Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253027276 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2018 |
| Series: | A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier |
| Pages: | 310 |
| Sales rank: | 1,140,449 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
La Florida and the Center of the World
By the time he met Chief Tascaluza in the town of Atahachi, somewhere near the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, in October 1540, Hernando de Soto knew how to use the rituals of diplomacy and threats of violence to get what he wanted. Since early spring, when his forces left their winter camp in Florida and pushed north, de Soto's entrada had passed through numerous towns, always with the same goals in mind: food, tribute, bodies, and information. He appropriated venison, bear fat, nuts, fruit, and maize to sustain his soldiers on their long march. He accepted gifts of deerskins, pearls, and craft goods. He transformed Indian men into porters, or tamemes, shackling and chaining them together to carry the heavy burdens of the expedition, and he impressed Indian women into sexual servitude to satisfy the desires of his men. Information was a more elusive commodity. Did the locals have gold or just the freshwater pearls prized by so many whom de Soto encountered? How fruitful was the land? Could it be settled and could the Indians be subjugated and put to labor? Since it was pearls and not gold to be found and since it was other Spaniards, not these soldiers, who would do the settling, de Soto always came to the final question: where did the next chiefdom lie where he could continue his pursuit of wealth and power as he traversed La Florida, this new land that he now claimed to govern?
The chiefs confronted by these demands often acquiesced. Some understandably were intimidated by horsemen holding lances and armored soldiers wielding crossbows, and might have calculated that the sooner they agreed to provide for the needs of the entrada the sooner those strange men would leave their land. De Soto's ruthlessness reinforced that sentiment. This was a man who, when angered by the misdirection of an Indian guide in Florida, threw him to the greyhounds and wolfhound, war dogs trained to disembowel their victims. But other chiefs might have calculated that they could turn the conquistador's military power to their advantage in their struggles against neighboring chiefdoms. Gifts of food, labor, and women were part of long-standing rituals of diplomacy designed to cement those sorts of alliances. Still others might have viewed de Soto as a visiting paramount chief and pledged fealty through the payment of tribute.
Hernando de Soto's encounters with the Indians of the Southeast reflected an uneasy relationship between the Spaniards' sense of superiority over the local people and their abject dependence on them. He had led his men north and west, deep into the Appalachian highlands in search of gold, which the Spanish associated with mountainous terrain. The way was rugged and food was scarce since there were few towns with stores of maize. As the soldiers trudged over the final range and began moving down the Tennessee River valley, the horsemen on mounts that "were tired and thin" and near starvation, they met a welcoming party that led them to Chiaha, a town situated on an island in the French Broad River. There they stayed for a couple of restorative weeks, filling their bellies with cornmeal porridge, walnut and acorn oil, and bear fat, and living with the residents "in peace," according to one chronicler of the de Soto expedition. He wrote that the Indians "played with them. ... They swam in the company of the Christians, and in all they served them very well." That idyll ended when de Soto demanded women for his men, prompting the Indians to flee into the surrounding countryside. De Soto responded as he had done at other places in La Florida and earlier in his career as a conquistador in the Incan Empire of Peru: he captured the chief and held him hostage. The townspeople returned and the chief granted de Soto the labor of five hundred tamemes to help carry the supplies to the next chiefdom. The chronicler noted that de Soto softened his demand by agreeing "to leave off collars and chains," but made no mention of whether women were part of the deal.
The Spaniards followed much the same pattern of coercion in the next chiefdom. Coosa was the heart of a paramountcy centered along the Coosawattee River in northwest Georgia that encompassed perhaps as many as ten individual chiefdoms stretching into Tennessee and Alabama. "It was a charming and fertile land," one chronicler wrote, "with good cultivated fields stretching along the rivers. In the open fields were many plums ... and grapes along the rivers on vines climbing up into the trees." When they reached the principal town of Coosa the chief came out to greet the soldiers, carried on a platform or litter by "sixty or seventy of his principal Indians" who "took turns from time to time, with great ceremony in their manner." A large crowd of Indians accompanied this procession, many playing instruments and singing. The chief, or cacique, as the Spanish called Indian leaders, wearing "a robe of marten skins" and "a crown of feathers on his head," welcomed de Soto and ordered that food and lodging be provided to the visitors. Whether he mistrusted the intentions of the people of Coosa or simply followed his usual practice of coercing compliance, de Soto responded to this hospitality by placing a guard over the chief. This effort to ensure the cooperation of the people initially backfired; leaders within the chiefdom, angered by this affront to chiefly authority, "revolted and went away to hide themselves in the woods." De Soto sent his captains off on horseback to round up the deserters and "they seized many Indians, men and women, who were put in chains." The rest returned, "saying that they wished to serve in whatever might be commanded of them." Some of the captured men were released, but the captains kept many in chains as slaves, "without allowing them to go to their lands." After establishing his dominance, de Soto and his men rested and enjoyed the fruits of Coosa for almost a month. When they finally left to continue their southwestward march, they took the cacique and his sister with them.
