Part 3 - Introduction 

The effect upon certain aspects of the Indians' material culture due to European expansion in the Southeast. 

The geography of the Southeast helped determine the chronological exploration and usage of land. Generally in the Southeast, the areas along the Atlantic coast were the first to be explored, settled, and colonized by the three major powers of Europe: Spain, England, and France.

                    Map # 10
Basic Locations of SE Indian Tribes circa 1680
map10sm.jpg (25460 bytes)By the beginning of the seventeenth century, both England and Spain had staked their claims to portions of the Southeast. France had not yet ventured further South than Canada.

The early part of the seventeenth century did not see much new terrain explored by any of the major powers. It was not until the last third of the century that major new explorations and colonizations occurred. While the French sought a major waterway to link the Great Lakes to the area of the Gulf of Mexico, the English were pushing both westward from Jamestown as well as southward down the Atlantic coast. Both nationalities wanted to strengthen their territorial claim in the new world; seek a quick route to the south seas or "Indies"; and increase their coffers monetarily through the fur trade and rumored existence of gem, gold, and silver mines.

Many of the individual explorers, according to historians Alvord and Bidgood, were also spurred onward into unexplored territory with the "hope of discovering a water communication [system] across the continent".1

According to these same two historians, Alvord and Bidgood, the seventeenth century was "one of the pivotal eras in the world's history.2" Europeans were encouraged to buy stock in trade and colonizing companies. The land was often pictured in "glowing" terms and the availability for quick profit was stressed.      

                            Map # 11
Mid to Late 17th Century to Early 18th Century
map11sm.jpg (23148 bytes)It would not be until the latter part of the seventeenth century that the three major European powers would start to actively and physically lay claim to common territories. Prior to the middle of the century, the French were ensconced in the far northeast, the Spanish were mainly in modern Florida with territorial claims to the South Carolina-Georgia coast, and the English were settled in New England and strengthening their claim to Virginia.

This section of the book will deal basically with the dress and adornment of the Southeast Indians in the seventeenth century. Obviously styles of clothing and impacting events do not commence or cease as one century changes into another. Thus, some source material will be discussed that was written in and about the early eighteenth century.

As the European population increased and expanded westward from the East coast to the Mississippi River, the Indians were exposed to more examples of European dress. Even though earlier, through the mechanism of trading routes, inland Indians did trade with coastal Indians for European goods, the former were not always brought into direct contact with the Europeans themselves.

As the contact increased, the Indians began to desire more European goods including clothing. This desire was to have a profound impact on the lives, habits, and subsequent material culture of the Indians.

The negative impacts on the Indians' desire and eventual need for European goods is expressed by the following two authors, W.A. Turnbaugh and R.S. Cotterill. Taken together they paint a full picture.

William A. Turnbaugh in his article "Wide-Area Connections in Native America", summarizes some of the effects of Indian/European interaction on the general Native population.

"During the later historic times, the white man played an even more major and direct role in Indian culture, through participating in the extensive native trade network. The Indian supplied huge quantities of furs, usually at the serious expense of neglecting the more routine activities of his subsistence and society. Moreover, the Indian made available to the trader many other commodities, such as buffalo robes, dried meat, [corn in the Southeast], guides, sexual partners, and transport, all of which further strained the basic fabrics of his society."3

R.S. Cotterill in his book The Southern Indians, described the effects of European trade on the Indians:

"It brought them comforts and conveniences they had never known: guns and ammunition which increased the tempo of both their hunting and hostility; cutting tools such as hatchets, knives, axes, and hoes, which enabled them to build better houses and more easily cultivate their fields; creature comforts such as scissors, beads, kettles, pots and pans, mirrors, salt, vermilion (for paint), and rum: and clothing in the form of blankets, shirts, coats, and hats [rarely worn], as well as [fabric] staples like strouds and calico, which they used as their fancy suggested. For these they bartered chiefly two things-deerskins and slaves. The demand for the former elevated, or at least changed, hunting from a supplementary means of subsistence to the dignity of a business and intensified, if, indeed, it did not create tribal competition for hunting grounds with an accompanying increase in hostilities. Increasing [inter tribal] wars resulted also from the demand for slaves (to be sold [by the Europeans] to the West Indies), which could be, legitimately, met only by the sale of captives."4

Thus, many Indian populations were seriously reduced by European diseases, conflicts among themselves instigated by the Europeans, and slavery.

From the Indian's earliest contact with the white man, the exchange of gifts was a significant part of their interaction. Similarly, as the Europeans traded their manufactured goods to the Indians, the latter's desire for these goods increased. Europeans were quick to realize that they could create a market for their goods by supplying the Indians with similar items to what they already had. Thus, the Europeans created "`clay' long-stem pipes, kettles, glass beads....."5

One culturally significant article of trade that the Europeans produced was the gorget. Originally made by the Indians of shell, and then of copper sheets, these gorgets were held valuable by the Indians. In some tribes, only the "tribal nobility" were allowed to wear them. The Europeans saw a market and began to produce them as well as to produce arm bands, wrist bands, medals etc. of brass and of silver. The value status of the Native made gorgets was substituted by the European made ornaments.6

