![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This research investigates Creek Indian and Spanish encounters in Cuba, exploring the ways in which Natives looked beyond the Southeast for access to commodities following the Seven Years’ War. It uses gunpowder as a lens to examine how ongoing Creek–Spanish relations shaped gender dynamics, personal relationships, local-level politics, and cultural structures within the Confederacy while simultaneously impacting Spanish geopolitics in the Atlantic World. This research seeks to better understand how Creek efforts to acquire gunpowder through formal processes of encounter and exchange in Cuba benefited both the aims of Indigenous leaders and Spanish officials during an era of change for both cultures.
Cette recherche examine les rencontres des Indiens Creek et des Espagnols à Cuba, en explorant les manières dont les indigènes ont cherché l’accès aux produits en dehors du Sud-Est après la guerre de Sept Ans. Cette recherche utilize la poudre à canon comme une lentille à travers laquelle on examine comment les relations en cours entre les Creeks et les Espagnols ont formé des dynamiques personnelles et des structures politiques au niveau régional à l’intérieur de la Confédération, pendant qu’elles influençaient simultanément la géopolitique espagnole au monde de l’Atlantique. Cette recherche essaie de mieux comprendre comment les efforts des Creeks d’acquérir la poudre par les processus formels de rencontre et d’échange à Cuba ont aidé à la fois les buts des chefs indigènes et ceux des officiels espagnols pendant une époque de changement pour les deux cultures.
Este estudio investiga los encuentros entre indios creek y españoles en Cuba, explorando los modos en que los nativos miraron más allá del sudeste de los actuales Estados Unidos para aprovisionarse en productos básicos tras la guerra de los Siete Años. El estudio toma la pólvora como una lente para examinar cómo las relaciones creek-españolas moldearon dinámicas personales y estructuras políticas de nivel local dentro de la confederación, a la vez que impactaban la geopolítica española en el mundo atlántico. Se trata de comprender mejor cómo los esfuerzos creek para adquirir pólvora mediante procesos formales de encuentro e intercambio en Cuba contribuyeron positivamente a los objetivos tanto de los líderes indígenas como de los funcionarios españoles en una era de cambio para ambas culturas.
palabras clave::
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a research fellowship from the David Library of the American Revolution. An early version of this paper was presented at the “New and Emerging Studies of the Spanish Colonial Borderlands” workshop at the Huntington Library in March 2019. I would like to thank the workshop sponsors for their financial support.
Notes
1 These Lower Creeks were largely from the town of Coweta, and at times are referred to as “Cowetas” in this article.
2 Creeks and Europeans both acknowledged that debts accrued upon receiving a gift. These debts included “bestowing a return gift at some point in the future, treating the gift with reverence, or holding the giver in higher esteem.” Please see Jessica Yirush Stern, The Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), p. 93. While historians have thoroughly explored the Indigenous arms trade, these studies have not separated gunpowder from the dominant firearms narrative. For a detailed history of guns in Native North America, please see David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
3 For more on the manufacture of gunpowder and the importance of gunpowder and saltpeter for European governments in the age of empire, please see David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4 “de Gálvez to El Pardo,” January 10, 1780. Papeles de Cuba 1290 F205, Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI). All AGI documents used in this article have been translated and transcribed by James L. Hill. These sources are published online through the University of North Florida. Please see “Synopsis of Official Spanish Correspondence Pertaining to Relations with the Uchiz Indians, 1771–1783,” Florida History Online, www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize/index.html; and “The Indian Frontier in British East Florida; Letters to Governor James Grant from British Soldiers and Indian Traders,” Florida History Online, www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/Grant/index.html.
5 Worth estimates that 200,000 Indians were forced out of mainland Florida and the Keys by 1763. John E. Worth, “A History of Southeastern Indians in Cuba” (working paper, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, October 2004), pp. 1–16. https://www.academia.edu/286354/A_History_of_Southeastern_Indians_In_Cuba_1513_1823; and John E. Worth, “Creolization in Southwest Florida: Cuban Fishermen and ‘Spanish Indians,’ ca. 1766–1841,” Historical Archeology 46, 1 (2012), pp. 142–60.
6 James L. Hill, “‘Bring Them What They Lack’: Spanish-Creek Exchange and Alliance Making in a Maritime Borderland, 1763–1783,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 36–67.
7 Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “The ‘Owner of the Town Ground, Who Overrules All When on the Spot’: Escotchaby of Coweta and the Politics of Personal Networking in Creek Country, 1740–1780,” Native South 9 (2016), pp. 54–88.
