. In those accounts, Creeks evoked the sounds of its pounding surf and the sight of the mists that rose from its waves, but more than these things, they remembered its power. The ocean had...

The sea change for which Spaniards had been bracing themselves in 1655 finally washed over the Southeast four years later. Rather than English freebooters coming from the south, as Governor Rebolledo and others had feared, Indian raiders from the north initiated the new violent era. The immigrants quickly distinguished themselves with their technology and their tactics because, according to Native Americans’ early reports to the Spaniards, they ‘‘use many firearms and come laying waste to the land.’’² They came for captives, whom they sold to the English of Virginia and, after 1674, the English of the newly settled Charles Town,...

Alindja said nothing to John Swanton about the wider circumstances behind the Cowetas’ and Tukabatchees’ alliance, but I cannot help wondering if his recollections refer to the turbulent years of the slave trade. The parallels, if not the connections, are intriguing. After 1674, as the Westos and their Carolinian trading partners destroyed and traded lives with terrifying ruthlessness, Indians in the Southeast faced two basic questions. How could one best survive? Who made the best partners for such an endeavor? Many southeastern Natives answered the first question by becoming slave raiders themselves. But if prudence seemed to encourage Carolina’s new...

When the naturalist William Bartram heard the above story in 1774, Creeks had many good reasons to emphasize the strength of their relationship with the British. A year before his tour through the Southeast, Creek leaders sold a large tract of land west of the Savannah River, and a number of disgruntled warriors were attacking colonists who built farms on the newly transferred land.² It was with the looming threat of war that his Creek travel companions told him a story of how the Creeks had migrated from the west, settling at the Ocmulgee Old Fields (near Ochese Creek) shortly...

On November 9, 1724, John Sharp suffered for the empire he served. In the dark hour just before dawn, the English trader awoke to the sound of gunfire. The sound was familiar. Since 1716, Sharp’s neighbors in the Cherokee towns of Tugaloo and Noyouwee had been at war with the Creeks. This time, however, Creeks were taking aim at his home rather than those of his Cherokee neighbors. Amid the pop and whine of flying bullets, Sharp was wounded in the leg. Moments later, his two hundred assailants stormed the house, overwhelming the hapless trader and his three slaves and...

A decade and a half after Red Shoes offered his words of praise for Creek multilateralism, the French philosopher Charles Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, wrote admiringly of Britain’s empire. In Montesquieu’s eyes, Britain achieved power without resorting to tyranny by planting overseas colonies “to extend its commerce more than its domination.” Britain, in the eyes of its people and its admirers, had created an empire that avoided the pitfalls of decadence and tyranny by devoting itself not to the control of people and territory as much as of trade and the sea. As Montesquieu wrote later in the same work,...