Indians of Greater Louisiana before 1760
First Nations of the Lower Mississippi and Central and Northern Plains to the end of the French Regime (state of research)
Patricia Galloway
Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Conference, 2003
Introduction
In the popular imagination the Louisiana Purchase represents a glorious fulfillment of United States Manifest Destiny. The official Euroamerican mythos surrounding the exploration of Lewis and Clark (mostly innocent of acquaintance with the actual texts) allows for a lone Indian woman and her child, seeking her lost tribe over an empty land. But the land was not empty, not even the land east of the Mississippi from which the hegemonic push westward began. Instead, it was broadly populated by many First Nations who had inhabited North America much longer than many of the European tribes had dwelt in their respective homelands. A large part of what Euroamericans were pleased to call “pioneering” in the new space that had been “opened up” by Euroamerican exploration was in fact bound up with the displacement of those populations and the attempted destruction of their cultures.[1]
The European determination to see their own nation-states, however youthful, as the measure of cultural achievement made their ethnocentric measures those by which American First Nations peoples have been mismeasured for hundreds of years.[2] Fundamental to this process was the erasure of their long and complex past. Over and over Europeans remarked that noneuropeans had “no history”; that when asked, they claimed no knowledge of major earthwork constructions on the landscape (never mind that Europeans allocated their own earthworks to a mythic past until the nineteenth century).[3] Europeans had real history, which they constructed as a canonical group of stories about origins, wars, and leaders, attached to and legitimating political power and property claims and bolstered by possession of specific documentary and artifactual materials. This handy fact meant that First Nations people who presented no such materials could not “prove” ancientness of settlement and therefore could be treated as newcomers themselves, and these assumptions were perpetuated by early American historians.[4] The truth of connections between First Nations and the archaeological remains present everywhere on the landscape was finally definitively revealed by the work of archaeologists and anthropologists in the late nineteenth century; yet it remained a relatively abstruse and proprietary truth that served to buttress the intellectual aspirations of an emergent academic discipline and to anchor First Nations people firmly as objects of study representing a generalized human past, instead of being mobilized as an effectual truth with repercussions in the present day.[5]
Here I want to offer a review of recent studies offering new ways of thinking about originary American diversities, First Nations settlement of the North American continent, and First Nations negotiations with and accommodations to the desires and deceptions of several strange groups of tourists, terrorists, imperialists, guestworkers, and refugees in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. I hope it can let everyone else in on what First Nations have always known and archaeologists and anthropologists have been confining to their hermetic professional discourse: the land was not empty, was cultivated and managed in ways too subtle for landless Europeans to grasp; the people were not savages, but inheritors of complex cultures that had accomplished much; and it was the continued diplomatic perspicacity of the indigenous people, not their innate barbarity, that made it necessary to redefine them as dangerous and wild so that dispossession could be rationalized in a series of “just” wars. The real pioneering, however, had already been done more than ten thousand years before the coming of Europeans.
From the Beginning of Time: Pioneering in the Pleistocene
The ancientness of human settlement on the North American continent emerged as an object of significant dispute at the end of the twentieth century. At first this seemed to be an issue limited to the internal politics of Americanist archaeology. One group of archaeologists, eager to make their mark as students of “early man” and thus to compete in some sense for students and funding with the spectacular discoveries of “fossil man” in Africa, began framing the discourse about the settlement of the Americas in terms that emphasized age and extinct megafauna and competed for proof of the oldest settlement site in the Americas. No one could compete with the emerging canonical story of an “out of Africa” human emergence, but when supposedly very old sites began to be claimed in places other than Alaska or the northern Great Plains, the previously agreed normal science of the “Bering Strait land bridge” from northern Siberia as the route for the entry of people into the Americas fragmented into multiple theories. Some began to claim waterborne routes from Japan or other Pacific rim locations or even more daring travels from western Europe.[6]
Although all this made charming, newsworthy, and European-dominant-discourse-affirming copy for National Geographic and Archaeology Magazine, it was still apparently a parochial amusement.[7] All the scientific practitioners were agreed that First Nations traditions about their own past were, charitably considered, at best mythic (and in this they agreed with many European researchers with respect to the historical traditions of formerly colonized Others) and at worst religious mystification. But in the course of the decolonizing last four decades of the twentieth century, as indigenous people everywhere were suddenly running their own governments, attending universities, and (more to the point) earning law degrees, new voices began to be heard that questioned the consignment of control of the cultural patrimony of formerly colonized peoples to European anthropologists, archaeologists, and art collectors. Furthermore, since the manipulation of anthropological and archaeological knowledge was no longer of use to legitimate the dominance of colonial governments, these scholars suddenly discovered that their canonical stories were no longer required, and they would have to compete for the right to speak.
This eventuality became the stuff of archaeologists’ worst nightmares in the United States when in 1990 George Herbert Walker Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA for short), which for the first time in United States history granted First Nations peoples of the continental United States a measure of control over the remains of their ancestors, the last of US citizens to receive such consideration. There were still requirements that First nations people establish lineal or cultural relationship with the skeletal and cultural remains in question (held by then in their hundreds of thousands by hundreds of museums and anthropology laboratories across the country), but all of a sudden First Nations history was to be counted in offering a “preponderance of the evidence” for NAGPRA claims.
Which brings me to my point: in the past twenty years serious academic attention has been devoted, by First Nations scholars and archaeologists alike, to long-ignored First Nations histories and to the possibility that truly ancient truth might be part of a history preserved as oral tradition. The battle lines in the argument over the historical value of First Nations histories are simply drawn: First nations people, ethnohistorians, and (frequently “postprocessual”) archaeologists who have worked closely with First Nations are committed to working together to understand the dimensions of First Nations histories and how they were and are constructed, acknowledging that they represent important evidence of the past; while archaeologists committed to a scientistic and positivist orientation and some modernist historians consider the whole enterprise a waste of time.[8] While practitioners who represent the former viewpoint have attempted to devise critical frameworks for evaluating traditional historical evidence, their interest is supported by the fact that they also consider that history tout court is useful evidence that can be used by archaeology. Practitioners who reject any historical approaches as lacking scientific rigor consider that the undisciplined form of traditional histories makes them doubly useless. Finally, there is a serious difference in the reflexivity of the opposing camps as well: rejectors of traditional history consider that their own method is ahistorical and devoted to universal human truths, while acceptors consider that all knowledge is situated and must be considered as a product of its own historical context.[9]
And indeed the context has changed. Just as in the case of the histories of constituent American ethnicities within the broader historical discourse that emerged with the development of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, the histories of the First Nations of the Americas are beginning to be articulated by the voices of those whose histories they are, formerly barred from the academy through lack of education or money but now fully qualified scholarly interlocutors. The stakes are high, no less than the preservation of First Nations sovereignty as agreed in hundreds of US treaties and the forging of First Nations prosperity after five hundred years of progressive dispossession, but the struggle faces the losses that the dominant culture may experience if it is no longer in control not just of the discourse but in some cases of land and resources. The stakes are equally high for mostly Euroamerican academics, who have been free for well over a hundred years to craft pasts for First nations people according to Euroamerican standards and conventions and to use without permission the remains and possessions of First Nations people to do it.[10]
Assuming, however, that First Nations histories are relevant to an attempt to establish a past in the “time before history” on the North American continent,[11] I want to outline something of the larger picture of origins as it is beginning to emerge from both narrative and material sources. The long-discussed Bering Strait migration route was a broad swath of dry land between northeastern Asia and extreme northwestern North America created by the global cooling of the last glaciation (ending about 11,000 years ago), and it has long been thought to be the route by which First Nations people first entered the Americas (and by the way, also the route by which the horse, which evolved in North America but became extinct here during the late Pleistocene, made its way to Asia to be domesticated and recycled through Europe and back to the Americas). This route is now being contested as the sole available avenue for the migration of animals and people. The Monte Verde site in Chile is said to date to at least 12,500 years ago, some 2000 years earlier than any known sites on the North American continent. This suggests to archaeologists that a coastwise route may have been employed to reach South America at such an early date. Parallel with these developments has been a persistent contestation of the “blitzkrieg” model for the peopling of North America, which called for hunters to pursue and eliminate many species of megafauna by overkilling and to race from Alaska to Tierro del Fuego in a thousand years while doing it. Careful studies of pollen and fossil insect evidence suggest that many megafauna species died off as much due to climate change as to hunting, while the environment of the late glacial period is coming to be understood as much more locally variable or “patchy,” thus supporting a much greater complexity of food resources for early pioneers to exploit for subsistence.[12]
This initial case of blaming First nations people for extinctions on the evidence available to archaeologists in the 1970s was answered by First Nations scholars using traditional history informally, but new studies have been directed toward providing formal models for the incorporation of traditional histories in the study of the First Nations past. In a detailed case study of Arikara legend, Roger Echo-Hawk has argued that a consensus of First Nations origin histories referring to darkness, cold, and an emergence from the earth can be interpreted as references to the “Pleistocene world-scape” of Beringia and the region of the Arctic Circle, with references to large bodies of water echoing the glacial lakes that accompanied the melting of the ice sheets.[13] Echo-Hawk is the pioneer of applying oral historical evidence to the deep past of what Americanist archaeologists call the PaleoIndian period, and it is clear that other migration histories may refer to more recent events, but his efforts have established the importance of paying attention to the possibilities offered by First Nations histories.[14]
Although many First Nations peoples take their traditions about earth-emergence literally and deny that they have ever lived anyplace other than an original North American homeland (which may of course be quite true if the group had its ethnogenesis within North America after its peopling), others like Echo-Hawk look to a migration tradition that may be mapped onto various periods of the past. Whatever the source of the populations that spread out over the chilly North American wilderness (when they arrived it really was wilderness), they came equipped with a flexible bone and lithic technology that could adapt to new lithic resources as they traveled and to the hunting of the giant species they encountered, like giant sloths and beavers, sabertooth tigers, giant bison, and mastodons. As these first pioneers moved across the continent they learned a sequence of entirely new environments, and while they established their occupation they were aided by the waning of the cold, the melting of the ice, and eventually a warming trend that made their adaptation task more complex as both flora and fauna adapted too.[15] Paleo people east of the Rockies established themselves among the grassy savannahs, marshes, and lakes formed from glacier meltwater, and found no barrier in what would become the great rivers of the region, which were then shallow braided streams that they crossed to reach the Mississippi valley region by about 10,000 years ago. But with the end of the glacial period and the warming and drying climate of the so-called Hypsithermal of 9000-5000 years ago, the Great Plains began to dry and the Mississippi River system to deepen and take on its modern appearance. The human population increased and became more sedentary. Seasonal hunting and gathering remained the primary resource, but as groups established permanent living sites they gradually began to undertake the informal cultivation of plants they had found nutritious or useful.
