Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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used them. At several points in Travels Bartram reviews existing theories of the intended purpose of the mounds. For example, he considers and then rejects the idea that the mounds were “sepulchres” for a funerary ritual; entertains the possibility that they were “designed … to some religious purpose, as great altars and temples”; and speculates that they were “raised in part for ornament and recreation,” or simply as “monuments of magnificence, to perpetuate the power and grandeur of the nation.”59 Yet most persuasive to Bartram is another theory, which he derives from an encounter with a particular mound standing “in a level plain” near the bank of the Savannah River.
The mound, he reasons, must have enabled the community to remain on ground that could become water with little warning. For after puzzling over “what could have induced the Indians to raise such a heap of earth” in a place so frequently “subject to inundations,” Bartram hypothesizes that the mound acted as an “island,” “raised for a retreat and refuge” “In case of an inundation, which are unforeseen and surprise them very suddenly, spring and autumn” (325–26). In other words, rather than building “settled habitations” on frequently inundated land, the Indians established themselves by building temporary dwelling places that they could easily abandon for higher ground when the waters suddenly rose.
Bartram’s claim that mounds enabled Indians to establish themselves on shifting ground is more than an assertion of Indian land rights on the basis of indigeneity; the claim also suggests that Indian inhabitance of the land was durable, and that this endurance resulted from a capacity to adapt to land’s impermanence. This suggestion is important because it debunks the mound-builder myth in a way that resists co-optation by supporters of U.S. expansion. For, as Annette Kolodny shows, it was not always enough to prove that Indians had built the mounds, as scientists finally did during the 1890s.60 For one thing, many observers interpreted the mounds as structures that enabled their builders to live nomadically, and nomads did not count as proprietors according to law. Yet Bartram’s interpretation of mounds suggests a way out of this logic. By describing mounds as both the product of indigenous Indians and a sign of their capacity to endure on the land, Bartram fashions the earthen heaps as material evidence that Indians developed a complex form of land-based possession. Put otherwise, on the same ground where recently built British plantations lie in ruins, mounds endure as “monuments” attesting that prehistoric Indians, ancestors of those populating the land to this day, ably anchored themselves to the land via mobile roots.
While the broader political implications of mobile roots remain undeveloped in Travels, they were not lost on a late nineteenth-century reader of the text. Bartram’s mobile roots enjoy an interesting afterlife in the work of ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, who considered Bartram a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society and “the source of more definite information regarding the southern Indians than those of any other one of our earlier authorities on the natives of northerly Florida and contiguous States.”61 In Cushing’s Report on the Exploration of Ancient Key-Dweller Remains, a narrative of archaeological discoveries about Florida’s Calusa Indians, he uses Travels and another text by Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians” (1788), to imaginatively reconstruct the environment and daily lives of the Southeast’s prehistoric cultures.62
Cushing’s conclusion that Florida’s early inhabitants remained on unstable ground by refusing firm fixity strikingly echoes Bartram’s descriptions of Florida roots in Travels. For example, the language of Bartram’s reverie on “floating islands” of water lettuce suffuses Cushing’s descriptions of excavated architectural remains of Calusa Indian “pile dwellings,” which Cushing calls “floating quays.”63 At “the Court of the Pile Dwellers,” an archaeological site on Key Marco in Southwest Florida, Cushing finds the remains of Calusa homes that are floating islands for some of the same reasons that Bartram uses the metaphor. Each home, Cushing explains, consisted of a horizontal, “partially movable platform” of timber, to the bottom of which vertical “piles” or “pillars” were affixed (34). These piles extended downward into the water to support the timber platform and keep it above the sea’s surface, much as the posts of a stilted house might. Yet, unlike stilts, the piles were not fixed firmly to the ground. Rather, they “rested upon, but had not been driven into” the top of artificial mounds or “benches” of “solid shell and clay marl” that the Calusa had built on the sea floor. The piles remained unfixed “so that as long as the water remained low, they would support these house scaffolds above it, as well as if driven into the benches.” However, “when the waters rose, the entire structures would also slightly rise, or at any rate not be violently wrenched from their supports, as would inevitably have been the case had these [supports] been firmly fixed below.” Cushing’s description unmistakably recalls the roots of Bartram’s water lettuce. Both pile-dwelling and plant remain upright by not being “firmly fixed” to the ground. Just as the water lettuce roots “descend from the nether center, downwards, towards the muddy bottom,” the piles extend downward, yet “had not been driven into” the ocean floor. And Cushing’s observation that, “when the waters rose, the entire structures would also slightly rise,” echoes Bartram’s statement that “when the river is suddenly raised” the water lettuce would rise and “float about.”
Cushing’s indebtedness to Bartram underscores the ethnographic and political implications of Florida roots in Travels. These implications emerge even more forcefully when Cushing draws on Bartram to describe Indian mounds.64 According to Cushing, the Calusa eventually built mounds in Florida, and thereafter throughout much of North America, for the same reason that they originally built pile-dwellings on the sea: they needed to maintain stability on radically unstable foundations. Cushing’s “theory of the origin of mound-building” holds that the mounds were built by the descendants of Indians living in “sea environments” to the “far south” of the continent. These Indians transmitted “ancestral ideas of habitation … down from generation to generation, and so, slowly up into the land” (81, 74). Over time, as the Indians moved north to inland Florida, they found that mounds suited Florida’s “peculiarly unstable” ground, which Cushing describes as “soluble,” “pervious limestone” that is “subject to undermining by … corrosive” rain and rivers; pocketed with sinkholes that “[fall] in” to form deep lakes and morasses; threaded by “subterranean rivers”; and ravaged by “the hurricane” that, “in a land so broken and low,” causes “continuous change of shore-line” (67).
But the mound-builders eventually moved farther north than Florida. For “the great and regular mounds and other earth-works occurring in the lowlands of our Southern and Middle Western States, and celebrated as the remains of the so-called mound-builders, may likewise also be traced … to a similar beginning in some seashore and marshland environment” (15). Cushing imagines mounds throughout the continent as “islands … on high land” that prove his topographic theory that, until recently, most of the continent exhibited “conditions like those presented by the southern marshy shorelands” (76). In other words, Florida offers a good approximation of what North America was like: “the whole region”—by which he means most of the continent—was “suited to such modes of life as I have referred to, even well on toward modern times” (78).
Cushing’s observations in the Report amount to the conclusion that mound-builders were the most able claimants of continental ground because of their capacity to remain on changing earth. This conclusion depends in part on Cushing’s reading of Bartram on early Florida’s landscape and the populations who managed to remain there. But even more importantly for our purposes, Cushing’s conclusion elucidates the relevance of Bartram’s mobile roots to later U.S. interpretations of the history and legacy of continental settlement and expansion. By suggesting that Floridian foundations reflect the character of the continent as a whole, Cushing suggests an alternate narrative of North America’s settlement. His work signals that, both during and long after the last quarter of the eighteenth century that has been this chapter’s historical focus, Florida provoked many North Americans to imagine those who managed to establish themselves on shifting ground as the rightful possessors of the continent.
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