The Native American World beyond Apalachee: West Florida and the Chattahoochee Valley (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 228 TheNativeAmericanWorldbeyondApalachee:WestFloridaandtheChattahoochee Valley. By John H. Hann. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. x, 250 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-8130-2982-1. Historian John Hann is well-known for his many books on Native Americans of the Southeast, particularly the Apalachee. In his new volume he shifts to Native American societies beyond the Apalachee mission , extending the study west to Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama, and east to Macon, Georgia, during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. Hann’s translations of original Spanish documents provide descriptions and viewpoints on these societies, previously known mostly through British documents, from a Spanish perspective. Hann chronicles Spanish interaction among eight Native American societies. The Chacato lived to the west of the lower Chattahoochee River. In the early seventeenth century they asked the Spanish mission for friars. The two missions that were established in 1674 lasted only a couple years before the Chacato returned to indigenous beliefs. The Chine lived on the coast and amassed a considerable body of navigational and geographical knowledge. They acted as pilots and guides for river and overland travel from Apalachee to Pensacola and Mobile. The Chisca were migratory raiders who wreaked havoc among other native groups. The Chichimeco may have been a distinct ethnic group, but they followed a similar path—the Spanish may have named them after the Chichimeca of Mexico, predatory bands whose name became a generic ethnic slur. The Pansacola lived farther west, on the coast. The Apalachicoli lived on the Lower Chattahoochee River in Georgia and Alabama and were ancestors of the later Creeks and Seminoles. The book is dense with data on these and other groups, but it can be confusing and difficult to follow. One reason is the typical ambiguity in the documents, which are often exchanges between Spanish officials. They might use single names to indicate an ethnic group, a language, town, region, individual chief, clan, or another designation. They also use multiple forms of the same name, not only in Spanish but also in English. The similar-sounding names can indicate different entities, not only in space but in time (e.g., Chatot or Chacato were different from Choctaw). Hann admirably attempts to sort it out but a comprehensive table listing each group and their location as recorded over the years would have been helpful. Political borders became interpretative barriers, from the historic border between Spanish Florida and British territory to the contemporary partitioning of scholarship by today’s state boundaries . Another complexity is the major river valley system where much of J U L Y 2 0 0 7 229 the narrative occurs. The Chattahoochee River meets the Flint River at the Florida border, where their confluence forms the Apalachicola River. However, the Apalachicoli Indians lived on the lower Chattahoochee, while it is unclear—and not discussed—who lived in the territory of the Apalachicola river valley, which extends over one hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Especially valuable is the discussion of various native groups’ activities after the destruction of the Spanish missions by the British and their Native American allies in 1704. The intrigues and shifting alliances over two centuries culminated in the emergence of the Upper and Lower Creeks and Seminoles of the late 1700s, mentioned briefly in the conclusion . The two maps included in the book are too small to include the multitude of places and names discussed in the text, and seldom are different groups or settlements tied to a specific known location, although this is a fault of archaeology, not of the historian. Like his Spanish correspondents , the author refers to individuals by different names, titles, and parts of compound names, further complicating the analysis. There are several instances where sentences or even whole paragraphs are repeated with only two pages in between. Copyeditors should have caught these problems. For those familiar with the time periods and peoples of this region, however, the narratives are rich in detail and drama. Actions of international rivalries among the European powers strongly influenced historic native groups, who deftly balanced...