Creeks recall their origin stories to remind themselves who they are, but even in the many stories they have shared with non-Creeks, they are asserting their sense of themselves in relation to outsiders, usually their colonizers. Statements like Gregory’s suggest how Europeans’ involvement in southeastern exchange networks included ideas as well as objects. They also highlight the importance of the historical contexts of these stories from the last three centuries. Most briefly, Chekilli presented Georgia’s leaders with his history lesson to assert his preeminence among the Creeks and also his power in relation to the new Georgia colony. Sixty years later, Tussekiahmico sought to remind Hawkins that Creeks already possessed a civilization and did not need to subscribe to the American version that Hawkins championed. When Ispahihta spoke with Gregory (and, by extension, the anthropologist John Swanton), the Creeks faced the joint political crises of allotment and Oklahoma statehood; the former threatened their land base and the latter their political independence. To assert a Creek power rooted in warfare and migration to the distant Atlantic Ocean (and to tell this to an anthropologist working for the U.S. government) offered a symbolic challenge to a nation that seemed intent on destroying them. Nearly a century later, the stories I heard during a brief visit to Oklahoma came from people who were proud of their history but who were also insistent that their history of emerging clans and migrating towns could not be entirely understood from documents in the archives or books in the library. By way of example from my own experience, when I asked Keeper Johnson about the Creeks’ origins, he confidently explained his own theory, what he called a “Keeperism,” that included Creek descent from the Aztecs who had fled Hernán Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. His story was unique, but his attitude was not.54
In these stories spanning nearly three centuries lies an intellectual history of Creeks charting their future in recollections of their past. The assistance or at least the understanding of outsiders can help, but Creeks always derive their power from their traditions. As the Creek literary scholar Craig Womack contends, by presenting their own history through stories that can only be understood through Creek symbols and cosmology, Creeks “are setting themselves apart as a nation of people with distinct worldviews that deserve to be taken seriously. This is an important exercise of sovereignty.”55 In other words, the talwa is not just a fundamental unit of Creek identity and history, a unit important to the mound-builders as much as the mound-born; it is also the basic unit of interaction with and resistance to the last half millennium of European colonization. The Creeks rarely succeeded entirely on their terms, but when they tell stories about towns born from Mississippian mounds, they affirm centuries of exchange—of things and ideas—that created and supported their towns. This is perhaps the Mississippian period’s greatest legacy, and the Creeks were among those Indians with the good fortune to keep the memory and themselves alive.
But their fortune has not always seemed so good. When the federal government forced Creeks to sell the Ocmulgee Fields in 1828, land-hungry Georgians made every effort to erase signs of the former inhabitants, who had long revered the nearby mounds. Reporting on the sale of the lands, the newspaper of the new town of Macon proclaimed, “We may expect shortly to see the springing up in these romantic retreats, handsome country seats, gardens, orchards, etc. etc. The shadows of superstition which overhung these scenes on the first settlement of the country, concealing beneath their dark mantle the spectral forms of another age, are in a manner dispersed. The goblins and spectres that were supposed to haunt the place some years back are all fled. Of late, we do not hear of unearthly phantoms, nor of unearthly voices.”56 In asserting the rights of the new occupants, it was not enough for the reporter to banish ancestral ghosts that Creeks had seen there for decades.57 Unless any doubt remained about the Creeks’ title to Georgia’s lands, the reporter went on to assert that their historic roots had never been very deep to begin with. No race of “modern Indians” could have constructed earthworks reaching nearly fifty feet in height because “they exhibit in general too much labor.”58 In a short article celebrating the growth of the new town, the article affirmed the silence Adair had pondered over a half century earlier, effacing the memory of the Creeks and the work of their ancestors.
But Macon’s ghosts apparently did not abandon the region. One hundred fifty kilometers northwest, Lynne and Mark Wisner bought a house near Grovetown on the banks of Euchee Creek some time in 1985, happy for the bucolic setting and even for the twenty-foot-high Indian mound located behind their house. Shortly after moving into their home, however, they were disturbed to learn that the unexcavated mound was haunted. Strange lights, drumbeats, and phantom figures dancing in the woods frequently disturbed the Wisners’ sleep. “Imagine getting up in the middle of the night, looking out in the back yard and seeing this strange light going up and down just outside your window,” explained Lynne Wisner. Her husband, daughter, and son-in-law had all seen similar things, and her horse, Dancer, refused to let anyone approach the mound. By 1998 they had gained local renown for the ghosts, but the Wisners had no desire to remove the mound or to leave their home.59 Whether one believes them or not, ghost stories have an inescapable pull because they describe the past unexpectedly manifesting itself in the present. In a sense, they are like the spirit that Mauss described: they represent the remains of a past event, a relationship, that continues to live with (and perhaps haunt) giver and receiver long after an object has been exchanged. It should perhaps not surprise that Creek ghosts still haunt the lands that Indians ceded to European conquerors. It should also not surprise if those ghosts predate the nineteenth-century land cessions. They dance among towns whose roots reach back a half millennium.
Late Mississippian towns were the centers of the Mississippian world, places of sowing and harvest, tribute and bestowal, war and peace, life and death. Around each, a cosmos turned. They were the products of centuries of Mississippian development, but they were more than just smaller, distant offspring of Cahokia. They were the fractious products of the Little Ice Age and the collapse of regional centers like Moundville, Etowah, and Rood’s Landing. They inhabited a more competitive world than their predecessors, one whose exchange networks provided more chiefs with more symbols of power, whose chiefs faced persistent challenges from elite rivals as well as assertive followers. When European colonizers disrupted these societies, they destroyed much of the complex ceremonies and hierarchies as well as the mounds where they were celebrated. Nonetheless, the foundations of that Late Mississippian world remained. However altered, towns survived as guarantors of cosmic balance and communal harmony. So too did the relationships, the spirit of giving, that bound them to others and ensured their survival.
Chapter 2
Floods and Feathers: From the Mississippian to the Floridian
On the fourth day the relatives and friends of the snake-man gathered at the Tcook-u’thlocco [the “Big House” or council house], as had been requested, and many others came near but remained on the outside. Presently the snake-man made his appearance, coming from the stream in which he had taken refuge, and he was followed by a stream of water. When he entered the grounds occupied by the public buildings they all sank along with the people gathered there, and this was the origin of the Coosa River. . . . The residue of the Cosa people, having thus formed a town, bitterly lamented