Through the construction and maintenance of their mounds, plazas, and homes, Mississippian townspeople created monuments to their communities and their communities’ relationship to the cosmos. Through the exchange of sacred objects and knowledge, they built networks that supported these towns. After 1492, they met peoples from the land called Spain who also recognized that power could come from exchange. The difference lay in the newcomers’ preference for extraction over reciprocity. They hoped to incorporate Mississippian wealth and labor for the use of the distant centers across the Atlantic Ocean. As Mississippian peoples quickly realized, Spanish visions of exploitation threatened the continued existence of towns as centers of their own worlds. Although armed entrepreneurs achieved legendary success in Mesoamerica and the Andes, the peoples of the Southeast did not succumb to these so-called conquistadors so famously. Only after a half century of failed conquests did Spaniards learn to blend royal support, personal ambition, missionary zeal, and generous gifts to secure a North American beachhead at St. Augustine in 1565. As Spaniards abandoned their military conquest in favor of offering gifts, peoples who bitterly resisted them in the early sixteenth century were seeking them out in the early seventeenth. Spanish influence in the region after 1565 depended on colonists’ ability to develop cooperative relations with their Native neighbors.2
Spaniards had to adapt, but the invasions of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of a new era in southeastern history, an era that saw the end of a Mississippian world and the beginnings of a colonial one. For some the results were catastrophic. The descendants of the once great chiefdom of Coosa recalled these years of transition as a great flood that swallowed most of their town. For others, like the residents of Zamumo’s town of Altamaha, Spanish gifts provided opportunistic leaders with a new route to independence from unwanted superiors like Ocute. Throughout changes great and small, the peoples of the Southeast sought to preserve the towns that defined their worlds, and much of that stability continued to depend on exchange with outsiders. Spaniards took advantage of this fact with calculated generosity.
By the first decades of the seventeenth century, St. Augustine was the center of a new network of exchange that linked town squares throughout the region to the Atlantic outpost. Although Spanish administrative control around 1610 did not extend beyond a chain of missions near the coast, the transformative impact of Spanish Florida was regional.3 Native networks of exchange carried Spanish gifts far inland; by the early 1600s, the peoples of the interior were gaining access to European materials. When Mississippian leaders accepted a gift such as a white feather or glass beads from St. Augustine, they probably hoped that they could incorporate these new objects into old norms regarding peace and power. Even when they succeeded in this conservative effort, Indians participated in radical change. By using European power to rebuild and maintain southeastern towns, they were connecting their lives and fortunes directly or indirectly to the people of St. Augustine. They were helping make a Mississippian region into a Floridian one.
Conquistador Invasions
This process began haltingly. Spaniards initially sought to force Indians into networks rooted in the dominance of a single center rather than the autonomy of many. They followed a well-established pattern. Ambitious men of middling means, including tailors, merchants, and lower nobility, staked their fortunes and lives on dreams of conquest, wealth, and higher social status. Although these dreams were usually tinted gold and silver, aspiring conquistadors all hoped to secure access to Native tributaries and some product of their labors. Because successful conquistadors always outnumbered the encomiendas, or grants of Indian tributaries, that their leaders distributed, those who lacked rank and connections were forced to seek new peoples to subdue. Consequently, Indians throughout the Americas quickly became acquainted with men seeking personal fortune in the name of a distant monarch.4 These ad hoc designs, however grand, met universal failure in the lands called La Florida. When disease and inadequate supplies did not dash Spanish plans, Mississippian warriors did.
Shortly after Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, Florida Natives became acquainted with a dangerous and unpredictable mix of slave raiders and shipwrecked sailors. By the time Juan Ponce de León explored the peninsula’s coast in 1513, the peoples of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were thoroughly convinced of the strangers’ unfriendly intentions. Ponce’s efforts to establish a colony in southwestern Florida ended in 1521 with his death from an arrow wound.5 The aborted settlement marked an inauspicious start to four decades of unsuccessful Spanish entradas, or explorations, into the immense territory Ponce named La Florida. Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón brought 600 colonists to the coast of South Carolina in the summer of 1526, but disease ended his and most others’ lives within months. Only 150 returned to Cuba before the end of the year. In 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez and all but 4 of his 400 soldiers died from arrows, disease, shipwreck, or enslavement, and fellow Spaniards learned of their horrible fate only when Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and three companions crossed paths with a Spanish detachment in northwestern Mexico eight years later. Hernando de Soto, flushed with the riches obtained during the conquest of the Inka, led 600 hopefuls in a fruitless search for a new empire in the southeastern interior between 1539 and 1543. When the roughly 300 survivors arrived in Veracruz, de Soto was not among them.
Of these early invasions, de Soto’s probably had the greatest impact on southeastern history. At the head of 600 men, a handful of women, and thousands of horses and pigs necessary to transport and feed them, de Soto commanded a force larger than most chiefdom towns. What was significant, though, was not the entrada’s size—Narváez and Ayllón had pursued projects of a similar scale—but the extent of its contact with interior peoples. After landing near Tampa Bay, the expedition headed northeast in search of a kingdom reputedly rich with pearls. The army traveled through central Georgia and the chiefdom of Ocute before crossing the abandoned Savannah River Valley that separated it from its rival Cofitachequi. There the Spaniards were greeted by a “lady” carried forth on a litter who offered them lodging, visits to some of her temples, and freshwater pearls.6 Many of de Soto’s followers urged him to establish his new colony among the mounds of piedmont South Carolina. Fertile lands, abundant pearls, and supposedly easy access to Spanish shipping on the Atlantic seemed a perfect combination for future encomiendas. The former lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro, apparently intent on “another treasure like that of Atabalipa, the lord of Peru,” disagreed, and he directed his followers west in search of the chiefdom and ruler known as Coosa. Crossing the Appalachians and entering the Tennessee River Valley, the expedition met Coosa’s tributaries. When the Spaniards finally reached the paramount’s central town, they took him hostage to guarantee their safe passage and their access to people as porters. As with Cofitachequi, Coosa’s renown failed to translate into riches worthy of de Soto’s avarice, and when the expedition reached the limits of Coosa’s dominions, they released the chief, who returned, crying and humiliated, to his now distant home.7
Neither Cofitachequi nor Coosa resisted these brazen intruders, but as word of the Spaniards spread, so too did plans for retaliation. De Soto’s next host, Chief Tascaluza, initially bided his time, offering his hospitality and accompanying the Spaniards as hostage through most of his chiefdom in central Alabama while he called on tributaries and even rivals like Coosa in a desperate bid to halt the Spanish advance. At the town of Mabila, Tascaluza sprang a massive trap. After welcoming de Soto and a small number of his party into the pallisaded town for festivities, the chief gave his order. Warriors poured from the houses, killing five almost immediately. De Soto narrowly escaped the town to rally his forces. With cavalry charges and coordinated assaults with firebrands, Spaniards breached the walls and set the town ablaze. An estimated 2,500 warriors died. Superior armor and discipline kept Spanish losses much lower, but with approximately 20 killed and 150 wounded, not to mention the loss of supplies and the freshwater pearls that constituted their meager plunder, the victors had little to celebrate.8 And so the first year of the expedition ended. Three more remained. After wintering outside Mabila, the force headed west in the spring of 1541, crossing the Mississippi and spending much of the next year and a half living among and fighting with chiefdoms in present-day Arkansas. With de Soto’s death in 1542, the survivors attempted to head overland to Mexico. When the land became