After traveling for a month, the Spaniards reached Talisi, a border town between the chiefdoms of Coosa and Tascaluza near present-day Childersburg. Here de Soto commandeered food supplies, deerskins, porters, and women and decided to release the Coosa chief, keeping his sister, an important figure in her own right in the matrilineal Mississippian culture. The cacique "was very angry and tearful" over that loss "and because they had brought him so far from his land." It was here, as well, that emissaries from Chief Tascaluza, including his eighteen-year-old son, met de Soto to lead him to the chiefdom's principal town of Atahachi.
When the Spaniards arrived in Atahachi, Tascaluza welcomed them from a position of power, sitting with his retinue on a balcony of his house atop a large ceremonial mound. He wore "a certain headdress," like a turban, "which gave him an appearance of authority, and a pelote or blanket of feathers down to his feet." The chief was seated on two cushions surrounded by "his most principal Indians" with "one holding a sort of fan of deerskin which kept the sun from him, round and the size of a shield, quartered with black and white, with a cross made in the middle." The entrada's chroniclers agreed that Tascaluza was a very large man who radiated authority. One claimed that the cacique was "very tall of body, large limbed, lean, and well built" and "was greatly feared by his neighbors and vassals." When de Soto entered the plaza next to the mound, dismounted, and walked toward Tascaluza, the chief "did not rise but rather was quiet and composed, as if he were a king, and with much gravity." Even a display of horsemanship that surely was meant to intimidate the chief and his people failed to disturb his calm. The Spaniards "galloped their horses in front of" Tascaluza, "turning them from one side to the other, and at times toward the cacique. He with great gravity and unconcern from time to time raised his eyes and looked as if in disdain."
Tascaluza might have been more imposing in build and character than other chiefs he had encountered, but de Soto did not hesitate to make his usual demands. After the feasting and dancing had been completed, he got down to the business at hand and called for Indian men to serve as porters and for one hundred Indian women. When Tascaluza replied "that he was not accustomed to serving anyone, rather that all served him before," de Soto ordered him to be confined. Tascaluza acquiesced, rounded up some porters, and offered to lead the entrada to the town of Mabila, where he would hand over more tamemes and the women. De Soto rewarded Tascaluza's cooperation with boots and a red cloak, and found a horse for the chief to ride, a difficult task given the man's height. And so the Spaniards journeyed on to Mabila with the great cacique Tascaluza on horseback, his feet almost scraping the ground, "and always the Indian with the sunshade in front of his lord, and another with a cushion" following behind.
Dressing Tascaluza in European clothes and placing him on horseback might have reinforced de Soto's sense of command over the man and the situation, but a little tickle of doubt could have intruded had he paid attention to that sunshade and cushion. Capture and co-optation did not erase Tascaluza's authority, which was rooted in a complex social structure of clans and a cosmological belief system that linked political leadership to the spiritual world. Tascaluza's people, like those of Chiaha and Coosa, and others along the entrada's route, responded to the Spanish intruders in a variety of ways, including submission, out of necessity, but they did not belong to La Florida. They lived at the center of the world, balanced between the supernatural beings that inhabited the four cardinal directions and the realms above and below, alongside the bones of their ancestors buried in the ceremonial mounds that anchored their towns. De Soto was used to getting what he wanted and he had the military power to enforce compliance, but he would find when he reached Mabila that ultimately he could not govern this land.
