Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Revised and Expanded Edition

Introduction

Introduction peter h. wood Up until at least the time when Alaska and Hawaii received statehood in the middle of the last century, general United States history texts—and even specialized demographic surveys—had a peculiar way of portraying American “expansion.” A chronological series of blank maps showed a few population dots along the eastern seaboard in 1650, and they multiplied steadily, migrating across an otherwise empty continent as time progressed. The dots would stop mysteriously at any political border, only to burst out across a new region like a rash of measles when “territorial acquisition” occurred.1 So generations of students received the strong subliminal message that no one inhabited Appalachia or the Ohio valley until English-speaking settlers arrived. They were shown the Louisiana Territory as a huge void, an empty funnel in the center of the continent, before President Jefferson purchased it from the French. Accompanying text might suggest the story’s greater complexity, but a picture—even a partially vacant outline map—can outweigh a great many words. In creating such demographic pictures, did these textbook cartographers ignore the presence of Native Americans through ignorance, accident, or some conspiracy of silence? Had anyone asked them, and apparently few did, the responses would no doubt have varied. Some would invoke precedent: “We’ve always done it this way.” Others would plead lack of hard evidence: “I’d like to show everyone, but I don’t think reliable data exist.” However plausible such excuses seemed at the time, these empty expanses stretching across historical population maps diminished to zero the significance of whole Indian societies and precluded the discussion of interaction between natives and newcomers. Moreover, whether inadvertently or not, they avoided the unsettling questions of Indian decimation and removal associated with the European colonization and conquest of North America.2 But the fiction could not be maintained forever, and after midcentury the picture began to change as two competing influences came to bear. One model for population reconstruction came from farther south and west,    where historical demographers, spurred on by anthropologists and archaeologists studying Latin America and the Southwest and inspired by ecological modeling, had been asking questions about the resource productivity and “carrying capacity” of specific environments, using elaborate models for broad areas. Meanwhile, an alternative approach to population issues came from the north and east, where colonial historians began to apply the tools of localized historical demography developed in Europe to early English villages in the New World. Working with excellent written records at the parish level, they soon became sophisticated and precise about demographic processes, though for the most part they remained less interested in reconstructing whole populations over time. Both perspectives are beginning to make valid contributions toward understanding the postcontact Southeast, though reconciling these different approaches cannot be swift for a region where demographic study regarding the colonial era has been slow to take hold. If black dots marching across an empty map are a thing of the past, more realistic population pictures have been slow to evolve. An atlas for the era of the American Revolution that appeared in 1976, for example, combined state-of-the-art cartography with segregation concepts from an earlier time. On maps of settlement the editors inserted a small disclaimer in parentheses: “(Indian population not included).” Then on other pages they introduced separate maps of some— by no means all—of the documented Indian towns of the East (although, as is customary with treatments of the Revolutionary era, they omitted Indians of the Mississippi valley and the Great West altogether). The map titled “Southern Indian Villages, 1760–94” was carefully prepared by Adele Hast and Helen Hornbeck Tanner. Despite its necessarily small scale, this summary overview approached again, after two centuries, the level of detail with regard to the names and locations of Native American towns that had appeared on the large-scale chart of the region drawn up before the Revolution by Joseph Purcell, under the direction of John Stuart, superintendent of Indian affairs for the Southern District.3 Helen Tanner has continued to pioneer in linking Indian history to geography through maps. Her Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (published in 1987) provides a model of what can be accomplished through painstaking research and innovative cartography.4 As yet, the diverse region below the Ohio River has not been subjected to such careful scrutiny. But the mapart one, geography and population  terials...