Archaeological evidence is dependent upon archaeological constructs. Pottery types, that is recurrent clusters of attributes of shape, ceramic composition, and decorative techniques and motifs, are of special interest because the persistence of such clusters is frequent in spite of the relative responsiveness of the medium. Most archaeologists will not generally make the claim that what they call a pottery type or style was so recognized by the people who made it, but such types are used nevertheless in analyses to proxy for ethnicity or for social groupings of greater specificity, and some researchers have even claimed to be able to distinguish the output of individual potters. Although where pottery is present it is preferred as a marker of social circumscription, people did not always make pottery: when they were nomadic or semisedentary, carrying breakable vessels was more trouble than it was worth.
It is more difficult to make specific ethnicity claims for lithic production, because in some modalities the material only allows of being worked in a very few ways in order to achieve a specific purpose. Yet other factors like material choice and the use of fire to heat the material can also form part of attribute clusters defining types. The situation is complicated by the fact that lithic toolmakers did not just throw away a broken or worn stone tool, but could resharpen or reshape it in different ways, making identification of the original form difficult. Finally, the climatic changes of the Paleo and Archaic periods could encourage long-range migrations as well as less significant movements to follow game, so the actual people making lithic styles could be in different places in different times, yet continue trying to make their accustomed tools with the stone they found in the new place—where other people they met might influence their practice. For all these reasons it is hard to map distinctions among lithic forms convincingly onto social groupings, especially since many finished examples are found at hunting rather than living sites, but postprocessual archaeological interests in social process are leading to new efforts to do so.
Architectural evidence, from buildings to fortifications to mounds of various kinds, is also correlated by archaeologists with temporal and spatial specifics that allow them to periodize various regional building practices.[16] Such practices, because they frequently require labor beyond individual effort, are the elements that have been used to proxy for social organization: large-scale constructions are, in the presence of marked differentiation in burial accompaniments (i.e., a few graves with many artifacts vs many graves with none), thought to reflect some degree of coercive power on the part of elites. But as we shall see in the case of the mound-building Archaic, where graves and living sites are very seldom found at all, new thinking is trying to work out another explanation based on voluntary communal action and periodic meetings.
Moundbuilding, Primordial and Otherwise
At least in the Southeast, a major theme of early development of cultural complexity has grown to dominate research in the past twenty years, during which evidence has emerged to suggest that beginning six thousand years ago people chose to erect monumental architecture in the North American landscape, and continued to do so even after Europeans first appeared in the hemisphere. In the last ten years, this evidence has led archaeologists of the Southeast to pay more attention to First Nations traditions of all kinds in order to explain what are coming to be understood as the earliest North American earthworks, some as early as 4000 BC (the “Archaic” period) and now being referred to as “primordial” mound or “first-mound” constructions. For the first time archaeologists are permitting themselves to imagine how hunters rather than farmers might have been able to organize the labor that was required to construct the more elaborate later sites like Poverty Point and Watson Brake. They have even devised a new sociopolitical formulation termed “transegalitarianism” and indicating organization of some degree of complexity—an incipient inequality still not precisely defined but perhaps only evidencing a kind of assertion of ethnicity—on a foraging economic base.
Scholars working on this period are now paying attention to potentially ceremonial objects like polished stone animal fetishes, oversized nonfunctional stone knives, and so-called bannerstones formerly assumed to be nothing other than weights for atlatls (spear-throwers). Archaic-period mound sites are understood now as having been built not for residence but for gatherings, whether for trade, feasting, or an annual ceremonial cycle. Rather than “simple hunter-gatherers,” the peoples of the greater Mississippi valley who built these communal structures have begun to be accorded the “complexity” of a more dimensional lifeway that included women and children and actual life concerns that they addressed through ceremony and celebration.[17]
The succeeding period is now seen to be of greater importance than formerly because of a new understanding of the domestication of plant species that took place during the so-called “Woodland” period. This newly-recognized agricultural revolution, preceding the adoption of maize by a thousand years, served as an important element in the increasing sedentariness of populations and their expanding social complexity, reflected in the appearance of significant village settlements. Although hunting was still important to the Woodland subsistence economy, there was an increase in the importance of harvests of oily-seed plants like sunflower, chenopodium, goosefoot, knotweed, little barley, and maygrass, as well as the long-domesticated squash. Woodland hunter-farmers also participated in a developing regional symbolism whose appearance on artifacts defines a so-called “interaction sphere” from the eastern Plains to the Appalachians and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, christened “Hopewell” by archaeologists after a mound in Ohio. The Hopewell cultural pattern included the construction of mounds (conical ones for burial and large platforms for ceremonialism probably focused on feasting[18]) and the creation and exchange of rare natural materials and symbolic artifacts, but it was followed by people with very different pottery traditions, significant regional variation in subsistence patterns, settlement, and burial practices and certainly also different languages and traditions.
The Mississippian period was named for the dominant Mississippi River and its tributaries to west and east, around which much of the maize farming and moundbuilding of this era took place. Over the past twenty years this era, too, has been elaborated by archaeologists through explanations featuring hierarchical “chiefdom” organization, chief-controlled trade in exotic materials and finished goods across the region, and a ceremonial life that featured elaborate symbolic costume and perhaps enactment of events in the lives of culture heroes.[19] Detailed studies of many sites of all sizes yielded a settlement hierarchy of farmsteads, hamlets, single-mound local centers, and multiple-mound polity centers, and within towns a structure of plazas, mounds, boundaries, and gates.[20] Archaeologists proposed a tributary and redistributive economy that bound all levels together through material reciprocity.[21] The mounds themselves served as platforms not just for ceremonialism but for permanent structures that probably functioned as temples or sacred spaces and lifted chief/priests nearer to the sun that was important to these agriculturists’ religion. The mere visibility of Mississippian mound sites in the river valleys of the South contrasts with the lack of permanent architecture moving westward from the Mississippi valley, although the dramatically rich findings from the Spiro site on the western boundary of Arkansas suggest that there was an active trade between the valley and Plains, reflecting the bounty of the buffalo hunt on the Plains even when carried out without horses, that enriched the people of that chiefdom.
It is difficult to be very precise about interaction among individual corporate groups before those groups begin to create durable architectural features and to leave things in or around them, hence the perennial interest in earthworks. The vastness of the North American continent and the small size of the archaeological community means that mere survey coverage is woefully inadequate by the standards of smaller countries, like most in Europe. This has meant that a great deal of American archaeological scenario-generation (much, it should be said, produced unwillingly by archaeologists who must do so under contractual obligations) is based on very little evidence from very few sites, leading to sweeping generalizations. Although earlier models of cultural contact attempted to explain everything under models of diffusion and migration, more recently archaeologists have tended to argue for greater time depth of cultural development in place, much as many of the First Nations earth-emergence origin histories also suggest. In the Mississippi valley and greater Southeast, populations are thought to have arrived during the age of paleolithic hunters (betrayed by widespread findings of fluted spearpoints), their artifacts actually found in association with mastodon bones there, and never really to have left the region completely until forced out by Europeans ten thousand years later.
Within the valley they hunted smaller game than was found on the Plains and gradually developed regional relationships; they began to settle more permanently as they domesticated indigenous plants. Eventually they adopted maize and increased dramatically in numbers and power. Explanations of the relationships between groups, however, rest on artifact styles and their distributions, which are thought to provide evidence of trade or exchange and marriage alliances, and on evidence of certain attributes like fortification and certain kinds of unbalance in burial populations, which are presumed to reflect conflict. All of these styles of interaction are believed to be better understood for later periods when there were more people making more countable remains in which archaeologists can find pattern.
Although there is still significant discussion about when maize arrived in North America from Mexico via the American Southwest, it is certain that maize began to be grown in quantity east of the Mississippi around AD 900. It was a gradual process beginning hundreds of years before, with maize as a minority, perhaps specialty crop, but maize eventually caused significant change in the lifeways of Woodland horticulturists, since a growing dependence on it as a relatively controllable and storable source of nutrition bound its cultivators to the river-bottom lands appropriate to its cultivation.[22] It was thus the great river valleys occupying the center of the North American continent that became the sites of the greatest population concentrations made possible by this reliable crop. Management of the lands and people came to fall into the hands of leaders who were ultimately, ca. AD 1000-1500, powerful enough to orchestrate the construction of far larger communally-constructed monuments on the landscape and to become known metonymically to early European settlers as the “moundbuilders.” How these leaders rose to power and established themselves as hereditary elites is still very much a matter of debate among archaeologists and ethnologists: some argue that ambitious men worked to achieve and intentionally establish such power, others argue that with the need to manage agricultural efforts on a large scale, natural leaders were drawn into a functional niche.[23] Whether the process was pushed by some influential originator or was independently developed wherever it arose is also debated.[24]
Anthropologists have come in the last fifty years to refer to these organized populations as chiefdoms because of the conventional nomenclature applied to their leaders.[25] The largest of North American mound sites was situated in the center of the continent, a large and complex city across from present-day St. Louis and called Cahokia from the name given by French settlers to the regional inhabitants. The city of Cahokia developed over centuries, but at its height in 1050-1200 it was a vast polity of some 20,000 people, including more than a hundred mounds as bases for significant buildings, plazas, residential areas, and other structures in just the main central city, but surrounded by lesser mound-centered towns and villages and individual farmsteads occupying the entire American Bottoms lying below the juncture of the Missouri and Mississippi. Cahokia was led by a hereditary elite, and its primary leader certainly had a great deal of coercive power.[26] The evidence of “exotic” imported goods at Cahokia suggests that it dominated trade and communication networks that stretched continent-wide.