*
Beginning a history of frontier Alabama with Hernando de Soto's entrada runs the risk of reinforcing false divisions between prehistory and history by suggesting that the appearance of Europeans awakened the indigenous people from a static, timeless past. Certainly the Indians who watched the armored men, horses, and pigs pass by understood that something new had entered their very old world, a world where the everyday routines that sustained life and the spiritual beliefs that gave meaning to those lives evolved slowly over centuries. But archaeologists are increasingly aware of just how fluid the chiefdoms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were before the arrival of Europeans, and just how much the stuff of history — trade, diplomacy, migration, and war — contributed to rapid shifts in the polities of the region. That history shaped the Indians' world long before de Soto's arrival and influenced their reactions to the intrusion of those strangers.
The people whom the Spanish encountered in the Alabama region led very localized lives on scattered farms, or in small hamlets, or perhaps in towns with a few hundred residents, but their chiefdoms were part of a broader culture that stretched through most of the Midwest and the Southeast. The Mississippian culture first emerged in the eleventh century in central Illinois just east of present-day Saint Louis, built on a foundation of intensive maize cultivation that allowed denser settlements. By the thirteenth century at least six thousand and perhaps as many as forty thousand people lived in the city of Cahokia, supported by the surrounding farming villages. Large central plazas and massive ceremonial mounds became symbols of chiefly authority and of hierarchy, both of which were reinforced by prestige goods crafted from nonlocal materials that attested to expanding trade networks. The palisaded walls surrounding the town suggested that diplomacy and war were part of Cahokia's expansion. Central features of the Mississippian culture that began at Cahokia — specific building methods, mounds and plazas, palisades, artistic motifs, and religious iconography — spread throughout the Ohio River valley and the interior of the Southeast, reaching the Alabama region by the thirteenth century.
Alabama, with its relatively mild climate and rich variety of environments, was particularly well suited to sustaining the denser populations of Mississippian chiefdoms. There were five broad physiographic regions in Alabama: the East Gulf Coastal Plain, the Piedmont Upland, the Valley and Ridge, the Cumberland Plateau, and the Highland Rim. The Coastal Plain comprised most of the southern half of modern-day Alabama. Close to the coast the sandy soil supported primarily pine forests, and there were few Indian settlements except for the southwestern corner of the future state. But the interior regions of the Coastal Plain boasted a richer environment, including the Black Belt prairies and oak-hickory-pine forests, especially along the floodplains of the Chattahoochee, Alabama, Black Warrior, and Tombigbee Rivers. The northeastern third of the state had two distinct regions. The Tallapoosa River passed through the rolling hills of the Piedmont Upland in east-central Alabama, cutting narrow valleys through the crystalline bedrock before passing across the fall line hills to the softer sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain. There the river's flow slowed and broadened in the alluvial floodplain valley before meeting the Coosa River to form the Alabama. To the north of the Piedmont lay a series of southwestward-sweeping ridges that ran along the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains, bisected by broad valleys. The Coosa River was the principal waterway of this region. The Tennessee River in the north flowed through the two remaining physiographic regions, first passing through the more mountainous Cumberland Plateau in the east and then broadening into a valley through the Highland Rim of north-central and northwest Alabama. All of these regions had varieties of oakhickory forests, interspersed with pines, with the addition of cedars in the Tennessee Valley and a large number of chestnuts in the mountains of the northeastern corner of Alabama.
When Hernando de Soto marched through, there were four major population centers. Stretching along the Tallapoosa, Coosa, and Alabama Rivers were the towns associated or allied with the chiefdoms of Coosa and Tascaluza. Further south, along the Chattahoochee River that later would form a border between Alabama and Georgia, were another group of mound-building chiefdoms. To the west, along the Tombigbee and Black Warrior river system that flowed through the west-central part of Alabama, were a series of towns and farms centered around what has come to be called Moundville, the largest mound site in the Southeast. A fourth cluster of settlements was situated to the south in the Mobile River delta, where the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers joined. The only major river system without significant Indian populations at the time of the entrada was the Tennessee River valley. Earlier populations of Woodland people had settled along that northern valley, as evidenced by large shell middens, and there had even been Mississippian settlements a century or two before de Soto's visit, but Indians had migrated out of that portion of Alabama by the mid-sixteenth century.
