Joseph M. Hall - Zamumos Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Zamumos Gifts

Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

JOSEPH M. HALL JR.

Copyright 2009 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hall, Joseph M., Jr.
Zamumos gifts : Indian-European exchange in the colonial Southeast / Joseph M. Hall, Jr.
p. cm. (Early American studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4179-2 (alk. paper)
1. Indians of North AmericaSouthern StatesHistoryColonial period, ca. 16001775. 2. Indians of North AmericaFirst contact with EuropeansSouthern States. 3. Indians of North AmericaCommerceSouthern StatesHistory17th century. 4. Indians of North AmericaCommerceSouthern StatesHistory18th century. 5. EuropeansCommerceSouthern StatesHistory17th century. 6. EuropeansCommerceSouthern StatesHistory18th century. 7. Southern StatesHistoryColonial period, ca. 16001775. I. Title.
E78.S65H35 2009
973.2dc22

2009001011

Abbreviations

Introduction

Zamumo, the chief of Altamaha, had to think carefully in the early spring of 1540. Hundreds of unknown men were apparently a two-day journey to the southwest, and they were headed toward his town in the Oconee Valley of todays central Georgia. Although the intruders did not seem violent, their strange metal weapons and the paucity of women in their party suggested a disturbing aversion to peace. Of course, Zamumo was not without power of his own. From the summit of the flattopped pyramid of earth that his townspeople had constructed, he had close ties with the spirits who shaped the world. Its seven-meter elevation offered him a commanding view of his town and its environs. West of his mound along the banks of the Oconee River were the cane-roofed homes of his followers, who numbered perhaps as many as a thousand and occupied the largest, if not the most populous, town in the valley. Farther west, just across the river, lay extensive fields of corn, beans, and squash. Spring planting had only just begun, but the granaries still held supplies from last years harvest, and Zamumo still enjoyed the finest deer and bear that hunters could find. A lofty position in a prosperous town reassured him, but it probably did not content him because his power depended on what he could acquire from the wide and dangerous world beyond Altamaha. Some objects of power came from Ocute, a more prominent chief who lived a one-day journey upriver, but only in exchange for Zamumos tribute. In this news of the visitors, then, lay a tantalizing opportunity. Perhaps, if they proved friendly, they might provide him with influence Ocute did not possess.

So he sent gifts to the approaching foreigners. Women went out with food, and a messenger welcomed the intruders with an offering that their record keepers failed to name. Altamahas paddled the newcomers across the Oconee River, and there, on its banks, Zamumo met this strange party of bearded men, their immense horses, their fierce war dogs, their voracious and innumerable pigs, and their leader, Hernando de Soto. From de Soto, Zamumo received a gift of a silver-colored feather. He accepted gratefully. You are from heaven, he replied in the words of a later chronicler, and this your feather that you give me, I can eat with it; I will go forth to war with it; I will sleep with my wife with it.

Zamumos giftsthose he offered as well as those he receivedsymbolized how the power of the foreign supported the security and autonomy of the leader and his community.

With his question regarding tribute, Zamumo revealed his hopes that de Soto and Ocute might both compete for his friendship. In the Southeast, a people with multiple partners could always hope for leverage against both by pitting one against the other. Whatever his ambitions, Zamumo failed to harness these newcomers for old practices because de Soto refused to challenge Ocute during his short stay in the Oconee Valley. More ominously, he initiated a host of unforeseen changes. Within a generation of this meeting at Altamaha, the mound-building peoples of the Southeast, including the Altamahas, began to decline, and the ambitions of Europeans for the lands that some called La Florida began to grow. De Soto failed in his search for riches, but in the two centuries after 1540, other Europeans found wealth in trade with the Indians and in raising their own crops for sale to countrymen across the Atlantic. Exchange remained important, but by the early eighteenth century, Indians traded deerskins and captives for an ever-expanding list of European tools, weapons, and cloth. The gifts that had once tied a few leaders together with bonds of reciprocity and mutual obligation had apparently given way to commodities that bound many men and women in relations of prices and profits. As South Carolinas preeminent trader and imperialist Thomas Nairne observed of the Indians in 1708, They Effect them most who sell best cheap. Three decades later, the German traveler and artist Philip George Friedrich von Reck seemed to capture British mercantile dominance over French and Spanish rivals in several watercolors of Yuchis living along the upper Savannah River. In one portrait of the chief Senkaitschi and his wife, the couple displayed the latest in English-sponsored fashion: she with a blue skirt and a white blanket trimmed with a red stripe, he with a red breech-clout and blue leggings.