Journey to the West: The Alabama and Coushatta Indians (review)

In Journey to the West: The Alabama and Coushatta Indians, historian Sheri Marie Shuck-Hall reconstructs the formation of the coalescent society known as the Alabama-Coushattas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and their subsequent migrations from present-day central Alabama into east Texas throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All in all, Shuck-Hall covers 300 years of interesting and tumultuous times for the Alabama-Coushatta people. Shuck-Hall begins her narrative in the sixteenth century with the first encounters between the ancestors of the later Alabama-Coushatta Indians and the first Europeans into the precontact Mississippian world of the American South. Shuck-Hall’s point—that the Alabama-Coushattas did not exist in precontact times—is well taken. She demonstrates that, although Alabama-Coushatta origins lay in precontact Mississippian chiefdoms, in the wake of the European invasion, the accompanying introduction of Old World disease, the commercial trade in Indian slaves, and other colonial forces, these as well as all the other Mississippian polities fell and that people moved long and short distances and reconstructed their lives along old and new lines.

Using both archaeological and documentary evidence, Shuck-Hall then details the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century coalescence of the Alabama-Coushattas on the upper Alabama River in present-day Alabama. This is the first comprehensive account of their coalescence, which, in and of itself, is a significant contribution. The Alabama-Coushattas were a small group, and throughout their colonial history they sought union with larger groups such as the Creeks for political, social, and military strength. Shuck-Hall also pays special attention to the Alabama-Coushattas’ strategic geopolitical positioning, beginning with that between the English and the French on the Alabama River, which gave them a voice in colonial affairs disproportionate to their numbers. Herein Shuck-Hall begins her deft and clear analysis of the Alabama-Coushatta strategy of playing the Euro-American powers off one another. That Indian people used the play-off system in the early years of colonial competition over North America is well known; however, Shuck-Hall presents a compelling close-up view of one small group and their leaders who quickly understood and used their advantages of geography and coalescence to manipulate colonial policies to their favor in trying times.

At times, though, play-off diplomacy became unfeasible, as in the 1760s when the French finally abandoned the lower South after the Seven Years War. When this occurred, the Alabama-Coushattas turned again to migration, and many Alabama-Coushatta people opted to move west, away from the English and onto Spanish-held territories in present-day Louisiana. Here, they once again employed coalescence as they loosely banded with the Caddo Confederacy. They also once again used play-off diplomacy after Spain and America began to vie for these trans-Mississippi territories.

Then, as this territory fell under sole American jurisdiction, play-off diplomacy once again became obsolete, and several Alabama-Coushattas split from their Louisiana countrymen and journeyed further west, into east Texas. Once in east Texas, though, the Alabama-Coushattas were vulnerable to western Indian hostilities, especially the Comanches, and they deployed their age-old strategy of coalescence. In this case, they joined the Western Cherokee Union, a union of splinter groups from the Cherokees, Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos who had voluntarily moved west and who had joined forces to resist the western raiders. Soon though Mexico and America were competing over these lands, and the Alabama-Coushattas turned once again to play-off diplomacy. As Shuck-Hall argues, the east Texas Alabama-Coushattas also adapted their corn agriculture and nascent livestock raising to the east Texas environment, and, given their acumen in playoff diplomacy, they did quite well in this new locale. In time, though, Texas of course joined the republic. The Alabama-Coushattas now faced only the Americans. Whereas in previous times, they used migration when the play-off system failed, in this case, as Shuck-Hall cogently argues...