"The crescent shaped silver object (similar to an eye-shade), is the most common design, and early pictures of the natives which show them garbed in mixed costumes, indicate that they frequently wore three or four of these over the breast. In addition, there was an arm-band of four to six inches in width in-casing the upper arm, and as well, a wrist-band next above the hand, together with a "crown", frequently as much as eighteen inches long, or more properly speaking, in circumference. In addition, pendant-ringed medals were manufactured, and perforated coins are frequently found."7

European cloth and clothes, also, constituted a large portion of these goods. The Mohawk Indians in the Northeast called the Dutch "cloth makers.8" Due to the well established Indian trading routes, it was not necessary for the Indian to always have contact with the European to desire his manufacture. It is not inconsistent with the prevailing conditions during the early centuries of Indian/European contact to conclude that the European trade goods and gifts probably influenced the Indian more in his dress than did the actual specter of the Europeans themselves. The availability of European trade goods and the European's often insidious requirements demanded of the Indian in order for the latter to obtain these goods would have a profound influence on the fate of the Indians in the Southeast.

The ability of European powers to distribute its goods was also, inadvertently, a partial determinant of which European power would eventually have the majority of control of the Southeast.

"An absence of trade goods and of gifts signaled potential disruption and often resulted in conflict between colonial and native groups."9

In addition, if one European power was unable to supply the Indians in the area with gifts or trade goods at costs acceptable to the Indians, those Indians would transfer their allegiance to another power.

After the English introduced new goods to the Creek Indians in 1685, the Spanish, located at the junction of the Flint and Chatahoochie rivers, tried to dissuade the Creeks from dealing with the English. When the Spanish threatened to use force, the Creeks moved to another location.10

To the Indian the lack of gifts or reasonably priced trade goods signified a lack of friendship and peaceful intentions on the part of the Europeans.

"Presents distributed annually to each tribe served as a kind of tribute from the colony for occupying and using native land,......but more fundamentally displayed to the Indians the peaceful intentions of the colonial populace.11"

The Indians did not understand the European concept of ownership of land.

"It is an established principal with the Cherokees, in common with all Indians, that Air, Water, and Land is a free gift of the Creator to all men, and when Land is traded it is always understood that only the right to use it is meant."12

While the Europeans believed that the goods that they traded to the Indians for their land signified that a contract of ownership had been made and that they, the Europeans, now had title to the land, the Indians did not believe that they were meant to relinquish the land, but only to share it with the Europeans. In exchange for the sharing of the land, the Europeans so long as they intended to use it were to pay the Indians "rent" on the land in the form of European goods.13

The disparity between the Indians' and the Europeans' concept of land ownership would wreak total havoc on the lives of the Indians of the Southeast.

When an Indian village was decimated either by war or disease, it was not uncommon for another group of Indians to assimilate the remainder of the village into its own tribe.

The Frenchman Father Paul Du Ru described how a Bayogoulas tribe in 1699 accepted members from the Mongoulacha tribe complete with their own temple that they built on the same square opposite the temple of the Bayogoulas.14

The Bayogoulas were not the only tribe to do this. As the remains of one village joined those of another, cultural traditions, both material and spiritual, by association and proximity, became modified.

Marvin T. Smith, in his essay, "Aboriginal Population Movements in the Early Historic Period Interior Southeast" stated that historians in tracing the routes of the Early Spanish Explorers, found that by the time the Europeans had, once again, penetrated the interior of the Southeast in the late seventeenth century, many of the tribes had changed the location of their villages.

By the late seventeenth century, tribes were moving due to inroads made by fiercer northern tribes, land appropriated by the English for settlements, fear of slavery, decimation by disease, and fear of the Spanish.15

Some of the movement was undertaken as a direct result of the state of "trade" in the seventeenth century. Some of the southeastern inland tribes relocated along the Florida frontier in order to have better access to European goods and to retain or create the position as middlemen; while others remained inland or moved from more coastal areas to the interior so as not to have direct interaction with the Europeans.16

These latter groups, however, were still influenced by European culture even though it was in a slower and more selective fashion. Waselkov, in writing about trade in the seventeenth century stated:

"By 1685, the essence of historic Creek culture was evident - no longer a pristine aboriginal culture but a synthetic one incorporating both European trade goods and traditional artifacts, values, and activities in a new, distinctive, stable cultural format."17

In the seventeenth century, the geographic regions explored by the three major European powers were distinct from each other. Thus, the Indians groups that they met were, generally, different, too.

The chapters in this section reflect the influence of the English, French, and Spanish on the Indian tribes they encountered in the southeast in the seventeenth century.  


1. Alvord & Bidgood, The First Exploration of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians, p. 94.

2. Ibid., p. 22.

3. Turnbaugh, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, "Wide-Area Connections in Native North America," 1976, Volume 1, Number 4, p. 27.

4. Cotterill, The Southern Indians, p. 17.

5. Peter Brannon, The Southern Indian Trade, p. 17.

6. Ibid., p. 75.

7. Ibid., pp. 75-76.

8. James Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 254 from note 28 on page 370.

9. Daniel Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, p. 27.

10. Cotterill, The Southern Indians, p. 16.

11. Daniel Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, p. 27.

12. Jack Frederick Kilpatrick, BAE 196, paper #77 p. 194. "The Wahenauhi Manuscript".

13. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, p. 157.

14. Usner, Indian Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Economy Exchange, p. 22.

15. Wood, Powhatan's Mantle, pp. 21-31.

16. Waselkov, "Seventeenth Century Trade in the Colonial Southeast", p. 129.

17. Ibid., p.130.