By the European fourteenth century there was a significant number of such Mississippian polities, though none so large as Cahokia. Each of them was similarly organized around the cultivation of maize and the need to dominate appropriate lands for it, but they were also distinctive in the style of their culture, as affected by the history and environment of their origins. Mississippian polities building mounds and farming maize could be found from Florida to western Arkansas and from Illinois to Louisiana. They included “paramount” or “complex chiefdoms” centered on large and impressive multiple-mound sites like Etowah, Moundville, Anna, Angel, and Spiro; but they also included modest countrified single-mound “simple” chiefdoms either subordinate to “complex” chiefdoms or existing quasi-independently in the interstices between their spheres of influence. Mississippian ceremonial practices have been studied through the broad range of artifacts that archaeologists have categorized as “Southern Cult” or “Southeastern Ceremonial Complex,” which includes elaborate engraved and shaped objects of shell and stone and pottery. The iconography of these objects suggests by its motifs of costumed dancers, plants, and familiar and fabulous animals a thoughtworld dominated by ideas about fertility, control of the environment, and warfare, and it is thought that the core of these ideas was commonly held throughout the Mississippian world.[27]
However similar their subsistence base and ideas, Mississippian polities did not build up into nations in the European sense. Indeed the idea of grouping them all together as a single cultural manifestation is somewhat misleading, since a series of maps showing sites and their sizes by century would demonstrate that each Mississippian polity had its own timetable of emergence and decline, although it also seems evident that neighboring groups could influence one another through dominance and subordination, cooperation, or competition. Population growth supported by a reliable crop would support the development of a town, but maize is a fertility-exhausting crop that must take advantage of periodic restoration of fertility by flooding, and it was possible for the population to outgrow the supply of available land even with this periodic assistance.[28] Bad weather in a series of years could lead to fragmentation at any stage, and polities that were dependent on multiple annual harvests and good local supplies of game and wood for construction and fuel could prove fragile in the face of rapid environmental change. The so-called Little Ice Age that preceded and coincided with the period of European exploration and early settlement (ca. 1350/1450-1850/1900), following upon several centuries of warmer weather that had favored expanding agriculture (the Medieval Warm Period), could make maize crops too uncertain in some areas to support large populations in close concentration. The decline of Cahokia began in the thirteenth century as its population dispersed. As the accounts of early European explorers showed, however, others lasted into the sixteenth century and longer.[29]
Because such chiefdoms survived to be encountered by Hernando de Soto and other early Spanish explorers, ethnohistorians have been eager to discern from exploration accounts something of at least the behaviors that surrounded the chiefly institution, on the argument that Soto was treated like a touring paramount chief. It has been argued on this basis that hereditary chiefs of complex hierarchical chiefdoms, those few paramount chiefdoms like Cahokia, Spiro, Moundville, and Etowah in which a central multi-mound town had relations of dominance with smaller single-mound towns, could be expected to make something like “royal progresses” to inspect their domains, during which they were greeted with elaborate ceremony and provided with “food, housing, tribute, burden-bearers, and transportation via canoe.”[30] Whether this was actually the case or a European analogy would be extremely difficult to prove on archaeological evidence alone.
The Sea of Grass and Buffalo
The central and northern Great Plains, bordered by the Mississippi valley on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west and watered by the Mississippi’s western tributaries, made up by far the greatest part of the Louisiana Purchase. But its populations by the time of European contact were nowhere near as dense as elsewhere in North America. People had hunted and foraged in the region since their arrival on the continent, living and adapting through eras where forests replaced glaciers and were in their turn replaced by grasslands as the climate turned warmer and drier and the megafauna died off to be replaced by buffalo that migrated from Mexico. They communicated with peoples to the east and west: they even supplied the volcanic glass from the Rockies, obsidian, to Hopewell peoples of the east, and were influenced by the Hopewell culture.
By the first millennium AD, they were also maize-growers, village-dwellers, and the builders of burial mounds, influenced by contacts with the Pueblo peoples in the Southwest and the Mississippians of the Mississippi valley but on a smaller scale than either. Their major subsistence activity was the seasonal exploitation of the growing herds of buffalo that inhabited and migrated across the Plains, which they hunted on foot, using natural and constructed features to direct the buffalo to so-called “jumps” where the animals would be precipitated off a steep bank and killed or disabled by the fall. Eastern Plains groups traded the products of the hunt (buffalo robes, bone tools, and perhaps even dried meat) with the Mississippi valley: the extraordinary burial accompaniments of the Spiro mound site are interpreted as a sign that it was the gateway between Plains and the valley.[31] Western Plains groups traded similarly with the settled pueblo farmers of the Southwest. Life was hard enough on the Plains, with their harsh winters, that populations remained relatively small and such hunting activity could remain at a sustainable level, such that the herds remained viable and grew.[32]
Farmer-hunters from all along the eastern borders of the Plains migrated into the Plains at the waning of the Mississippian period, perhaps following routes they had previously taken to make hunts on the Plains. The Pawnee migrated from the Red River in Texas onto the Plains in the thirteenth century up the Platte. The Caddoan Wichitas moved onto the western Arkansas River in the fourteenth century. Siouan peoples, Mandans and Hidatsa, migrated from the Great Lakes region to the middle Missouri valley by the mid-fifteenth century. The Pawnee Arikaras settled near them on the middle Missouri. These new settlers adapted their farming practices to drier conditions and learned to make more elaborate use of the buffalo.
After 1400, however, a large part of the region was controlled by Athapaskan people who had migrated from Canada, the most powerful of whom were the Apaches, who spread down the western high plains and raided the village settlements, controlled the central part of the Plains from Wyoming to Texas, raided the peublos in the south, and pushed the Pawnees back down the Platte. The Little Ice Age made itself felt on the Plains in a series of droughts during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which led to famine and the contraction of village settlements into federated groups of formerly independent people. By the time Europeans arrived, therefore, great changes had taken place on the Plains and a new cast of characters had had two hundred years or more to make themselves at home there.
Archaeological evidence has only rarely been drawn together to provide regional trends, but a few efforts have been attempted.[33] In spite of a sustained effort to reconstruct, piece by piece, general pictures of societal evolution for regions like the lower Mississippi valley and Great Plains, there has been no such effort to frame a history of any specificity, simply because archaeologists have in general been honest enough to admit that their material evidence taken alone can at best outline general trends. For the specifics of interaction among ethnic groups, for ethnic groups in general, First Nations traditions of migrations and wars will need to be integrated into the distributive evidence found buried in the earth, just as have those of origins.
Enter History
There is now no argument that the earliest European explorers encountered First Nations societies of a range of lifeways, from farming, forest hunting, and moundbuilding in the Mississippi valley to horticulture and large-scale prairie hunting on the Plains, so it is clear that it was at the very end of the Mississippian period that First Nations people of North America begin to appear on the international stage. Early efforts at the writing of North American exploration history in the nineteenth century were largely ethnocentric diatribes lambasting the cruel Spaniard and the debauched Frenchman (presumably because they had preceded the hardy yeoman Englishman), but by the end of the twentieth century the study of this earliest period of contact between European and First Nations people had benefitted by the rediscovery of European source materials and had received the revivifying impetus of a raft of centenaries (Marquette and Jolliet in 1974, La Salle in 1982, Hernando de Soto in 1989-91, and Columbus in 1992) to spur research. Indeed the various symposia and grant-funded research projects of the closing years of the century did yield a collection of useful works that both summarized recent findings and presented entirely new ones, the sum total of which amounted to the establishment of a new revisionist view of what came to be known diplomatically during Columbus Quincentenary planning as the “encounter.” This new picture was limned by historians, anthropologists, and their intermediary friends the ethnohistorians, all increasingly influenced by emerging practitioners from the ranks of young First Nations scholars.
As far as First Nations history is concerned, this work falls into two broad categories: “external” and “internal” ethnohistory, which corresponds to the ethnographer’s distinction between the etic view of a culture (objective, as viewed from the outside) and the emic view (as seen from the native’s point of view). Practitioners of the “external” view tend to come from academic history and to seek its rewards by placing First Nations history into the current trends in American history scholarship (Atlantic world, gender, capitalist market forces, etc.), while practioners of the “internal” view are often anthropologists grinding their own axes of agency, adaptation, or rational acting. For the real “internal” view, the view of First Nations scholars themselves, it is necessary to listen rather carefully amid the din of these other voices.
Nevertheless, the commonality and reflexivity of larger decolonizing, postmodern viewpoints has led to a more balanced view: no longer are First Nations people portrayed by historians as one-dimensional monsters or passive victims. Instead, the new discourse of colonial history recognizes Europeans and First Nations people as equally historifacient, and the results are complex: a clearer view of First Nations power in the relationship, identity negotiations, métissage, and a “middle ground” of communication woven of gifts, trade, wars, marriages, and diplomacies that evolved over extended colonial relationships to modify and invent ways of being together.[34] There are also serious acts of political and military violence to be taken into account, in which one side was privileged by more destructive weapons technologies (of what amounted to “mass destruction” for the time), while the other side knew the land intimately and could exploit that knowledge strategically.[35]
This new view has been compounded not only of a new awareness of the First Nations role in the making of history, but a long-developed emergence of evidence and arguments to support a much larger role in the “conquest” of First Nations peoples for European diseases than for European might or military acumen. This research, much developed in Mesoamerica, was worked out in a similar vein by Henry Dobyns in 1983, when he argued that the numbers of people “north of civilized Mesoamerica” on the eve of the European arrival were eighteen million, and that those numbers were “thinned” by a series of European disease pandemics by 95% from 1519 to 1617.[36] Dobyns’ work was based on previous efforts for various regions by other researchers and his own case study of the Timucua, and Dobyns was the first to make claims of such high numbers brought so low. Inevitably there were responses, calling such drastic extremes into question, not all of them by scholars unwilling to accept such a revisionist notion of native numbers.[37] More temperate claims were in fact made by Cherokee historical demographer Russell Thornton, who maintained that the present United States contained over five million people in 1492, a number that was reduced to some 250,000 by 1890.[38] Whatever the numbers, however, there is no arguing with three facts: the initial bouts of contagion were unmistakably the result of European diseases brought by explorers and early settlers; the scale of the loss of life was unprecedented in many regions; and such huge proportional reductions in numbers must have had profound effects upon the social cohesion and morale of those groups most seriously affected.
