All of this leaves us with a sense that chiefs enjoyed significant power if they negotiated carefully. Ocute and Coosa might personify their towns, but they could not control all of the relationships that supported their towns and their leadership. The fact that they achieved some success at controlling the people and things involved in intertown trade suggests, too, the importance of relationships to the power of the chief and the town. And when chiefs lost power at the end of the early colonial period, it should be no surprise that their followers concerned themselves more with building and maintaining networks of exchange than with restoring the power of their humbled elite. Consequently, when Chekilli told his story of his people’s sacred origins in 1735, he spoke of how Cussitas, the townspeople, rather than Cussita, a chief, accepted the Apalachicolas’ sacred feather.45
Enduring Mississippian Spirits
Despite such significant changes in the contours of Creek stories, these histories still carry the echoes and the power of the Mississippian past and demonstrate quite clearly how they shaped the colonial world. In them, Creek historians explained and today continue to explain why towns remain fundamental political units of southeastern Native life and how exchange has sustained them. Such connections can at times be quite elusive. If stories are legacies of Mississippian life-ways and indeed products of generations of exchanges of information, then how could Chekilli’s story, the oldest and most detailed published account, neglect any mention of mounds? The eighteenth-century trader James Adair put the problem best during a visit to the Ocmulgee Old Fields, near today’s Macon, Georgia. His Creek friends revered the site, with its remains of mounds more than six hundred years old and of a town and trading house that Indians and English had abandoned after war divided them in 1715. “They strenuously aver, that when necessity forces them to encamp there, they always hear, at the dawn of the morning, the usual noise of Indians singing their joyful religious notes, and dancing, as if going down to the river to purify themselves, and then returning to the old townhouse: with a great deal more to the same effect.” So claimed his hosts, but, “Whenever I have been there,” continued Adair, “. . . all hath been silent.”46
Sometimes, though, it is a matter of listening more for stories than for specters. In 1773–74, some two decades after Adair frequented the locale, the naturalist William Bartram visited the mounds of the Old Fields as part of his itinerant study of southeastern plants and animals. There, his Creek guides taught him some of their history.
And, if we are to give credit to the account the Creeks give of themselves, this place is remarkable for being the first town or settlement, when they sat down (as they term it) or established themselves, after their emigration from the west, beyond the Mississippi, their original native country. On this long journey they suffered great and innumerable difficulties, encountering and vanquishing numerous and valiant tribes of Indians, who opposed and retarded their march. Having crossed the river, still pushing eastward, they were obliged to make a stand, and fortify themselves in this place, as their only remaining hope, being to the last degree persecuted and weakened by their surrounding foes. Having formed for themselves this retreat, and driven off the inhabitants by degrees, they recovered their spirits, and again faced their enemies, when they came off victorious in a memorable and decisive battle. They afterwards gradually subdued their surrounding enemies, strengthening themselves by taking into confederacy the vanquished tribes.47
As in Chekilli’s story, Creeks’ ancestors faced numerous military challenges on their journey east. Unlike this earlier account, mounds played prominent roles, providing strength and succor. In ways that Bartram only hinted at in his summary, Mississippians and their Creek descendants were sharing ideas that connected them to each other and to old sources of power.
In fact, Creeks frequently mentioned mounds when they explained the foundations of their talwas’ autonomy. In 1800, Benjamin Hawkins, the United States Superintendent of the Creeks, related the account that Tussekiahmico of Cussita gave for the origin of the Creeks and their sacred fire. Much of the account paralleled Chekilli’s story from six decades earlier. At one point in their migration, though, the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws stopped at two mounds west of the Mississippi River when sacred beings from each of the four corners of the world came to them. Giving the three peoples fire, the four visitors explained that the sacred flame would preserve them and inform Esaugetuh Emissee (the Master of Breath) of their wants. Sitting around the fire on one of the mounds, the four beings also taught the traveling peoples the knowledge of the sacred plants. After the teachers departed, the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws migrated east to the Coosa River, where they met the Abecas. In a four-year war to obtain scalps and determine seniority, Cussitas achieved the highest rank, followed by the Cowetas, Chickasaws, and Abecas. The Cussitas defeated another people inhabiting some mounds further to the east before continuing on to the Atlantic Ocean, where the recently arrived whites forced them to return inland.48
Another story, related by Ispahihta of Cussita to James Gregory circa 1900, described how the Cussitas, Cowetas, and Chickasaws abandoned their lands in the west because of the spread of evil. Determining that the sun was the last pure object in their tainted world, they headed east in search of its origin. After crossing the great river with the Cowetas and Cussitas, the Chickasaws abandoned the quest, preferring to live on the fertile lands along the river. Traveling far ahead of the Cowetas, Cussitas built a mound into which they dug a chamber to purify themselves. Once purified, the warriors set out against unnamed enemies living nearby. The Cowetas, angry that the Cussita warriors had gone to war without them, threatened to kill the Cussita women and children remaining in the town. Alerted to the Cowetas’ malicious intentions, the Cussita warriors returned in time to prevent the attack, punishing their partners by beating them with canes. Again the Cussitas departed, leaving the Coweta warriors to purify themselves inside the mound. When Cherokees came to attack what they thought was an undefended town, they saw, much to their astonishment and dismay, that Coweta warriors “poured up from the bowels of the earth.” After routing the Cherokees, the Cowetas joined the Cussitas in a series of military victories that led them to the Atlantic Ocean. Seeing the sun rise out of the sea the following morning, they understood that the water kept the sun bright and pure. Once they had conquered neighboring peoples, the Cowetas challenged the Cussitas to the ball game to avenge their earlier caning. This contest established the distinction between the red war towns led by Coweta and the white peace towns led by Cussita.49
The stories that Hawkins and Gregory recorded reveal additional details about Creek culture. In the ball game, towns competed only against others that were “of the opposite fire,” that is to say, red or white towns never competed against towns of the same color. Hawkins’s synopsis explains the sources of this division between red towns responsible for war and white towns that took a leadership role in making peace.50 The arrival and brief stay at the ocean shore that Hawkins described becomes more meaningful and poignant in Gregory’s version. The convergence at the horizon of the Middle World where people resided with the Above World of air and order and with the Under World of water and chaos must have been a powerful sight for the migrants and for those like Ispahihta and Gregory who recounted their experience.51 Most important, as with Bartram’s account, the mounds in both stories serve as the sites of rebirth. Atop one mound, migrating peoples learned the sacred ways that would be the foundation of their common culture. Emerging from another mound, as if “from the bowels of the earth,” Cowetas and Cussitas repeated their initial emergence in the west. In each case, the mounds made new people.
The people were new, but many of their basic institutions were not. Towns no longer had mounds, but by emerging from them, later Creeks acknowledged their Mississippian antecedents. Exchange also gave these towns life and strength. In the story told by Tussekiahmico and summarized by Hawkins, towns received the sacred knowledge necessary to balance the power of the cosmos; in Chekilli’s account, Cussita received a feather to secure bonds of peace. Finally, the stories themselves were products of exchange. Whatever the variations among towns, the congruences also speak to centuries of people sharing information among talwas and across generations.
Consequently,