The contractual conquests that had secured Spanish control of the Greater Antilles, Mesoamerica, and the Peruvian highlands failed in the Southeast. Mississippians required new tactics, and the Spanish court’s growing interest in securing the peninsula, which controlled the shipping (and silver) that flowed from the Caribbean across the Atlantic, meant that after 1550 Spain’s Council of the Indies took the unusual measure of financially backing the new ventures. But unusual tactics yielded familiar results. Supply problems and poor relations with Coosa forced Tristán de Luna y Arellano to abandon his colony near modern Pensacola two years after its establishment in 1559. Frustrations abounded, but when King Felipe II learned that French Huguenots under the command of René de Laudonnière were settling Florida’s Atlantic coast, he personally sponsored yet one more attempt. Under the naval commander Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Spaniards established the fortified outpost of St. Augustine and exterminated the French colony in 1565. St. Augustine became Spain’s first permanent foothold in North America in part because the region’s inhabitants had forced Spaniards to adjust the principles and means of empire building. The crown helped finance a new colony and, for the first time, sent professional soldiers instead of entrepreneurial conquistadors. These would not be the first adjustments that European empires would make to the interests of southeastern towns.10
Of course, the residents who imparted these difficult lessons were making their own uncomfortable adjustments. The conquistadors’ violence, hunger, diseases, and cultural practices destabilized many chiefdoms. De Soto frequently resorted to force when hosts did not immediately accommodate his demands, and his infrequent military engagements such as at Mabila exacted a catastrophic toll on local populations. Many communities also lost significant numbers of able-bodied men and women when Spaniards seized them as porters and sexual slaves. Feeding the visitors also took its toll. Spaniards emptied granaries and even cooked up what dogs they could find. It is little wonder that Ocute, where de Soto’s chroniclers recalled a friendly reception, displayed outright hostility to missionaries entering the province fifty-seven years later. Spaniards like de Soto were dangerous and unwelcome visitors even when they were (to their minds at least) friendly.11
For Mississippians, such discomforts and insults initiated a series of profound social changes that convinced many to forsake their mounds and some to abandon their homes. Unfortunately, the roots of these changes continue to baffle scholars. New epidemic diseases from Europe and Africa probably had the greatest impact on the region in the two centuries after Ponce, but what exactly happened? Despite five major Spanish ventures and countless smaller raids and shipwrecks, there are no documented instances of epidemics in the interior before 1696, when a smallpox epidemic ravaged southeastern towns from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River.12 Though the documents say nothing, archaeologists have noticed that settlements diminished in number and size after contact, but the absence of concrete evidence probably means that the horrors of the conquistadors’ violence and rapine may have inflicted more damage than their diseases. Regardless of what caused some communities to struggle after 1540, the region avoided the pandemics that some have previously assumed.13 Even when southeastern communities were spared devastating encounters with death, life also presented a host of new challenges after 1550. The dozen or so towns of Apalachees who farmed the hill country around modern Tallahassee had driven out Narváez and de Soto thanks in part to well-coordinated leadership, but political crises seem to have diminished the power of chiefs so much that by the end of the sixteenth century they had abandoned the mounds at the hearts of their communities. The people of Ocute in central Georgia also abandoned their mounds at about the same time. Altamaha, a tributary chiefdom of Ocute at the time of de Soto, moved its town away from its central mound and, by 1610, severed its tributary ties to Ocute. The peoples of the upper Coosa Valley— including the once mighty Coosa chiefdom—consolidated their shrinking populations in a series of downstream migrations. Descendants of the paramount center were now joining their former tributaries, but they came as refugees. Such movements and the shrinking populations that accompanied them also disrupted the exchange networks that had buttressed chiefly authority. As tributary populations declined and new exotic goods from Europeans became more widely available, burial goods no longer readily distinguished leaders from followers. Many southeastern peoples began to build council houses instead of maintaining chiefly mounds. In slow steps that are difficult to trace in detail, the hierarchical structures of the chiefdoms were giving way to new societies less likely to ascribe great distinction solely on the basis of birth.14
What this meant for the peoples of the region is nearly impossible to determine, but one tantalizing hint comes from the collective memory of the Coosas. In the 1920s, the anthropologist John Swanton published several accounts of the great town’s disappearance beneath the waters of the Coosa River. In the longest version, a pair of Coosa men out hunting came across a pool of rainwater in the hollow of a tree, and in the water were fish. These were no ordinary fish. Because they were creatures of the water living on land, they transgressed a fundamental boundary of the Coosa universe. The first hunter recognized this fact, but his companion cooked and ate them. Almost immediately, the second hunter began to change into a water snake, itself one of the most dangerous creatures in Creek mythology because of its amphibian ambiguity. The first hunter then left his transformed friend in the nearby river and returned to Coosa with the sad news. Returning to the river, he signaled to his snake-friend by firing off his gun, and the two arranged a reunion with the grieving kin. When these relatives gathered in the council house and square ground to meet the snake, his visit caused the council house, the square grounds, and all of the other public buildings to sink beneath the waters of the Coosa River. Only those outside the square grounds remained to lament, “Woe is our nation! We were the greatest of all the nations; our tus-e-ki-yås (great warriors) were numerous, reaching out and known and dreaded the world over. . . . But it is not so now. . . . Shame and humiliation are our portion.” Another version of the story recalled that some of the engulfed townspeople survived beneath the river, where “people could hear a drum beaten there when they were dancing and having their times.” All of the versions agreed that the humbled and humiliated Coosa survivors decided to continue on with their town, renaming themselves Tulsa, because “ulsee signif[ied] in the Muscogee language ‘to be ashamed.’”15
It is possible to read such stories as allegories for the Creeks’ own humbled state in the early twentieth century, when the creation of Oklahoma in 1907 deprived them of the last vestiges of their political independence and the discovery of oil on their lands in 1913 provided their European American neighbors with new excuses to defraud them of great wealth, but the roots of this story go much deeper. After Coosa’s decline sometime in the late sixteenth century, the town never returned to greatness; the trader James Adair recalled it in 1775 as “an old beloved town, now reduced to a small and ruinous village.” Whatever layers of tragedy later generations placed on Coosa’s demise, they lay them on top of a collapse that followed the conquistadors.16
But the story recalled more than tragedy; it centered that tragedy and the act of survival on the town. The people that comprised the town and the civic architecture that organized it all vanished together. That no mound existed to share this fate likely suggests some of the ways that the story had been adapted to resemble the world that tellers and listeners knew (much as the first hunter called to his snake-friend with a gun). Mounds had disappeared, but the people of the old Coosa chiefdom still spoke to their descendants, if perhaps in the muffled tones of those who are submerged. These memories of powerful warriors and great populations still had life in part because those who remained above the water did not abandon each other. Whether they in fact became Tulsas or carried on as Coosas, survivors proved the resilience of the institution of the town by establishing a new one.
Lessons in Southeastern Politics
But to say the chiefdoms were losing their luster after 1550 is not to say that their residents were losing their sense of their past or confidence in their present. However great the changes that Indians faced, Spaniards remained interlopers in a region where the world was still best understood, honored, and regulated in the town square or atop the temple mound. All of these towns needed to regulate their relations with the powerful forces that surrounded