Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 (review)

94Southern Cultures rounding the flag, including the recent debates over the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi the right of municipalities to fly the flag, and the display of the flag on college and high school campuses. The show ends with a tape in which a number of influential people , ranging from the Grand Titan of the Klan to Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, say what the flag means to them. A questionnaire invites visitors to record their own opinions. One has to admire the honesty and courage of the Museum of the Confederacy and hope that a sense of perspective will help us get beyond the dismal, deadlocked argument over the flag. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815. By Kathryn E. Holland Braund. University of Nebraska Press, 1993. xvi, 306 pp. Cloth, $37.50. Reviewed by Peter H. Wood, professor ofhistory at Duke University. He L· coauthor o/Towhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast and Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years. It has been two generations since Verner W. Crane published The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (1928). Sparked by a master's seminar with Frederick Jackson Turner, Crane used English and colonial sources to create a path breaking study of southeastern trade and politics between the founding of Carolina and the beginning of Oglethorpe's Georgia colony. But colonial historians preferred to focus on seventeenth-century New England; frontier historians favored the nineteenth-century West; and southern historians remained wedded to the Virginia cavaliers and their Civil War descendants. Crane's pathway went virtually unused for more than a generation. Over the past twenty-five years, Crane's pioneering volume (though no longer available in paperback) has been gradually rediscovered, and a fuller picture of the southem interior in the eighteenth century is finally beginning to take shape. John Alden (a student of Crane's), Edward Cashin, Alan Gallay, and others have crafted biographies of some of the leading figures of the frontier, and the works of such diverse commentators as imperial agent Thomas Naime, Chickasaw trader James Adair, and Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram have been published. Interdisciplinary scholars have grown increasingly focused and creative in their studies of southern Indians, as seen in the work of Helen Rountree on the Powhatans, James Merrell on the Catawbas, and Joel Martin on the Muscogulges, or Creeks. The early and significant effects of Spanish Florida on the Indians have been explored by such scholars as Henry Dobyns, Amy Bushneil, Charles Hudson, and the late J. Leitch Wright Jr. Meanwhile, Marcel Giraud, Patricia Galloway, Daniel Usner, and others have made similar inroads regarding French Louisiana's relations with Natchez, Chickasaw, and Choctaw inhabitants. The progress has been slow, but it continues to accelerate. The year 1993 marked an important shifting of gears, thanks to the arduous and creative work of two impressive independent scholars. Tom Hatley published a penetrating revision entitled The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era ofthe Revolution (Oxford University Press), and Kathryn Braund brought forth Deerskins and Duffels, a remarkably thorough and well-researched study of the rise and fall of Creek trade with Anglo-Americans. These parallel books make rich and imaginative use of new Reviews95 and old sources in exploring the zone of economic, social, and biological exchange that ethnohistorian Richard White, in another context, has aptly called "the middle ground." Not surprisingly, both authors have drawn inspiration from The Southern Frontier. "After reading Verner W. Crane's classic work," Braund states in her preface, "I became fascinated with the deerskin trade and began my writing career." Her fascination has resulted in a significant new addition to Nebraska's Indians ofthe Southeast series, edited by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green. Braund's survey of the present-day Alabama and Georgia area begins in 1685, with the arrival of Henry Woodward at the Muscogulge town of Coweta with an entourage of 250 men and an impressive array of English trade goods. By the end of the seventeenth century, Charleston merchants were exporting an average of forty-five thousand deerskins to London annually, and some of the Muscogulges had moved east to...