8 It is important to note that Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution devotes a chapter to investigating Creek passages to Cuba during this period, exploring Creek efforts to secure Spanish aid during the early years of the conflict. Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014).
9 Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1928), p. 184; and Stephen A. Kowalewski, “Coalescent Societies,” in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Charles M. Hudson, Robbie Ethridge, and Thomas J. Pluckhahn (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2006), pp. 94–122.
10 James Adair, The History of the American Indians, Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1775), p. 257, https://archive.org/details/GR_10/page/n275/mode/2up.
11 This article frequently uses the terms “Creek,” and “Creeks,” though it acknowledges the socio-political complexities of the Creek Confederacy and uses individual town and village names whenever possible.
12 As the eighteenth-century progressed, marriage across clans and the adoption of outsiders as kin strengthened these town and village connections.
13 Steven C. Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1783 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 3–4.
14 In April of 1715 the Yamasee Indians attacked and killed ninety British traders and their families in the Carolina town of Pocotaligo. Native peoples throughout the region, including the Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws, became involved, murdering traders in Indigenous villages throughout the Southeast. Though specific causes of the war varied, Native frustrations were rooted in the exploitative nature of the British trade. The end of the Yamasee War in 1718 spurred large-scale indigenous migrations and “alliance realignments” that permanently changed the geopolitics of the Native South. William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). For a comprehensive study of eighteenth-century Creek neutrality, please see Hahn Invention of the Creek Nation. Hahn identifies this this period as “the South’s imperial Era.”
15 This research argues that neutrality was a planned, well-designed Creek political strategy, aligning with the work of Steven C. Hahn. Hahn asserts that the Creeks, “reeling from the effects of the Yamasee War of 1715, first formally articulated this policy of neutrality in 1718 in the Creek town of Coweta. Over time, the ‘Coweta Resolution’ … became the political wisdom of much of the Creek Nation, acquiring the sanctity of tradition among later generations.” Hahn, Invention of the Creek Nation, p. 4.
16 Hahn, Invention of the Creek Nation, p. 3.
17 Andrew K. Frank, “Taking the State Out: Seminoles and Creeks in Late Eighteenth-Century Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 84, 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 11–12.
18 The term gunmen denotes the number of males within Creek society capable of going to war. It is a European classification found in seventeenth and eighteenth-century documents. Please see Francis Ogilvie, “A List of Towns and Number of Gun Men in the Creek Nation,” 1764, The Thomas Gage Papers, American Series Vol. 21, 1754–1807, The William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Well-known Okfuskee micos include Red Coat King, Handsome Fellow, and One-Handed King. Please see Joshua Aaron Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 129; and Joshua Aaron Piker, The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
19 Piker, Okfuskee, p. 129.
20 Approximately thirty-five hundred gunmen and fifty-nine towns made up the Creek Confederacy. British observers affiliated thirty-nine towns with the Upper Creek, scattered along the Tallapoosa-Coosa-Alabama river system, and twenty towns with the Lower Creek. Ogilvie, “A List of Towns and Number of Gun Men in the Creek Nation”; and Adair, The History of the American Indians, p. 256.
21 The Spanish did assume control over New Orleans after 1763, which was geographically closer to Lower Creek towns and theoretically easier for them to access than Cuba. However, it took a number of years for the transfer of power from the French to the Spanish to take hold, and the transition was not a smooth one. Creeks additionally viewed the overseas journey to Cuba as culturally significant. Many used travels to Havana as a way to try to access power, as recognized in both the spiritual and physical worlds.
22 “Triple-nation diplomacy” is a term used by Steven C. Hahn to describe the eighteenth-century Creek play-off system. Please see Hahn, Invention of the Creek Nation, pp. 116–19.
23 Spain’s reasons for deciding not to supply their Creek visitors with gunpowder during these early years of contact with Cuba are unclear. Historically, the Spanish Empire did not provide guns or gunpowder to Native peoples, citing their focus on religious conversion, the justification for their colonization of the Americas. In Southeastern North America, the small number of missionaries and military personnel in Spain’s isolated Florida colony lived in constant fear of Indian attacks. They believed that trading guns and gunpowder to the region’s Native peoples would provide these Indians with the means necessary to wipe out the missions and presidios. While these beliefs may have persisted into the late eighteenth century, the most probable explanation is that gunpowder was hard to come by in the Americas. Spain, needing to protect its own territorial and commercial interests, likely could not afford to provide Creeks with gunpowder in the years immediately following 1763. It was not until the mid-1770s, when tensions emerged among Anglo-American colonists, that the Spanish made gifts of gunpowder to the Creeks a diplomatic priority.