These effects are made quite visible in the Mississippi valley and Southeast, where large concentrated populations were particularly hard-hit, by the fact that European exploration of the region in the middle of the sixteenth century was not followed by colonization until the end of the seventeenth century in most of the area. Changes that had taken place in the intervening period resulted in a strong contrast with the former prosperity and complexity. Where populations were more thinly spread, as in the southern Plains, effects were not so evident.
Two Spanish explorers bracketed the heartland of a relatively “untouched” American continent in the sixteenth century, both of them lured by the remnants of the Panfilo de Narvaez expedition, which had tried to explore the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico but had ended shipwrecked on the Texas coast. Its survivors had wandered for years among the hunting tribes of the northern Mexico interior.[39] One of them, Cabeza de Vaca, went to Spain to seek a governorship for himself, where his account came to the attention of Hernando de Soto, but he refused to accompany the explorer back to La Florida. A fellow survivor, the Moorish slave Estevanico, remained in Mexico and led the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza to “Cibola” (what he had seen, from a distance, was actually Zuñi pueblo), and the reports of that exploration spurred the Mexican viceroy Mendoza to send Francisco de Coronado to follow up.[40]
Hernando de Soto, a veteran of the Pizarro conquest of Peru, sought and won appointment as governor of Cuba and adelantado to the lands of La Florida, the southeastern part of North America, in 1539. His elaborate exploratory expedition, consisting of 600 men, 400 horses, a herd of pigs, and several supply ships, wound its way across the region over a period of four years, up the Florida peninsula, northward through Georgia and into the mountains of the western Carolinas, southwestward toward the Mississippi, and then westward and southward once across, finally to escape by canoe down the Mississippi. Soto and his men accepted the help of First Nations people where it was offered and commandeered bearers and food supplies by force where it wasn’t. His strategy among settled agriculturists was the same one he had used as one of Pizarro’s captains in Peru: seize the leader to force the people to do your will.
But because even the most autocratic rulers he met were far less powerful than Atahuallpa and because First Nations communication networks at least within alliance areas were good enough to provide warning of his coming, he was far less successful in such coercion, although he captured and displaced or murdered hundreds of bearers east of the Mississippi. Indeed the expedition was misled by apparently willing guides and endured several major attacks, notably at Apalachee, Mabila, and Chicasa, before it ever reached the Mississippi. There the survivors crossed, with their numbers reduced by half, their clothes in tatters, and most of their arms and equipment lost or destroyed. Soto himself died on the banks of the lower Mississippi in 1542, but not before his expedition had met and observed a broad range of Native societies that it had met with all across the Southeast and something of the southern Plains. They had seen hunters and farmers, simple dwellings and grand mound centers and temporary camps, and nowhere had they found the gold they sought. At best, they had observed east of the Mississippi prosperous farming populations that they thought might be brought to subservience and broad spaces where Spanish cattle could be raised.[41] They had encountered in the lands of the Purchase Tunican, Natchezan, and Caddoan people, but they did not on balance make many friends.
Francisco de Coronado was sent to explore the so-called Seven Cities of Cibola (actually the pueblos of New Mexico) in 1540 in search of gold. He had a very different charge from the governor of New Spain, since he was directed to respect the rights of the nations he would meet and to carry all his own food and supplies, but in the performance his actions were little different from those of Soto. The expedition consisted of 336 men, hundreds of armed Mexican volunteers, and large herds of remounts, cattle, and sheep. Taking one Zuñi pueblo violently, he eventually negotiated what he was pleased to believe was acquiescence to Spanish rule by the others. Similar treatment was accorded the Hopi. Failing to find gold amid the western pueblos, he sent a lieutenant to extend the search north and eastward through the eastern pueblos up the Rio Grande and onto the Great Plains. After a winter spent first abusing the hospitality of the Tiwas and then beseiging and burning several towns and their people, Coronado’s main force crossed the Plains to the legendary Quivira (in the bend of the Arkansas River in Kansas), which he reached in 1541.[42] Like Soto, he was searching for minerals and the populations to extract them, and like Soto he was gravely disappointed. The two most extensive sixteenth-century Spanish explorations of the North American interior thus revealed the sedentary pueblobuilding farmers of the southwest and the sedentary moundbuilding farmers of the east, with mobile hunters in the middle, but Coronado found as Soto had ultimately done that the resources of the region he had explored would not be worth the effort it would take to subjugate populations so far from New Spain, and he returned to Nueva Galicia borne on a litter, permanently injured by a fall from a horse, in 1542. The eager missionaries who insisted on staying behind were all martyred.
“Protohistoric” Intermission
No significant European colonizing efforts reached the Mississippi valley and eastern Plains again until the late seventeenth century. During this time historians once assumed that nothing happened, but more careful attention to First Nations traditions and archaeological evidence has revealed that far-reaching changes took place, precipitated by European microbes, the increasing results of violence resultant from population losses and the growth of European trade, and a new awareness among Indian people of the presence of a group of very unpredictable Others on their borders.
Spanish expeditions had spread disease without trying, in the human waste they left behind in their winter camps and in the animals that escaped and were “liberated” by their First Nations hosts. There were even a few human escapees left behind: some slaves and a few soldiers. The chronic human diseases and subacute zoonoses that were most likely spread by such expeditions might not have killed in sudden and dramatic ways (although viruses for influenza carried by swine might have caused serious outbreaks in virgin populations), particularly considering the fact that many First Nations populations were healthier than Europeans to begin with, but they would have added to the few chronic lifestyle illnesses already present in North America. In the long term they would have made the people more susceptible to acute European diseases when they were transmitted into the interior. And that transmission did not wait for new exploration; Spaniards certainly continued to travel and trade and capture slaves along the coast ot the Gulf of Mexico as they moved between New Spain and their eastern Florida outposts, and the diseases they carried could move via the First Nations communication routes of the interior.[43] Acute disease episodes could therefore continue to touch interior populations.
Population losses due to European diseases did not all take place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a large proportion did, and for some groups huge losses of well over half their people were the result, while others, further off well-worn riverine communication routes or game migration routes followed by others, were less seriously touched. Where the impact of European disease was greatest, Dobyns pointed to two results that could ensue: emigration from depopulated areas with consolidation of populations and simplification of social organization including the loss of specialized skills.[44] Given that the largest population losses must have been among elders and children, it is likely that much knowledge was lost along with hope for the future.
Again, both traditional histories and archaeological evidence agree that there was a great deal of population movement and reconsolidation in the Southeast and Mississippi valley during this period of only marginal contact with Europeans. A characteristic form the new social agglomerations took was that of the confederation: a joining together of formerly somewhat heterogeneous groups (simpler if they shared a common language, but not impossible without). East of the Mississippi confederacies like the Creek and Choctaw, west of the Mississippi the Caddo, joined together for mutual defense, ceremonial services, and reproduction to make powerful alliances of quasi-independent groups that could have leaders of hereditary rank and could be ranked as groups with respect to one another.[45] In cases like that of the Natchez, where a core group retained its social structure and took in outsiders through their existing kinship practices, the identity and location of the core group and even its autocratic rule could persist. Sometimes the disruption was so serious that populations migrated considerable distances to their “historic” settlements, as was the case of the Quapaw: historians and archaeologists are still trying to puzzle out where precisely these Dhegiha Siouans came from in the mid-seventeenth century to settle on the lower Arkansas River, but they were probably part of the general Dhegiha Souian movement westward from the Ohio valley under pressure from Iroquois raids that also pushed the Omahas, Poncas, Kansas, and Osages to settle on the edge of the Plains, and that may have been responsible for the presence of the Ofo in the Yazoo Basin and the Biloxis on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.[46] Most First Nations groups (the Natchez excepted) were as a result organized in a more “flattened” structure: the hierarchies of chiefdoms had largely gone, in favor of the more resilient structures of local autonomy externally federated for defense. The previous mix of subsistence activities would probably be retained if resettlement did not dictate otherwise: maize agriculture continued in the Mississippi valley, fishing was a coastal occupation, and hunting continued to play a significant role on the Plains. Nor did First Nations groups lose their travel and communication routes and connections, even if they were not used for the same purposes as before; when they migrated to escape disease or violence, First Nations peoples followed known routes. Finally, as missionary efforts were increased with colonization, the evidence of proselytizing failure by Europeans and the constant need to battle “heathen” beliefs and practices provide pretty clear evidence that religious traditions had run too deep to be challenged even by the disaster of population collapse.
The effects of European technologies, not yet adopted by most but now within the ken of First Nations people, are more complex to evaluate. North American First Nations used technologies of wood, stone, fiber, and bone, available to them everywhere they turned and progressively honed and adapted to suit the natural offerings of specific ecological settings, but in many ways no match for the products of European metallurgy. Metals were the basis for European weapons far superior in potential killing power to anything known to the people of North America, who were desirous early on of acquiring projectile weapons to defend themselves, especially when Europeans had put similar weapons into the hands of their enemies.[47] Metals also enabled the more efficient exploitation of the vegetable and mineral environment and were therefore of special interest to agriculturists. On the other hand, European elaborations of wood and fiber technologies had made their sailing ships possible, but they were still no match for First Nations watercraft in navigating the continental rivers. The conventions of alphabetic writing were of great use to Europeans in the long run, but initially most Europeans were illiterate and the distant communication of messages without First Nations assistance nearly impossible anyway. Finally, European technologies of governance, the acquiescence of some in the control of others, were not entirely foreign to many of the peoples of North America, but their scale was inappropriate: only when Europeans were able to establish secondary centers of control on the continent itself were they able to begin an effective attempt to deal directly with the powerful among First Nations people, whose dubiousness about any “great father beyond the waters” was often undisguised.
