Chapter 3

      Seeking the Atlantic: The Growth of Trade

       Way back before the Indians had any religion they were playing ball close to the ocean. They saw a ship coming on the water and ran off. The ship had come across the ocean and they discovered the Indians already here. When the Indians were all gone they brought a barrel of whisky with dippers all around it and put it at the ball pole then went back to the ship. When the Indians returned and found the barrel they all were afraid of it but one venturing closer decided to taste it. Then he drank more and the rest started to drink it. They didn’t know how it would affect them so they drank too much. Some were wobbling around and others were on the ground when the strangers came back. The ones who could, ran off again but the white people captured one Indian and took him to the ship. They taught him to talk their language and brought him back to talk to the other Indians. Through him they said that they would like to be in their country and take care of them. They made an agreement—they put a cowhide in water to soak so it would be soft and would stretch. Then it was cut into a long strip. All the ground that could be encircled by this strip was to belong to the white people—about a mile square. Later they told the Indians to go way back and one of the whites would shoot a gun. As far as the Indians could hear the gun—the whites would take the ground. They kept taking more and more ground until the Indians were in Alabama. Then they had to get up and walk clear to this country [that is, Oklahoma] as they didn’t have any wagons.—Mose Wiley, 1937 ¹

      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 appeared in stories at least a century earlier, but it was in the time of phonographs and motorcars that some of the more subtle versions were written down. The Creek historian James Gregory recalled the Atlantic as a place of sacred power when he described the Cussitas’ and Cowetas’ migration to the white anthropologist John Swanton at the dawn of the twentieth century; from its waters the pure sun rose each day, and at its horizon upper, middle, and lower worlds met. Three decades later, though, when an interviewer hired by the Works Progress Administration asked Mose Wiley for stories of his past, he recounted how the ocean brought trouble rather than power to his ancestors. The newcomers initially promised friendship, but over the course of years, white demands for land pushed the Indians steadily westward, eventually to Oklahoma. Told amid the poverty of the Great Depression and in the aftermath of Creeks’ economic and political dispossession, both of these stories said much about Creek lessons from the past and hopes for the future. Memories of ancient migrations and spiritual power must have reassured Creeks of their great heritage, but so, too, must references to the Atlantic have been laden with grim portents of twentieth-century troubles. Whether Gregory’s or Wiley’s ancestors from the seventeenth century spoke of the ocean in either set of terms is impossible to say, but they did become acutely aware that new sources of power lay in the hands of people who crossed its eastern horizons and debarked on its western shores.

      Of course, leaders like Zamumo had recognized this fact decades earlier. Spaniards and their gifts provided new resources for old Mississippian networks, and by 1612, well-traveled leaders visiting St. Augustine testified to the outpost’s regional status. But even as La Florida’s capital gained a reputation as a new participant in southeastern networks, its inhabitants also began to change those networks. Beginning around 1620, Spaniards responded to imperial developments and Indian expectations by beginning to trade with Natives.² They offered their objects not as gifts in exchange for political allegiance but as trade goods in exchange for corn and deerskins. As exchanges of commodities began to accompany exchanges of gifts, Native peoples in and beyond the missions welcomed these resources for building new ties of friendship or strengthening old ones. Meanwhile, Indians’ growing access to European goods allowed commoners to acquire some of the symbols of power once reserved for their leaders. These changes in intertown alliance and intratown politics appeared in striking if still fleeting fashion among the peoples of the Florida panhandle and Chattahoochee Valley. Although the new trade developed during one of the most poorly documented periods of Florida’s history, it is clear that it played a vital role in the region’s development. After 1620, southeastern Indians began to learn about and modify European norms of trade before it expanded rapidly and violently after 1660.³ Gregory’s and Wiley’s stories do not discuss these formative adaptations, but they remind us to attend to the promise and danger of the region’s growing Atlantic connections.

      Setting the Foundations