results did not always favor chiefs’ authority. One suggestive clue appears in 1604, when Governor Pedro de Ibarra met Altamahas in Guale and gave only passing mention to the “cacique of La Tama.” Rather than the head of the famed inland province, he appeared in a list as one of many other dignitaries. Perhaps Spanish contact with Altamaha had become routine, or perhaps the visiting cacique was not the chief of Altamaha but one of his subordinates. Regardless, the lack of emphasis suggests that this leader was not as powerful as his Spanish title suggested. Archaeologists have uncovered additional clues regarding this power shift. For more than a century before Cacique Juan or any other emissaries ventured with gifts from St. Augustine, the Altamahas, Ocutes, and their neighbors were abandoning their towns, dispersing their homes throughout the valley. By 1580, valley residents no longer used their mounds. In other words, Altamaha leaders probably sought Spanish goods not just to escape Ocute’s influence but also to maintain their own influence over an increasingly segmented population.44
In some respects, Altamaha’s leaders were simply using new goods to confront old challenges of political instability. In other respects, these adaptations introduced far more radical consequences. Following the turn of the century, at a time when many interior populations were consolidating dwindling communities at the fall-line frontiers between piedmonts and coastal plains, Oconee peoples were also relocating. While many peoples moved in order to build new communities at locations that afforded the greatest opportunities for subsistence, some residents of the Oconee Valley were actually moving downstream of the fall line to the coastal plain. Although they now inhabited lands less ecologically diverse than their former homes, they had much easier access to the respected clothing, beads, and tools from St. Augustine. Like other inland peoples, they once again began settling in more nucleated towns rather than dispersed farmsteads, and this shift may have been a product of their leaders’ rising authority.45 Chiefs may have sought additional Spanish support for their precarious prominence by requesting Franciscans at the short-lived mission of Santa Isabel on the Altamaha River, which lasted from 1616 to about 1635. If diseases were following gifts inland, these new mission residents may have also been seeking relief from this new challenge as well. Depopulation from epidemics could have just as easily caused a dwindling population to seek the mutual protection of towns and the spiritual protection of Franciscans. Whether dealing with the old problems of inter-elite rivalry or newer ones of depopulation and community cohesion, Altamahas were looking to St. Augustine for some solutions.46
They did not pursue this strategy alone. In 1612, Governor Fernández de Olivera claimed that unnamed southeastern Natives’ widespread interest in missionaries signified both “God’s miraculous work” and the influence of the gifts and aid the governor offered to those who came. The most significant sign of this attractive power was that “[some] have arrived here from the very Cape of Apalachee and from much further away.” Furthermore, explained the governor, “They assured me that they have been walking for two and a half months and that all along the way they have had safe passage and warm reception knowing that they come here.”47 Seven decades after the Apalachees of the Florida panhandle had hounded de Soto’s forces out of their province, their descendants were joining others to seek Spanish friendship and trade goods. More strikingly, other peoples were journeying eastward perhaps five hundred miles to do so.48 St. Augustine’s inhabitants, who numbered less than one thousand in 1612, were reshaping relations among thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of Native inhabitants of the Southeast.49 Gifts and the power that they conferred and confirmed gradually insinuated themselves into the power structures of a variety of peoples beyond the echoes of Spaniards’ cannon or the peal of their mission bells.
As in the Oconee Valley, these developments probably owed much to pre-contact patterns of diplomacy and exchange, but not all of the consequences would prove so familiar to southeastern townspeople. Governor Fernández’s diplomatic triumph of 1612 also marked the eve of tragedy. Between 1613 and 1617, epidemics killed eight thousand mission Indians, half of the newly converted population.50 Whether these devastating contagions followed these new routes of travel and exchange remains an open question: continuing visits from Native dignitaries and the contemporaneous establishment of the mission of Santa Isabel may have carried the lethal microbes inland or may serve as proof of how little disease disrupted those wider contacts. Regardless, the four-year scourge stood as the most painful evidence that Spaniards were introducing more than new objects for old patterns.51
This conjunction of gifts and diseases may help explain the suddenness of Spaniards’ success in the region. The diseases and violence that accompanied the Spaniards disrupted chiefs’ efforts to maintain the populations and cosmic harmony that would build the inspiring mounds and harvest the crucial food surpluses. As chiefs struggled, so too did skilled craftspeople lose the time and the expertise to endow their pottery, shells, deerskins, or copper with the powerful designs that leaders and followers both needed for social stability. In the midst of these crises—some grave, some merely troubling—chiefs recognized the opportunities that accompanied the people of St. Augustine. Some found answers in the new religion of the Spaniards; many saw the advantages of their gifts. Possessing a spiritual power rooted in their foreign origins and the military strength and religious zeal of their purveyors, these objects offered potential solutions for the challenges that beset southeastern elites after 1550. By 1630, Spanish beads were arriving in towns as far west as Alabama and as far north as Tennessee.52
Roughly one century after Ponce’s entradas, Spaniards finally secured a stable colony, one that influenced its neighbors and altered the lives of those who never heard a mission bell. Their success, such as it was, was born of hard lessons. What began with invasions of entrepreneurial conquistadors became next a military venture and then an evangelical one. Each phase certainly involved elements of the others—missionaries accompanied Luna, Menéndez de Avilés sought personal profit, and Franciscans depended on soldiers to prevent or suppress neophyte revolts. Nonetheless, the shifts were crucial to Spanish success, and they occurred because Indians forced Spaniards to rethink their efforts. However disruptive the floods that swallowed some towns, plenty of chiefs and their townspeople had the power to enforce the norms of Mississippian intertown diplomacy. Only after 1587, when royal and religious officials regularly offered gifts to potential Native allies, effectively purchasing a friendship they could not compel, did the missions expand with any predictability. Feathers and lace accomplished much more than fire and steel. Southeastern peoples had reshaped an outpost of empire to resemble a paramount chiefdom. For the Spanish, the expansion of empire required the gifts of empire.
For many Indians, though, the gifts of empire also entailed the acceptance of empire. As the Guales knew in 1597, the missionaries who followed these gifts had more than just religious power. They also had strong ideas about how that religious power should shape Native societies. Franciscan insistence on settled communities reduced Native mobility and their access to food sources that lay outside their maize fields and the immediate environs of their missions. Chiefs might have preserved much of their authority thanks to the support of Spanish officials, but they increasingly exercised their authority in the interests of royal and religious officials, whether it was to collect tribute, enforce church attendance, or organize the labor drafts that took their towns-people to the fields of St. Augustine.53 Along with the situado, the repartimiento labor of Indians was the only resource available for Florida elites to exploit for their personal benefit. As the archaeologist Jerald Milanich has noted and mission Indians must have increasingly realized, “Missions were colonization.”54 True as this was, this form of colonization was nonetheless conditioned by the demands of gift exchanges that built and maintained it. Floridians were gradually colonizing the Southeast, but they were doing so within some of the constraints of Mississippian norms. This fact would become especially apparent during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
Profound changes were also underway in the interior: Indians were adjusting to and helping to create a new Spanish ecumene far inland from the colony’s coastal foothold. Spaniards were offering items that corresponded well with the indigenous objects of copper, shell, and deerskin that traditionally marked Native leaders’ ceremonial and political power. Indians of the Southeast came to recognize these new and rare objects not just as simple analogs of older symbols but also as creations from people