European Settlement and Colonization
English settlement along the eastern seaboard of North America, French settlement along the Saint Lawrence, and Spanish settlement in the Florida peninsula and Mexico had been well established by the seventeenth century, and First Nations’ exposure to disease and weapons and cultural controls, especially by religious conversion, were already increasing by the end of the century. North Europeans worked Native trading networks for furs in Canada and the Northeast, while the religious intentions of his Catholic Majesty of Spain and the strategic shipping requirements of Spanish mining enterprises in central and northern Mexico were served first by the settlement of Florida coastal harbor sites, then by the missionization of the interior, and eventually the creation of a vast cattle empire in northern Florida to resupply Spanish ships.[48] The experiences of native peoples in these arrangements differed, but in most cases European demands were met by responses that tended to alter the meaning of the demands and yield advantages to some First Nations leaders. Most of these enterprises (with the exception of the Iroquois wars of the middle seventeenth century, designed to replace disease-decimated populations with captives and to control the beaver trade of the entire Midwest/Great Lakes) were marginal to our region, however, and might have remained so somewhat longer except for the spiritual and worldly ambitions of four Frenchmen, who attracted the attention of both England and Spain.
French fur trader Louis Jolliet was acting on current intelligence from coureurs de bois who had ranged westward when he attempted the exploration of the southerly reaches of the Midwestern river suspected of leading across the continent to California and the Pacific. Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette was appointed to accompany him. They navigated the Mississippi in 1674, traveling southward to the confluence of the Arkansas, beyond which they feared to go, now aware from First Nations intelligence that their route did not lead to the Pacific but might lead to a Spanish prison in Mexico. They established cordial relations with First Nations groups they met along the way, however, and Marquette was instrumental in setting up a mission to the Illinois on his return. Though Jolliet’s journal and maps were lost in a shipwreck, he reconstructed them from memory. His testimony added to Father Marquette’s map and commentary finally showed that the continent’s major river flowed south to the Gulf of Mexico.[49] In addition, their observations began the French literature of the European rediscovery of the peoples of the region, which was now seen to be less densely populated and generally quite differently organized than the Spanish explorers had claimed. By this time, accounts of Soto’s journey had been translated into French and used by French cartographers to make speculative maps that were in the hands of explorers, who excoriated the earlier explorers for their lies.
It was the soaring ambition of an ex-Jesuit explorer-businessman and a one-armed Italian soldier that saw the Mississippi finally explored by Europeans not only northward toward its source but all the way to its mouth. René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle was deeply involved in the French efforts to rally the Algonquian Indians who had been driven westward beyond Lake Michigan by the Iroquois “beaver wars” of the 1640s and 50s, probably to establish a monopoly on their fur supplies, for which he dreamed of being the middleman with the merchants of Montreal. He had his second-in-command, Henri de Tonti, establish a fort at Starved Rock to serve as a trading center and safe haven. He also sent Father Hennepin with three voyageurs to explore the upper Mississippi in 1680 and make contact with the Sioux who lived there; Hennepin and his party were in the event taken captive by the Sioux. In 1680 Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, who was making peace between the Cree and Assiniboin and the Sioux, sent men out onto the Plains to search for the so-called Sea of the West. Having instead found the Great Salt Lake, they were able to rescue Hennepin and company from their Sioux captors on the way home.
La Salle’s larger plan was to seek the southern outlet of the Mississippi, betting that it would be the long-sought River of the Holy Spirit emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, thus providing a frost-free port and a way to end-run both Montreal traders and the Iroquois. In 1682, after much preparatory establishment of forward bases along the Great Lakes, La Salle and Henri de Tonti navigated down the Mississippi with a crew of 24 Frenchmen and 27 Algonquians (including seven women and two small children), making formal claims to the lands it watered among the Quapaw on the Arkansas River and somewhere in the swamps of the subdelta at its mouth.[50] Along the Mississippi they met First Nations people who had undergone disruptions similar to those with which they were well acquainted in the Great Lakes country and who knew quite well that Europeans were encroaching on the borders of their region. The people of the Mississippi were already being threatened by neighbors to the east and west who had been armed by Europeans, like the Chickasaws, or who had stolen arms and horses from them, like the Apaches and after them the Comanches. They therefore had a reason for welcoming friendly overtures from different Europeans who might provide them with the means to defend themselves. La Salle and Tonti both participated in welcoming ceremonies and made alliances with sedentary groups all the way down the Mississippi River on both sides, actually setting up a column with the arms of the king and a painted cross among the Quapaws. They saw signs of the disruption of populations by disease, migration, and warfare with European weapons as it took the form of intertribal conflict, evidenced by burned villages and dead bodies. They were themselves attacked by the Chitimachas on the lower river and were forced to look to their arms and avoid a long stay with the far more dangerous Natchez on their way back up the river.
La Salle was far from disappointed with the results of his exploration, however, and he immediately went to France to secure support for a return to the mouth of the Mississippi by sea, convinced that First Nations alliances were the key to a bountiful fur trade through a frost-free port. In the event he was not only disappointed but eventually killed by members of the expedition. Convinced (or perhaps reluctant to admit) that he was not lost, plagued by quarrels and a shipwreck that destroyed most supplies, La Salle set up a fortified settlement on the Texas coast in 1685. After La Salle’s departure in search of the real mouth of the Mississippi, the abandoned settlers were eventually killed and their children made captive by the Karankawa hunter-gatherers of the barren coastal region, who did not wish to compete with the intruders for the scanty available food. La Salle was killed on another attempt to reach the Mississippi by heading northeastward. The murderers and innocent survivors of the group reached a Hasinai Caddo village, where French firearms proved decisive in a Hasinai attack on enemies. Eventually seven survivors set forth eastward and reached a Kadohadacho village, where they obtained guides to take them to the Quapaw. There they found a French post that Henri de Tonti, La Salle’s partner, had established on the Arkansas River among the Quapaw in 1686. As Tonti had intended, it was ready to make the trade connection with Native peoples he had met.[51]
This first Arkansas settlement in the town of Osotouy consisted only of six voyageurs, but it began to open a window on the Quapaw, who would become firm allies of the French, and to permit a better view of their Caddoan, Tunica, Wichita, and Koroa neighbors. As Morris Arnold has pointed out, in consequence of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 the outpost on the Arkansas was the only European settlement west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande when it was founded.[52] Surrounded by Mississippi valley and eastern Plains tribes, it was well placed not only to serve as a halfway post on the Mississippi, but to trade westward for what La Salle originally thought would be profitable from this region: buffalo fur. Tonti himself was able to explore safely further west in 1690 in search of La Salle, and observed for himself the change from farming in the river valleys to hunting on the Plains. Spanish alarm on learning of the French intrusion into the area led to the establishment of short-lived missions among the Caddo in the same year. In 1699 a group of Anglo traders from Carolina, probably inspired by the reports of the Arkansas Frenchmen, who had been abandoned when La Salle’s fate was known, made their way to the Quapaw as well. Hence by the turn of the eighteenth century the central North American valley was being eyed by three European colonial powers, and First Nations people were key to their access to and success in the region.
Coordinated with the next French step was a missionary initiative. Jesuits had already moved into the Illinois country and had a mission at Fort St. Louis, commanded by Tonti, but in 1698 the Seminary of Quebec was granted the apostolate of the Mississippi and sent a group of three missionaries down the river to establish a series of missions among the First Nations groups from the Illinois country to the Gulf. The second part of the French initiative was a military one. European understanding of the political environment around the western end of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi was further elaborated, and English hopes thwarted, when Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a respected Canadian naval officer whose family had long been involved with the Indian trade, brought a sea-borne expedition to follow up on La Salle’s effort and locate definitively the mouth of the Mississippi in 1699. Iberville explored the coast and up the Mississippi River, but he was not alone in the enterprise. Pierre-Charles Le Sueur made his way up the river in 1699 in search of lead mines among the Sioux, while in 1700 Louis Juchereau de St. Denis explored the Red River and established a firmer French acquaintance with the Caddo. From then on the Caddo would be able to exploit the interests of two European nations.[53]
All these French exploration efforts revealed that the banks of the lower Mississippi were dominated by a few larger groups—Quapaw, Tunica, Natchez—surrounded by or interspersed with many allied smaller tribes like Yazoo, Ibitoupa, Taposa; Koroa, Grigra, Tioux; Chitimacha, Houma, Bayougoula, Mongoulacha, Acolapissa. Immediately to the east of the Mississippi, Tunicas and Natchez dominated from north to south; further east, the north was dominated by the Chickasaw and the south by the emergent confederacy of the Choctaw, while Choctawan Pascagoulas and Siouan Biloxis were living on rivers debouching along the coast. To the west of the lower Mississippi the three divisions of the large Caddo confederacy dominated most of western Louisiana, east Texas, and southwest Arkansas, while the Quapaw controlled the lower Arkansas River valley. Along the upper Mississippi in the Illinois country, the Illinois, Miamis, and others who had survived the Iroquois wars were settled around Tonti’s Fort St. Louis, while many of the Algonquians who had fled west of Lake Michigan were leaving that refuge area to return eastward. To the west and north on the Plains, the repercussions of the Iroquois wars and the domino collapse westward of the Siouans and Algonquians, together with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that made Spanish horses available in quantity on the southern and central Plains, were beginning to form the new lifeway of mounted nomadism. Neighboring groups knew of one another, and from time to time traded and warred in shifting constellations.
