-
American Indians in Colonial New Orleans
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
American Indians in Colonial New Orleans daniel h. usner jr. So much of the scholarship on American Indians in colonial North America has concentrated on the populous nations inhabiting the interior that relatively little is understood about those smaller Indian groups situated in the midst of colonial settlements and towns. The praying towns of New England and the mission reserves of Canada are the most familiar of such communities , thanks to recent investigations into the refugees and survivors of seventeenth-century wars.1 Since so much research is needed on southeastern Indians in general, one is hard pressed to urge emphasis on any particular category of colonial-Indian relations. The large picture of geopolitical, economic, and cultural interaction demands closer attention to the Cherokees , Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Caddos before we can afford the luxury of studying smaller, more enclosed Indian communities. Yet to ignore the latter would exclude Indian peoples living within sizable parts of the Southeast—like the Tidewater and piedmont Atlantic areas, the Florida panhandle, and the alluvial plain of the Mississippi River—who experienced colonialism differently, but no less importantly, than did interior tribespeople.2 Colonial towns serve as especially informative foci for examining forms of Indian adaptation and persistence different from those that occurred within Indian nations situated in the backcountry of European colonies. In diverse eighteenth-century towns across the Southeast, Indians frequently lived and visited in an array of circumstances. An inestimable number of Indians from many tribes found themselves either being shipped away as slaves from colonial ports or working as slaves in and around them. Charlestown merchants waged slave-raiding expeditions that brought captive Timucuans , Apalaches, Tuscaroras, Yamasees, and Choctaws to households in their town as well as to plantations in Virginia and Carolina. Intimate contact with Europeans and Africans and coercive labor at entirely new tasks undoubtedly changed life for Indian servants and slaves inhabiting colonized areas while channeling Indian influences to the colonial populace. The co- american indians in colonial new orleans lonial capitals of Williamsburg, Charlestown, Savannah, and St. Augustine , and eventually such interior centers as Augusta, Fort Toulouse, and Natchez, became important meeting places for Indian diplomats, many of whom traveled long distances to exchange words and gifts with European officials. More regularly these emerging cities were frequented by Indian villagers who lived nearby and, though reduced to tributary or subordinate status by war or flight, participated actively in the social and economic rhythm of town life as boathands, packhorsemen, interpreters, day laborers , and peddlers.3 All these types of activity were experienced by American Indians in another southern colonial town, named by its French founders “Nouvelle Orléans.” Traveling up the Mississippi River in early March 1699, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville was shown by his Bayogoula Indian guide “the place through which the Indians make their portage to this river from the back of the bay where the ships are anchored. They drag their canoes over a rather good road, at which we found several pieces of baggage owned by men that were going there or were returning.”4 Situated between a chain of lakes and the Mississippi, the crescent-shaped bend at what became New Orleans had been mainly used by Indians for transport between waterways and seasonal gathering of food sources. Yet natural conditions that made this site ideal for portage and fishing reduced its potential for permanent occupation.5 Now a metropolis slowly sinking inside artificial levees and spillways, New Orleans sits on a natural levee, created by sediment deposited during seasonal flooding, that slopes down from a crest of fifteen feet above sea level to almost five feet below sea level. The city’s vulnerability to flooding is exacerbated by Lake Pontchartrain to the north and Lake Borgne to the east.6 Before European contact Indians used the four-to-eight-mile-wide strip of swampland as a fishing/hunting/gathering station and as a portage between the lakes and the river. The most habitable sites were along Bayou St. John, a few miles long and about twenty feet wide when Iberville traveled it, and on the Metairie ridge, which linked that bayou with Bayou Chapitoulas . From this junction Indians reached the Mississippi by a three-mile portage.7 Since René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle’s voyage down the Mississippi in 1682, this had been a highly volatile area. A Tangipahoa village a few miles above the portage road was destroyed, perhaps by Quinipissas from upriver. By 1699 a group...