Gifts mattered so much to Zamumo and Chekilli because reciprocity ensured the strength of the towns they led. Exchange among townspeople maintained equilibrium and hierarchy within the town while exchanges with outsiders provided leaders with rare and powerful objects. Both sets of relationships enabled townspeople to regulate their cosmos with appropriate ceremonies and to maintain friends and resist enemies with large, well-fed, and well-armed populations. Zamumo said as much when he exulted over the feather from de Soto: large harvests, powerful armies, and growing populations would all reinforce his power and perhaps his town’s independence from Ocute. The calculations that informed these conclusions derived their power from centuries of practice. Zamumo was the heir to some six centuries of cultural practices that had first begun in 900 c.e., when people near today’s St. Louis began constructing what would become the largest city in North America. The people of this city called Cahokia introduced a new architecture of massive earthen temple mounds, but they also introduced new relations of exchange. Other southeastern communities adopted Cahokia’s new political economy, but as these successor societies grew in number and competed with one another, they expanded the networks and volume of prestige goods circulating throughout the Southeast. It was in this fluid environment of the sixteenth century that leaders like Zamumo sought new patrons like de Soto even as they acknowledged old ones like Ocute. It was also from these competitive networks of exchange that southeastern townspeople would fashion new relations with their new European neighbors, keeping the Mississippian spirit of giving alive long after mounds had become memorials to the distant (if still sacred) pasts of people like Chekilli. And stories like his testify to the capacity of ancestors to leave their descendants with gifts that could cross time as well as space. The durability of these stories that tellers adapted over generations of colonization speak as richly as any feather to the power of exchange and the resilience of local autonomy.3
The Birth and Rise of Mississippian Towns
Chekilli’s story, the oldest and one of the longest written accounts of Creek origins, provides a useful point of departure for this discussion of towns, gifts, and the power of the Mississippian past. The story was written down in 1735, when Chekilli, the mico (or headman) of the talwa (or town) of Coweta, described the origins of the peoples of the Chattahoochee River and their allies to Georgian colonial dignitaries gathered in Savannah. According to a secretary’s paraphrasing of the two-day talk, the people known as the Cussitas emerged from the earth somewhere to the west and migrated eastward toward the rising sun. Crossing a wide, muddy river and then a red, bloody one, they eventually came to a thundering mountain that shot fire straight upward. Taking some of this fire, they combined it with some that came to them from the north to make their sacred fire. Near this same mountain they also met three other peoples, the Chickasaws, Alabamas, and Abecas. Together the four peoples learned the attributes of the sacred plants, how some of them were necessary for purification before their annual Green Corn Ceremony, or boosketuh, and how menstruating women could destroy the power of the plants if they came too close. In order to determine which of the four peoples was the eldest and most powerful, they decided to erect four poles. The first to cover their pole with the scalps of their enemies would be considered the highest rank. The Cussitas finished the challenge first, followed by the Chickasaws, the Alabamas, and the Abecas, who were unable to “raise their heap of scalps higher than the knee.”4
Also at about this time, a terrible blue bird was regularly killing these peoples. They killed their assailant with the help of a rat who was the child of the fierce bird. They then followed a path that was white, the color of peace, until they reached the Coosas. There they learned that a lion was eating one of the Coosas every seven days, and so they set a fatal trap baited with a “motherless child.” After four years among the Coosas, the Cussitas relocated to a site along the river they called Calosahutchee, where they struggled to feed themselves for lack of corn. Eventually, they resumed following the white path until they came to a town that they hoped was the home of the path’s makers. Unfortunately, when scouts fired white arrows into the town to indicate the Cussitas’ peaceful intentions, the residents responded with red arrows of war. Displeased, the Cussitas prepared to attack the town, but when they arrived they found it abandoned, the people having apparently disappeared beneath the nearby river. When they came to another town that responded with red arrows, they attacked it and killed all but two of the inhabitants. After chasing these survivors, they came again upon the white path, which led them to the town of the Apalachicolas. The Apalachicolas welcomed the travelers, and hoping to calm their bloody-minded visitors, the hosts offered them black drink, a purificatory tea made from leaves of the cassina plant. Professing that their hearts were white, the Apalachicolas convinced the Cussitas to bury their hatchet under the meeting benches at the Apalachicolas’ square ground and offered them feathers as symbols of friendship. The two peoples lived together from that point onward, with the Cussitas settling two towns, Cussita and Coweta, that became “the Head Towns of the Upper and Lower Creeks.”5
Chekilli’s story explained to his listeners the origins of his people’s most important life-ways even as it also established the bonds of friendship and power that held together the Abecas, Coosas, Alabamas, Apalachicolas, and Cussitas as the people that the British colonists called “Creeks.” In making their sacred fire with the fire that came to them from the north, the Cussitas first refused the fires that came to them from the west, east, and south. These four directions organized Creek space and provided Creeks with the sacred number four. Square grounds, where they met to discuss issues of general interest, always adhered to the cardinal points, with the sacred fire in the middle, and the meeting benches of the leaders facing east. One of the most important ceremonies performed at the square grounds was the Green Corn Ceremony, which the Creeks celebrated at the time of the first maize harvest, purifying themselves for the beginning of a new year. Chekilli also mentioned the importance of particular medicines and the need to protect them from the uncontrolled power of menstruating women, alluding to the division of tasks that followed lines of gender. Only women could provide children with a clan identity that would make them Creeks, which explains why the Cussitas baited their lion trap with a “motherless child.” Red was the color of war and white the color of peace, and as much as war was part of Creek life, the black drink could purify and bring calm to the drinker.6
This account of political and cultural origins was in many respects a case for the world as Chekilli thought it should be.7 Most basically, though, he was claiming that towns made history. Even when Creeks from other towns contested Chekilli’s claim to superiority, they and many subsequent Creek historians have presented the talwas as the source of action and allegiance. Also like Chekilli, they have emphasized the prominence of their talwa in the origins of the Creeks. When two Coosas told their origin stories to the ethnologist John Swanton early in the twentieth century, they both explained that their people were the first Muskogees. Some Tukabatchees, in contrast, averred that their talwa came from the sky above before migrating north, south, and then finally east to settle lands among the Creeks.8 In another version, Tukabatchees came out of the earth, later meeting the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws. In the contest of scalps to determine seniority, the Tukabatchees and Cussitas tied, with the Cowetas following them and the Chickasaws not participating at all. For their part, Alabamas described their migration as separate from the others.9 The Hitchitis claimed they, like the Cussitas, migrated toward the rising sun, but they did so and arrived at the sea long before the Cussitas and their companions. Thus they were revered by the later arrivals as those who went to see from where the sun came.10 Although the differences matter a great deal, the stories agree on a number of levels, including the recurrence