For the French it was the lower Mississippi that was still unknown, and it was no less confusing. Especially the so-called “small tribes” of the lower Mississippi, most of them remnants of larger groups decimated or displaced by disease, were moving around and coalescing or contesting settlement areas with one another, just as the Algonquian remnants had done to the north. This unsettled condition was probably due both to the contestation for farming and hunting lands and fisheries and to the movements of larger tribes. Both tradition and linguistic evidence suggest that the Dhegiha Sioux Quapaw came downstream to their Arkansas home in the seventeenth century, possibly pushed southwestward on the Ohio River; and in the process they in turn probably pushed the Tunicas southeastward before them, across the Mississippi into the Yazoo Basin, where they had established a center of power by the time of French contact.[54] Upheavals were felt everywhere, not just from European disease and firearms, but also from the demands and attractions of the transatlantic economy.
The French as the dominant European power represented a welcome opportunity for the First Nations peoples of the region. They brought trade goods that peoples of the region already knew of and wanted to have, particularly the guns of which they were already victims. The Chickasaws had been contacted by the English in the 1680s, and had begun carrying out slaving expeditions to serve a market in South Carolina. Iberville had found that Choctaws and Quapaws, as well as the smaller tribes of the lower Mississippi and Mobile delta, were suffering from these raids, were eager for French assistance, and were willing to assist the French in making the modest settlements they said they wanted. In initial explorations to the westward on the Red River (even La Salle in 1685 had argued that a Mississippi River settlement would help the French advance on the Spanish mines of Mexico), by Iberville’s brother Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and his cousin Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis, were unsuccessful because of wars taking place on the Plains, but cordial contact was renewed with the Caddoan tribes. Initially, all went well between First Nations and Europeans, as the small French outposts along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico demanded very little of their hosts, the tribes were provided with guns to defend themselves, and the French concentrated their first settlement around Mobile Bay to the east. Even a faction of the Chickasaw sought French alliance and trade in 1704.
Yet in the interior and among the First Nations peoples the turmoil of the continuing impact of European settlements and trade and European disease continued to be felt. As early as 1706 the Tunica were driven out of the lower Yazoo valley by the pressure of English-Chickasaw slave raids, to settle south of the Natchez opposite the mouth of the Red River. There they were eventually able to take and maintain control over the Red River regional trade in salt and horses, serving as brokers for Caddoan horse traders. Meanwhile the Taensa, formerly dwellers on the west side of the Mississippi above the Natchez, moved in the same year to settle further down the Mississippi with the Bayougoulas, whom they suddenly attacked along with some of their Chitimacha guests. Blaming the French, having also a history of mistrust of the French since La Salle, the Chitimachas killed the missionary Saint-Cosme. They were punished by the destruction of a village and the sale as slaves of women and children taken captive, beginning a running enmity that lasted for ten more years and led to the enslavement of many more Chitimachas, who became the most common enslaved servants in French Louisiana settlements. The Taensas, with French assistance, moved eastward to settle in the Mobile River delta.[55] It is interesting to observe that both the Tunica and the Taensa had had French missionaries just at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Additional exploration was carried out to the westward. A group of Natchitoches Caddo had earlier moved near Lake Pontchartrain to settle and had been led by Louis Jucherau de St. Denis in the French attack on Pensacola in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Natchitoches wanted to return to the Red River, and in 1714 they guided an expedition, backed by Crozat and led by St. Denis, from Natchez to the Spanish Rio Grande presidio, where St. Denis hoped to establish trade. Instead, having won the hand of the commandant’s granddaughter, he was sent to prison in Mexico. But he had already established Fort St. Jean Baptiste among the Natchitoches Caddo on the Red River in 1714, which would eventually be a thriving bicultural settlement (though it was countered by a nearby Spanish mission founded in 1716).[56] In 1714 also, Véniard de Bourgmont explored the Missouri River as far as the Platte, reported conditions there among the Pawnee and Omaha, and supplied enough information to put the region on French maps.
English-supported slave raids ceased for two reasons: Indian slavery became uneconomic and it was cut off by a local rebellion against the English of Carolina by the Yamasee in 1715. While the English were looking the other way, as it were, the French took the opportunity to establish a firmer footing with strategically-located forts. In 1716 the French built Fort Rosalie at Natchez and in 1718 Fort St. Pierre at the Yazoo River confluence with the Mississippi. But these forts were not only built to guard the Mississippi River against the English, nor to assist with the exploitation of mines in the Illinois country, even though English attacks from the east came in 1708 and 1712, and an English agent was captured on the Mississippi in 1713. They were also built to monitor and control activities of First Nations groups and to bind them to the French interest through trade.
It is also clear that French diplomatic activities, both official and in terms of the work of maintaining equable relationships wherever Frenchmen and Indians met in the Louisiana colony, was from the start consciously framed to build the kind of middle ground of mutual translation and accommodation that White described for the Great Lakes region. Iberville began the process in 1704 by placing young boys with native leaders to learn their language and be reared within their culture so as to serve later as interpreters, and this foundation provided a cadre of interpreters that over time developed métis branches and continued to serve under Spanish and even American regimes.[57] Iberville’s brother Bienville, who was active in the colony for some thirty years, was noted for his diplomatic talents, and he made use of several equally talented relatives.[58] Although initially efforts were made to force Native structures of governance into a redistributive system that the French could use to influence events directly, over time the institution of “Indian presents” came to bear the aspect more of the actual indigenous system than of the virtual one that the French wished to construct.
Yet French Louisiana, in spite of its recognized “good” relations with many of the First Nations peoples who lived in its lands and hinterlands, had a central struggle at its heart that marked the entire history of the colony, and that struggle focused on the only remaining true remnant of a Mississippian-style chiefdom in the region: the Natchez. Trouble with the Natchez touched every First Nations ally (and enemy), and it still echoed in the 1790s when the Spanish governor Gayoso produced a Natchez stone pipe to consecrate negotiations for permission to establish Fort Nogales. The story of the Natchez relationship is in a sense emblematic of the worst fate that First Nations people met from the French in Louisiana: destruction, enslavement, and diaspora.[59]
La Salle had had a nervous brush with the Natchez; the missionary St. Cosme found them unreceptive to his message. The Natchez Suns were autocrats with life and death power over their people; the analogy between them and the French Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, was not lost upon the French. Nor did the Natchez Suns willingly tolerate what they perceived as diplomatic slights. In addition, the English interest in the Mississippi extended to obscure but relatively certain contacts with the Natchez through their Chickasaw allies. In 1716 an incident between the Natchez and the French revealed the internal factionalism that could be wrought by the influence of competing Europeans. The new French governor, La Mothe Cadillac, had refused the Natchez calumet ceremony and offended Natchez leaders in 1715, while ordering Bienville to erect a fort among them. Before Bienville could act, the Natchez were accused of the murder and robbery of four Canadian voyageurs making their way upriver to the Illinois country. At the same time the French trade house that had been established among the Natchez was also plundered by Natchez warriors who anticipated reprisals, and Bienville then had to undertake a punitive expedition. Camped south of the Natchez among the friendly Tunicas, he lured Natchez chiefs to his temporary fort, captured them, and executed those he found to be responsible for the deaths. Though the English-allied Sun of Terre Blanche town had escaped, Bienville succeeded in obtaining return of the stolen goods and assistance in constructing the fort, probably from those Natchez more disposed toward alliance with the French. It seems reasonable to believe that English incentives might have been responsible for the attack.
But this was just the beginning of difficulties for the Natchez, not the end. When the Louisiana colonial effort was farmed out by the crown to the speculative colonizing ventures of the Company of the West under the direction of John Law, preparations for an influx of colonists in Louisiana began with the foundation of a new capital at New Orleans. A second French trading post was established further up the Red River among the Kadohadacho Caddo in 1719. In the same year French immigrants began to arrive on the Gulf coast, poorly supplied and in desperate need of assistance from Indian allies, which was forthcoming from the coastal tribes. Although an abortive attempt was made to make a settlement at the Arkansas post and small settlements were made at Fort St. Pierre among the Yazoos and on the Gulf Coast and lower Mississippi, it was soon found that the lands of the Natchez region were by far the most fruitful for the agricultural enterprises—tobacco and indigo—planned for the French plantations, and the largest French land grants were made there, served by labor of the first African slaves to be brought to Louisiana.
The Natchez dealt patiently with the French to grant them land on usufruct terms, but the settlement of such a large number of people eventuated in friction. In 1723 a Natchez elder was killed by a French soldier, and another disturbance ensued. Clearly the resentment it stirred did not fade away, especially when the post commander Chepart moved to exploit Natchez land for his own benefit and that of his patron Governor Perier in 1729. By that time the leading French partisans, Tattooed Serpent and the Grand Village Great Sun, were dead. When Chepart demanded a specific piece of land that included what he judged to be an abandoned mound site, the Natchez asked for time to harvest their crops. They took the time to organize—perhaps with the help and encouragement of the English—an uprising that might have originally included all the tribes of the Yazoo and the Choctaw and Chickasaw. In the event, when the Natchez under guise of hunting to provision the French settlement seized all the French guns, killed the French men and numerous women and children, and took another group of women and children hostage, they also had the assistance of the enslaved Africans who had worked the French farms.
The Natchez fled both west and east, with one segment being hunted down on the Red River and sent to the French Caribbean as slaves; while another escaped to the Chickasaw and were taken in by them to form their own village. The diaspora of the Natchez changed the balance of First Nations power in the lower Mississippi region. It enhanced the importance to the French of the Tunica and Ofo on the east bank of the Mississippi and the Quapaw and Caddo to the west. It brought ruin in the form of attacks by the Quapaw on the Yazoo, who had joined the Natchez in revolt and killed French soldiers and settlers at Fort St. Pierre. The Chakchiuma, who had stayed out of the revolt, were nevertheless forced to retreat from the Yazoo River to join the Choctaw and then the Chickasaw. Finally, the Natchez flight attracted French warfare against the Chickasaw in 1736 and 1740, into which the Choctaw were drawn as participants in spite of their deep traditional relationship and ongoing marriage alliances with the Chickasaw, and even Illinois and other allied peoples from the Illinois country and the Great Lakes were involved. The Chickasaw themselves were rent by factional strife as a result, since not all Chickasaws were happy to welcome the Natchez. Eventually many of the Natchez moved once again to become the Notchee among the Cherokee of North Carolina, a small tribe by the same name in South Carolina, and a band among the Coosa in Alabama. For a time it looked as though one segment of the Chickasaw might break off and settle among the Choctaw. Further, factional rivalries evident among the Choctaw before and during the Chickasaw wars broke out into open civil war in 1746, incited by French demands for restitution after the killing of three Frenchmen. This internecine struggle did not end before some 800 people, several of them important leaders, had been killed, but the divisional structure of the confederacy survived.