24 “Arriaga to de la Torre,” June 21, 1774. Papeles de Cuba 1213 F95. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize.
25 “de la Torre to Arriaga,” May 4, 1775. Papeles de Cuba, 1220 F243-244. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize.
26 Saunt, West of the Revolution, p. 202.
27 Saunt, West of the Revolution, p. 202. According to Saunt, the Spanish imported 59,000 African slaves to Cuba between 1763 and 1788, “as many as it had over the previous 250 years.”
28 Saunt, West of the Revolution, p. 203.
29 John Richard Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Frontier: A Study of Indian Relations, War, Trade, and Land Problems in the Southern Wilderness, 1754–1775 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1944), pp. 305–9.
30 Steven J. Peach, “Creek Indian Globetrotter: Tomochichi’s Trans-Atlantic Quest for Traditional Power in the Colonial Southeast,” Ethnohistory 60, 4 (Fall 2013), p. 615.
31 Nassuba Mingo, “Nassuba Mingo To Superintendent Stuart,” 1765, in Mississippi Provincial Archives English Dominion: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, ed. Dunbar Rowland (Nashville, TN: Press of Brandon Printing Company, 1911), V1:5 p. 242. https://archive.org/details/mississippiprov00offigoog/page/n242.
32 “Grant to Stuart,” February 1, 1769. James Grant Papers R2 F171-174. The David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, PA.
33 Mary W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993); and Peach, “Creek Indian Globetrotter,” p. 615.
34 “Journal of David Taitt’s Travels From Pensacola, West Florida, to and Through the Country of the Upper and the Lower Creeks, 1772,” April 28, 1772, in Travels in the American Colonies, ed. Newton D. Mereness (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 548–49. https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbtn.09410/.
35 Hill, “Bring Them What They Lack,” p. 46.
36 “de la Torre to Gálvez,” October 9, 1776. Papeles de Cuba 1222 F56-57. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize.
37 John T. Juricek, Endgame for Empire: British- Creek Relations in Georgia and Vicinity, 1763–1776 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015), p. 80.
38 Juricek, Endgame for Empire.
39 Juricek, Endgame for Empire.
40 “de la Torre to Gálvez,” October 9, 1776; and Rindfleisch, “The Owner of the Town Ground,” p. 70.
41 “de la Torre to Gálvez,” October 9, 1776.
42 Michelle LeMaster, Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), p. 74.
43 Joshua S. Haynes, Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018), p. 30.
44 Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “The Indian Factors: Kinship, Trade, and Authority in the Creek Nation & American South, 1740–1800,” Journal of Early American History 8 (2018), pp. 1–29; p. 7.
45 Joshua Aaron Piker, “‘White & Clean’ & Contested: Creek Towns and Trading Paths in the Aftermath the Seven Years’ War,” Ethnohistory 50, 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 315–47; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); and Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “The ‘Owner of the Town Ground, Who Overrules All When On the Spot’: Escotchaby of Coweta and the Politics of Networking in Creek Country, 1740–1780,” Native South 9 (2016), pp. 54–88; p. 61 n 21.
46 George E. Lankford, “Red and White: Some Reflections on a Southeastern Metaphor,” Southern Folklore 50 (1993), pp. 54–87; p. 56.
47 Tunapé’s familial claim to the “cacique” title is unclear, though he is present in many of the Papeles de Cuba documents. He often uses his preexisting ties to the Spanish to try to secure his personal aims. James L. Hill explores Tunapé in depth in “Bring Them What They Lack.”
48 “Declarations of the Boat Captain Bermudez and the Cacique Tunapé,” December 22, 1777. Papeles de Cuba 1290 F635-639, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize.
49 “de la Puente, Relation of Indians and List of Goods,” January 12, 1778. Papeles de Cuba 1290 F374-375, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize.
50 Rindfleisch, “The Owner of the Town Ground,” p. 71.
51 “Ruiz del Canto’s Journey to San Marcos de Apalache,” September 26, 1779. Papeles de Cuba 1290 F221-223. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/Projects/uchize.
52 “Ruiz del Canto’s Journey to San Marcos de Apalache.”
53 Worth, “A History of Southeastern Indians in Cuba,” p. 10.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jennifer Monroe McCutchen
Jennifer Monroe McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Maine. She received her Ph.D. from Texas Christian University in August 2019. Jennifer specializes in early American history and ethnohistory, with a focus on the themes of gender, power, exchange, and diplomacy.