Spanish organization of the missions frequently confirmed Native leaders’ expectation that they were adding a new and powerful people into old networks of power. Franciscans, like their new charges, preferred to organize their churches around large, settled populations. They reinforced pre-contact settlement hierarchies by establishing their missions (known as doctrinas) in the principal towns, making occasional visits to the outlying villages, which became visitas. As respectful followers were expected to do, converts had to plant a communal field, or sabana, for the friar’s support and also gave him game from the hunt. Governors made explicit their claims to superior status by confirming the successors of deceased caciques of doctrinas, but they also made sure not to contravene Natives’ choices. Chastened by years of failure, Spanish officials had abandoned the impositions of empire in favor of the flexibility of chiefly influence. Not surprisingly, friction remained. Indian converts did not necessarily submit fully to Roman Catholic doctrine and governors’ efforts to collect tribute from townspeople directly challenged chiefly prerogatives of receiving and distributing their towns’ harvests. Mission revolts during the next century exposed the limits of Indian acquiescence.27
But precisely because gifts could not purchase the obedience Spaniards craved, they also likely helped secure these gifts’ widespread prominence. Hundreds of miles from the missions, few people had met Spaniards, but they knew of their goods and they probably heard rumors of the spiritual power that accompanied their makers. Much like the people of Coosa before them, the people of St. Augustine enjoyed regional prominence thanks to the reciprocal rather than extractive relations they had to build with their neighbors. This influence, however unintentional from the Spanish perspective, provided inland peoples with new resources to maintain their towns in a new world.
Gifts and the Reorganization of the Oconee Valley
It is not easy to determine how southeastern Indians effected these changes. The best evidence comes from the missions, but Indians there confronted other Spanish pressures and so could not always adapt as they saw fit. Nonetheless, enough fragmentary evidence exists regarding the Oconee Valley to show that Spaniards had learned well some of the norms of Mississippian gift-giving. More important, it hints at the ways that at least part of old Mississippian exchange networks were becoming part of a Floridian one. The rise of Spanish influence (or at least Spanish goods) in the Oconee Valley followed a decade of Spanish successes in St. Augustine’s immediate environs. Spanish spiritual power and material generosity spurred a string of evangelical successes after 1587, including conversions among the Timucuan Mocamas and Potanos north and west of St. Augustine and even among the Guales after 1595. Hoping to build on these successes, in 1597 Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo sent additional expeditions north, west, and south, beyond the limits of the mission towns. The ambitious Méndez hoped that these evangelical forays could transform the region’s political and religious landscape. Although the expedition west into the peninsula would be the only one to lead to later conversions, Spaniards had a significant if subtle influence on the peoples of central Georgia. Thanks to the arrival of Spanish goods after 1597, the Indians of the Oconee Valley began to reorganize their polities. They did so within older patterns of chiefdom rivalry, but we should not overestimate the significance of such continuities. Disease may have followed these goods inland, and although chiefs and followers may have enjoyed relatively good health, the political fortunes of their societies were increasingly linked to the possession of Spanish objects.
Two Franciscans, Fr. Pedro de Chozas and Francisco de Veráscola, led the evangelical expedition north to the Oconee Valley early in the summer of 1597. Accompanying them were Gaspar de Salas, a soldier and interpreter who spoke Guale, and an escort of thirty Indians led by Don Juan, the mico of Guale’s principal town of Tolomato. Chozas loaded them, as the Franciscan Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo put it in his epic poem, La Florida, “with Castillian blankets, with knives, fish hooks, and scissors, and with very fine glass beads, with sickles and cutting axes.” The party set out from the Guale mission of Tolomato, expecting that the people of Altamaha and Ocute “would know the power of our people and the little which they enjoyed in their western lands.” Chozas supplemented these material demonstrations with suitably dramatic preaching, and the formidable Veráscola further exhibited the power of the Spaniards and their god by successfully wrestling “chest to chest” many challengers in the towns they visited. Escobedo was writing an epic of Franciscan achievement, and we should expect some exaggeration, but even his heroic narrative described the material, physical, and cosmological power that resided in St. Augustine and east across the ocean in terms that chiefs and their followers would appreciate.28
One day after reaching the valley and its immense fields of ripening corn, beans, grapes, and watermelons, the travelers arrived in the town of Altamaha, where Chozas met the members of the leading family in the council house and presented to each a blanket. Impressed with the offer, the leaders permitted him to speak to the town. The following day, Chozas had “the king” place a cross in the center of the plaza, and then he and Veráscola called the community to meet inside the council house, where, after observing a grave and prolonged silence, Chozas proceeded to instruct the people about the Christian faith. A sudden rain shower convinced his listeners of his cosmological connections, and the town accepted baptism en masse and reciprocated with gifts to the Spaniards. In both acts, Altamahas expressed their own desire to build a deeper relationship.29 Continuing inland one more day to Ocute, the visitors were again “well received.” They noted with surprise and hope that the women of Ocute wore shawls similar to those of New Spain. All seemed well, but as soon as they indicated a desire to continue further on their journey, perhaps to determine the proximity of New Spain itself, the chief Ocute “obstructed them with much pleading and crying,” explaining that many of those further inland still recalled de Soto’s visit and hoped to kill some of those related to the ruthless invader. More troubling, the valley residents’ ardor was cooling, and the missionaries failed to convert anyone in Ocute. The situation became downright perilous when, on their return through Altamaha, the formerly friendly chief sent a warrior to scalp Chozas. The Franciscan evidently possessed great power, and the chief had decided that the hair on his head—rather than the ideas in it—might improve the chief ’s chances of winning an imminent competition against a neighboring leader. Only a timely shot from Salas’s harquebus saved the missionary. Chozas apparently could not imagine this disappointing reversal was in earnest: the next day, he still insisted on asking for porters to carry his goods. The chief’s emphatic refusal made enough of an impression to send his visitors scurrying home.30
For the Spanish, the expedition accomplished little. Chozas, Veráscola, and Salas returned from the province they called La Tama with glorious accounts of conversions and tantalizing rumors of silver mines, but nothing ever came of either of these chimeras. Altamahas and Ocutes, and especially their leaders, had much more to appreciate from the visit. They had acquired items from the powerful new people of the coast, and perhaps the Spaniards’ ally and subordinate, Juan of Tolomato, might return by way of the newly blazed trail with more such items.31 For his part, Ocute could proudly reflect that he had maintained effective control over his subordinates and his guests. Altamaha’s sudden interest in Chozas’s scalp probably had something to do with Ocute’s refusal to accept conversion, so the shift probably reassured the paramount leader in Ocute that the chief of Altamaha remained loyal to him. The Spaniards had heeded his injunction against venturing further inland, and they had left respectful of but not angered by Ocute’s and Altamaha’s displays of independence. From Ocute, prospects looked good.
Despite these positive developments, Oconee peoples’ hopes of deriving new benefits from St. Augustine, whether via the hands of Franciscans, Guales, or others, took an unexpected turn shortly after Chozas’s hasty departure. Late in September 1597, Guales revolted, destroying the missions, killing five Franciscans, and capturing a sixth. Despite Spaniards’ two years of successes with gifts, old coercive habits died hard. Franciscans had already stacked ample tinder by attacking important Guale traditions