In the years leading up to the Seven Years’ War, most European attention was focused to the east, on the French/English rivalry. Yet westward, the trade in horses and skins was booming and the Caddo and Tunica were prospering with it as middlemen, so much so in the Tunica case that the burials of their leaders came to be astoundingly rich with French trade goods. The Quapaw further north had moved their villages because of a flood in 1748, and the following year persuaded the French to move their fort also after a Chickasaw attack. In the Illinois country, a prosperous multiracial and métis farming society of French traders and farmers, christianized Illinois Indians, and African slaves developed on the old lands of the Cahokia chiefdom, taking advantage of the fertility that had supported it; this settlement was also the gateway to the fur trade of the northern Plains and beyond, and its leading citizens prospered in outfitting traders. East of the Mississippi the Choctaw continued low-level hostilities with some of the Upper Creek towns, traded with the Chickasaws’ English traders when French trade goods ran low, as they did in the late 1750s, and continued to war on the Chickasaws at other times on behalf of the French. The Chickasaw for their part remained clients and allies of the English.
The Wages of History
Over the period from roughly 1500-1760, then, it is possible to trace in the region of the Purchase a wide range of trajectories that historic polities might take in reaction to contact with Europeans. The Siouan Quapaw moved into the Valley, made alliance with the French on their first entry into the region, and remained dependable allies: they suffered for it through population diminution. The Caddo confederated segments, having drawn together geographically prior to European contact, dispersed widely into regional centers to exploit their environment more effectively through the fur and horse trades. The Natchez began as the most authoritarian, took in refugee bands of Koroa, Grigra, and Tioux when their population declined, but fell afoul of the French in defending their right to control their own sacred spaces; they ended destroyed, enslaved in Santo Domingo, or in diaspora in Tennessee or the Carolinas. The Choctaw as a protohistoric confederation of some four disparate but related peoples were able to maintain their alliance even through civil war, possibly because of their relatively remote location. The Chickasaws absorbed Natchez, Yazoo, and Chakchiuma people, but themselves suffered from constant strife for their strategic and willingly established location at the point of French and English struggle for the interior.
As Dan Usner has described, the large patterns of imperial policy and purpose do not truly portray the texture of the myriad contacts between the broad range of European soldiers, settlers, traders, and their First nations counterparts of all levels and interests. First Nations people and French people had a mutual interest in exchange on which they built what Usner has called a “frontier exchange economy” in the region, based not only on the exchange of deerskins, buffalo robes, and beaver pelts to be shipped to France, but on the foods the French needed to survive and the clothing and items of personal adornment that First Nations leaders needed to maintain their leadership and ordinary men and women wanted in order to save their labor for the preparation of animal skins.[60] First Nations people not only participated in the commercial hunting that skewed their tribal economies, but served the French military as scouts and guides. The always serious shortage of French women meant that male French soldiers and settlers contracted sexual relationships with First Nations women, and both became the parents of métis children.
None of this took place without the continuing presence and periodic outbreak of European disease: smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, cholera, and perhaps even bubonic plague continued to be brought into the country with every boatload of settlers or soldiers from France or enslaved Africans from the Senegambia and the insects and vermin that accompanied them. Added to this constant detriment to the health of First Nations people was the problem of a trade in alcohol, which although it was not nearly so serious with the French as it would become later with the English, was resorted to by traders to obtain advantage in the trade and was constantly complained of by chiefs who deplored the violence that it led to when men indulged in it to excess.
No First Nation in the Americas, no matter how powerful or populous, was untouched by European colonization. European disease did additional damage as it continued to be communicated in different episodes to First Nations peoples. European trade did more damage, especially the trade in alcohol that undermined some vision-seeking spiritual practices, enmeshed First Nations people in a debt-and-credit trade system, and led to domestic red-on-red violence. But First Nations in the Purchase region had a long history of adaptations and change: of migrations, wars, alliances, changes in subsistence base and economy, and as of the end of French Louisiana, in the lands of the Purchase, First Nations people and polities still held the balance of power.
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[1] Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan University Press, 1973) works out the literary construction of the dramatis personae of the frontier, while Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating
and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), carries the momentum of Manifest Destiny through Korea and Vietnam, a broad stroke when he wrote it that now seems modest.
[2] The phrase is from Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on the genetic unreality of race, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).
[3] See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) for a powerful example of how this was done to construct a Eurocentric history of Haiti.
[4] Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) has articulated this argument in detail. This kind of contemptuous treatment of the Indian past has persisted in schoolbooks almost until the present day. See James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History Textook Got Wrong ( Touchstone Books, 1996).
[5] Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
[6] For a critique of the revival of the “pioneering Frenchmen” Solutrean hypothesis by a Solutrean specialist, see Lawrence Guy Straus, “Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality,” American Antiquity 65(2), April 2000: 219-226. A group of physical anthropologists, returning to the nineteenth-century roots of their discipline in skull-measuring scientific racism (Robert Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986]), are claiming that the most ancient remains are not those of the ancestors of modern Indians, and therefore belong to all of humanity: see James Chatters, Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), and contrast James Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
[7] For the internal politics of the construction of National Geographic discourse about noneuropeans, see Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Interestingly, during the same decades that indigenous people worldwide were beginning to resist the exploitation of their cultural patrimony by looters and archaeologists driven by a commoditized European art market, Archaeology Magazine ceased to accept advertisements for the sale of genuine artifacts from the noneuropean world, and began allowing only advertisements for reproductions.
[8] These two arguments are well framed in a pair of articles dating to 2000: Roger C. Echo-Hawk, “Ancient History in the New World: Integrating Oral Traditions and the Archaeological Record,” American Antiquity 65(2): 267-290; and Ronald J. Mason, “Archaeology and Native American Oral Traditions,” American Antiquity 65(2): 239-266.
[9] For a situated history of Americanist archaeology, see Alice Beck Kehoe, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (New York: Routledge, 1998).
[10] For a broad range of academic positions on both sides of the connected issue of repatriation of First Nations skeletal and artifactual remains, see Devon A. Mihesuah (ed.), Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Philip Phillips, James Ford, and James Griffin were more honest than most when they remarked in 1951, before radiocarbon dating had taken hold in archaeology, “This may be our last opportunity for old-fashioned uncontrolled guessing.” (Philip Phillips, James Ford, and James B. Griffin, Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley,1940-1947 [Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology 25, 1951], 455). I am indebted to Marvin Jeter, “From Prehistory through Protohistory to Ethnohistory in and near the Northern Lower Mississippi Valley,” in Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson (eds.), The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 177-224; p. 220, for reminding me of this remark.
[11] Colin Tudge’s The Time Before History: Five Million Years of Human Impact (New York: Scribner, 1996) places all human endeavor within an environmental framework, and provides a perspective within which the pioneering and settlement of the Americas in the short space of a few thousand years can be seen for the enormous accomplishment it was at a time when “history” had not yet begun, at Sumer or anywhere else.
[12] For a summary and detailed bibliography of the evidence for a more complex picture of the First Nations role in the changing fauna of North America, see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 29-43, references 236-242.
[13] Echo-Hawk, “Ancient History,” 276-277.
[14] And other efforts were spurred by NAGPRA and the Columbus Quincentenary, among them an effort by Hopi pueblos to collect and record traditional histories: see Hartman Lomawaima, “Hopification, a Strategy for Cultural Preservation,” in David Hurst Thomas (ed.), Columbian Consequences, Volume 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 93-99. See also George P. Horse Capture, “An American Indian Perspective,” in Herman Viola and Carolyn Margolis (eds.), Seeds of Change: Five Hundred Years Since Columbus (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 186-207; this essay explicitly relates the beginnings of European colonization to recent Indian actions like the occupation of Alcatraz and combines insights from ethnographically-preserved tradition and oral tradition, as well as written Euroamerican history. Serious attention to origin histories is now quite routinely paid: see Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 9-11, where the Iroquois creation story is cited as “allegorical truth.”
[15] See Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian.
[16] For recent studies of Mississippian-period architecture, see R. Barry Lewis and Charles Stout (eds.), Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Robert Mainfort and Richard Walling (eds.), Mounds, Embankments, and Ceremonialism in the Midsouth (Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, 1996).
[17] A forthcoming book of essays, Organization and Power in the Southeast Archaic, edited by Jon Gibson and Philip Carr (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, n.d.), addresses this new thinking about Archaic moundbuilding. It should be pointed out that in the last thirty years the discourse of complexity in archaeology has morphed from the static categories of rank and inequality to the more dynamic concepts of power, dominance, and resistance; it is not clear whether archaeological evidence is capable of addressing the element of intentionality in the latter set.
[18] For a handy summary of Woodland moundbuilding, see Jay Johnson, Gena Aleo, Rodney Stuart, and John Sullivan, The 1996 Excavations at the Batesville Mounds (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History Archaeological Report 32, 2002), 87-94. In the past twenty years the recognition as Woodland period of some southern multiple-mound sites like Pinson in Tennessee and Ingomar in Mississippi has had similar impacts on archaeological thinking as has the “discovery” of Archaic mounds.
[19] Robert L. Hall has described a possible articulation of First Nations legend that could account for Mississippian symbolic complexes in An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). See also Patricia Galloway (ed.), Southeastern Ceremonial Complex: Artifacts and Analysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
[20] For the patterns of Mississippian architecture see Lewis and Stout, Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces.