Mississippian Indians built their settlements on bluffs and terraces overlooking creeks, streams, and major rivers. Seasonal freshets deposited along the alluvial floodplains a nutrient-rich, sandy soil that was both fertile and easy to cultivate. They took advantage of canebrakes, the dense thickets of bamboo-like cane that flourished along the riverbanks, to construct their houses, weaving cane matting between posts set in holes or trenches, before daubing the exterior with a plaster of clay and grass. The tough, flexible cane could also be used to make baskets, fishhooks, and knives.
Their towns often straddled ecological zones to maximize resources. For example, archaeologists have discovered town sites clustered in the fall line areas along the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers. Those were prized locations, in part because the rocky shoals provided fording places, facilitating travel. More importantly, the Indians could take advantage of two distinct environments. They could plant their maize, squashes, and beans in the alluvial soil deposited just downstream from the fall line, and harvest wild plants and catch fish, turtles, frogs, and small mammals in the ponds and swampy areas where creeks and rivers first flowed out of narrow Piedmont valleys into the Valley or Coastal Plain. The proximity of the Piedmont also had benefits. That was where Indians found minerals such as greenstone, mica, graphite, and quartz that were prized for the crafting of tools and ornaments. Hunters did not have to go far to kill the turkeys, deer, and bear that helped sustain their families. Those animals and others made use of both ecological zones, eating the berries and tender shoots of the Piedmont in the spring and summer before moving into the oak and hickory forests of the river valleys in the fall and winter to eat the mast, the hickory nuts and acorns on the forest floor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Daniel S. Dupre.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart One: Beginnings1. La Florida and the Center of the World2. The Indians' FrontierPart Two: The Imperial Frontier3. The Birth of the Creeks4. Trade and the Search for OrderPart Three: The Settlers' Frontier5. Ordering Alabama's Frontier6. Settlements and Transformations7. The Creek War8. The Cotton FrontierEpilogueWhat People are Saying About This
"Three great streams of humanity fashioned the story of the Alabama frontiers over two centuries: the native American people who had occupied this landscape for centuries; the arrival of Anglo-Americans, who sought the lands from the first group; the growing steam of slaves from the Upper South who cleared the farms and plantations and then worked them. No historian has captured the interactions of these three groups with such insight as Daniel Dupre's Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. A remarkable contribution to frontier and Southern history."
Alabama, like other future states carved from Transappalachia, experienced several frontiers. Beginning with De Soto's attempted entrada in 1540, its many diverse Native Americans met Spanish, British, and ultimately American invaders. Dupre is especially clear on how each successive frontier really worked through the centuries until, by 1840 and Creek "removal," the cotton frontier took hold. Well-sourced and well-written, this book is a fascinating read.
Demonstrating an immersion into the most recent historiography and a keen ability to condense that scholarship into a new synthesis, Dupre offers a provocative consideration of how the peoples of a region—native, white, and black—were transformed by their interactions. In the Old Southwest's historiographical landscape, dominated by economic history, Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South will have a substantial impact.
Three great streams of humanity fashioned the story of the Alabama frontiers over two centuries: the native American people who had occupied this landscape for centuries; the arrival of Anglo-Americans, who sought the lands from the first group; the growing steam of slaves from the Upper South who cleared the farms and plantations and then worked them. No historian has captured the interactions of these three groups with such insight as Daniel Dupre's Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. A remarkable contribution to frontier and Southern history.
Three great streams of humanity fashioned the story of the Alabama frontiers over two centuries: the native American people who had occupied this landscape for centuries; the arrival of Anglo-Americans, who sought the lands from the first group; the growing steam of slaves from the Upper South who cleared the farms and plantations and then worked them. No historian has captured the interactions of these three groups with such insight as Daniel Dupre's Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. A remarkable contribution to frontier and Southern history.
Alabama, like other future states carved from Transappalachia, experienced several frontiers. Beginning with De Soto's attempted entrada in 1540, its many diverse Native Americans met Spanish, British, and ultimately American invaders. Dupre is especially clear on how each successive frontier really worked through the centuries until, by 1840 and Creek "removal," the cotton frontier took hold. Well-sourced and well-written, this book is a fascinating read.