[21] For a relatively recent symposium volume covering current ideas about Native elites in Mississippian moundbuilding cultures see Alex Barker and Timothy Pauketat (eds.), Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America (Washington, DC: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 3, 1992).
[22] For a brief and readable recent summary of the emergence of gathering and agriculture as subsistence in the American South, see Gayle Fritz, “The Development of Native Agricultural Economies in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” in Vincas P. Steponaitis (ed.), The Natchez District in the Old, Old South (Southern Research Report #11; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 23-47.
[23] See Alex Barker and Timothy Pauketat, “Introduction: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America,” in Lords of the Southeast, 1-10; citation is to pp. 2-3.
[24] For a group of essays on the beginning of the Mississippian phenomenon, see Bruce Smith (ed.), The Mississippian Emergence (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
[25] This nomenclature is derived from the evolutionary social-development scheme suggested by Elman Service, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective (New York: Random House, 1962). In this book Service proposed an evolutionary scheme from primitive bands through tribes to chiefdoms, and archaeologists quickly took up the scheme to map it onto paleolithic and archaic hunters (bands), village-dwelling hortidculturist-hunters (tribes), and moundbuilding agriculturists (chiefdoms). This sequential scheme is now no longer seen as causal, but its terminology is still popularly used.
[26] For a collection of essays reflecting recent research on the Cahokia site and region, see Timothy Pauketat and Thomas Emerson, Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
[27] For an overview see essays in Patricia Galloway (ed.), Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.
[28] The foundational argument for this environmental requirement was made by Bruce Smith in his article “Variation in Mississippian Settlement Patterns,” in his edited volume Mississippian Settlement Patterns (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 479-503.
[29] For Cahokia and the trajectory of Mississippian polities in general see Pauketat and Emerson, Cahokia. An essay collection concentrating on the “late prehistory” of the Mississippi valley is David Dye and Cheryl Cox (eds.), Towns and Temples Along the Mississippi (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990).
[30] See Smith and Hally, “Chiefly Behavior: Evidence from Sixteenth Century Spanish Accounts,” in Lords of the Southeast, 99-109; citation, p. 99.
[31] There is some discussion as to the ethnic affiliation of the Spiro site. For some time it has been considered Caddoan, but new evidence has suggested the idea that it has Tunican connections. See Marvin Jeter, “From Prehistory through Protohistory.”
[32] For an authoritative source on the Indians of the Plains, see William Sturtevant and Raymond Demallie (eds.), Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 13, Plains, 2 vols. (Washington, Government Printing Office, 2001).
[33] In the late 1980s and 1990s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers financed the writing of regional archaeological summaries (“cultural resource overviews”) to bring this information together for the south central region immediately west of the Mississippi and the Great Plains. These studies included Marvin Jeter, Jerome Rose, G. Ishmael Williams, and Anna Harmon, Archaeology and Bioarchaeology of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Trans-Mississippi South in Arkansas and Louisiana (Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series 37, 1989); Jack L. Hofman (ed.), Archeology and Paleoecology of the Central Great Plains (Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series 48, 1996); George Frison and Robert Mainfort (eds.), Archeological and Bioarcheological Resources of the Northern Plains (Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series 47, 1996). For the Mississippi Valley, Dan and Phyllis Morse, Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley (New York: Academic Press, 1983) is now a little dated but indispensable because of the region it covers; while the classic summaries for the Lower Mississippi Valley, though long out of date, have not been replaced: Philip Phillips, James Ford, and James B. Griffin, Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947 (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology 25, 1951) and Philip Phillips, Archaeological Survey on the Lower Yazoo Basin, Mississippi, 1949-1955, 2 vols. (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 60, 1970).
[34] The emblematic study here is Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a review of this new literature see James Axtell, “Columbian Encounters: Beyond 1992,” William and Mary Quarterly XLIX, 2 (April 1992), 335-360; Dan Usner, “The History of American Indians in the Early South,” in Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 1-14 and (notes) 139-146; and Colin Calloway, “bibliographical Essay,” in Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 199-217.
[35] See for example Jose Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
[36] Henry Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983). For an abundantly-documented quincentenary overview of the scholarship on the whole question of Indian population see John Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quarterly XLIX: 2 (1992), 298-320.
[37] The most vociferous response came from David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), who was not the first to bring attention to the often careless use of sources by scholars in the debate. A more recent essay by Paul Kelton has suggested that conditions for pandemics were not right in the Southeast, at least, before 1699/1700, since it was unlikely that the Soto expedition brought acute diseases and the southeastern interior remained essentially untouched until the end of the seventeenth century: see “The Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic, 1696-1700: The Region’s First Major Epidemic?,” in Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 21-38.
[38] American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 43. His book’s real strength lies in the fact that Thornton takes in a longer temporal trajectory that considers population recovery in the eighteenth century and subsequent recrudescence of disease and the perpetration of genocidal wars under conditions of internal colonization in the nineteenth century.
[39] An extraordinary work of scholarship by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), provides survivor Cabeza de Vaca’s account in a dual language edition with detailed scholarly apparatus and contextualizing essays.
[40] See Elizabeth John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996; first ed. 1975) for background on the Coronado expedition.
[41] An enormous Soto industry was inspired by the work of Charles Hudson and his colleagues, including their own work and that of others. Lawrence Clayton, Vernon Knight, and Edward Moore edited new and old translations of the source accounts in The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto in the United States, 1539-1543, 2 vols. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993); Charles Hudson provided a summative overview of his work in Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); and two collections of essays were published: Gloria Young and Michael Hoffman (eds.), The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi, 1541-1543 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); Patricia Galloway (ed.), The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
[42] For an overview of European colonial impact on the southern Plains and Texas, see Elizabeth John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds.
[43] For the establishment of Spanish hegemony over the Gulf of Mexico, see Robert Weddle, Spanish Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500-1685 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985).
[44] Dobyns, Numbers, 302-335. Two studies of such effects are Ann Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), and Marvin Smith, Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1987).
[45] An overview of what happened in the South can be found in the essays in Charles Hudson and Carmen Tesser (eds.), The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). Entire studies have been devoted to some of the larger tribes. See, for the Creeks, Gregory Waselkov and Marvin Smith, “Upper Creek Archaeology” (242-264) and John Worth, “The Lower Creeks: Origins and Early History” (265-298), both in Bonnie McEwan (ed.), Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); for the Choctaw, Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); for the Caddo, Timothy Perttula, The Caddo Nation: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
[46] For a detailed consideration of this and other questions in the region centered on Arkansas and addressing Quapaw, Natchezans, Tunicans, and Caddos, see Jeter, “From Prehistory through Protohistory.”
[47] For the effect of firearms on Indian groups, see Patrick Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
[48] After Soto it became obvious to Spain that there would be no hugely lucrative discoveries made in the North American interior, thus despite the failure of his successor Tristán de Luna, a significant settlement eventually to take in most of the Florida peninsula and to stretch westward to the borders of Alabama was set up, and lasted until English colonial agression destroyed the mission towns of north Florida and enslaved or dispersed their people in 1704. See Eugene Lyon, The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Spanish Conquest of 1565-1568 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1983 [orig. ed. 1974]); Paul Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Amy Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 74, 1994); and John Hann, Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1988).
[49] There is little recent scholarship on the expedition, but a biography of Jolliet is available by the Jesuit scholar Jean Delanglez, Louis Jolliet, vie et voyages (1645-1700) (Montreal: Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 1950).
[50] For the Mississippi expedition, see Patricia Galloway (ed.), La Salle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982); for documents and commentary see Robert Weddle, Mary Christine Morkovsky, and Patricia Galloway (eds.), La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf: Three Primary Documents (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987). The First Nations group probably included Mahicans and Abenakis. Lewis and Clark learned well the lesson of the disarming message given by the presence of First Nations women and children accompanying explorers.
[51] Robert S. Weddle’s unstinting scholarship has also opened a fresh window on the second La Salle expedition and its Spanish response. See his Wilderness Manhunt: The Spanish Search for La Salle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973); The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682-1762 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991); The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001); and Weddle, Morkovsky, and Galloway, La Salle.
[52] Extensive work on the history of the Arkansas post has been carried out by Morris Arnold, whose most recent historical overview is Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Social and Cultural History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991).
[53] For the definitive history of the early years of the French in Louisiana, see Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, Volume 1, The Reign of Louis XIV, 1698-1715, trans. Joseph Lambert (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974).
[54] See the extended work of Jeffrey Brain, Tunica Treasure (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 71; Harvard: Peabody Museum, 1979), Tunica Archaeology (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 78; Harvard, Peabody Museum, 1988); for a more recent consideration of Tunicas and Quapaw, with a consideration of Quapaw tradition and linguistic evidence, see Marvin Jeter, “From Prehistory through Protohistory.”
[55] Remarkably, the relatively small Taensa group not only retained its coherence living in the Mobile delta region, but in 1764 moved back west of the Mississippi to settle around the Red River. See John Swanton, Indians of the Lower Mississippi Valley and adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 43; Washington, GPO, 1911).
[56] For these activities of the French and Spanish see Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, Volume 2: Years of Transition, 1715-1717, trans. Brian Pearce (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1993).
[57] Patricia Galloway, “Talking with Indians: Interpreters and Diplomacy in French Louisiana,” in Winthrop Jordan and Sheila Skemp (eds.), Race and Family in the Colonial South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 109-130.
[58] For a general view of French experience in Canada with interpreters, including the influence of the Le Moyne family in that regard, see Peter Laurence Cook, “New France’s Agents of Intercultural Diplomacy: The Western Frontier, 1703-25,” in A.J.B. Johnston, Proceedings of the Twentieth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (Cleveland: French Colonial Historical Society, 1996), 59-79.
[59] For a detailed essay on the Natchez trajectory in the Louisiana colony (although not for their origin), see Dan Usner, “French-Natchez Borderlands in Colonial Louisiana,” in Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15-32.
[60] Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
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