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The Land and Water Communication Systems of the Southeastern Indians
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The vitality of Indian community life in the southeastern section of the present United States was enhanced by a maze of intervillage contacts. The frequency of interaction depended upon the distance between townsites. Descriptions of southern Indian society include accounts of intertown ball games, itinerant peddling of goods in a barter economy, diplomatic councils , and gatherings for seasonal festivals. These lines of contact were engraved in the earth as pathways connecting associated towns. But there were also intertribal contacts utilizing trails and canoe routes over distances of several hundred miles, extending in the case of war parties and diplomatic missions to 1,000 or 1,500 miles. These longer routes formed a network that also had a bearing on life in the individual villages. The entire communication system, composed of local subsystems, hubs, or intermediate terminals, and connections with other networks, can be roughly outlined with the view of demonstrating the wide range of contacts accessible to southeastern Indians (fig. 1). This outline deals primarily with the major population groups of the eighteenth century, the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws east of the Mississippi River and the Caddos of Louisiana and east Texas.1 The overall area involved in this treatment of the Southeast is the region south of the Ohio River and southwest of the Great Kanawha River, a major southern tributary of the Ohio River flowing through West Virginia , and also southwest of the James River entering the Atlantic Ocean at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay. West of the Mississippi, the Arkansas River is a reasonable north-south dividing line. The Arkansas River marks the traditional northern border of the country of the Caddos, a people more similar to their eastern neighbors across the Mississippi River than to those living in any other direction. The western border of this definition of the Southeast is the Cross Timbers, originally a belt of forest that The Land and Water Communication Systems of the Southeastern Indians helen hornbeck tanner extended north and south in central Oklahoma, reaching into northern Texas.2 Geographically, the Southeast ends near modern Dallas at the head of the Trinity River. Most of the information about the details of traditional transportation routes in the southland comes from eighteenth-century sources, though some references date from both the early seventeenth century and the early nineteenth . Yet the persistence of the same transportation routes, in some cases evident from the time of the mastodon to the present highway and railroad era, makes it possible to use reports from different time periods in forming a coherent picture of a communications system for the Southeast. Turning attention first to the trail system in the southeastern United States, it is important to distinguish between pathways chiefly used for local purposes, any series of short links, and the lengthy thoroughfares of interregional communication that are the ultimate concern of this discussion .3 From maps already published, it is apparent that there were a number of trails developed solely to serve local population concentrations. Notable are the networks connecting fifty Choctaw towns in southeastern Mississippi and Alabama, the local pattern reflecting the tight formation of seven Chickasaw towns near modern Tupelo in northeastern Mississippi, and the intricate maze crisscrossing the southern Appalachian Highlands in the Cherokee country of eastern Tennessee and adjacent sections of North Carolina and Georgia.4 In the total communication system of the Southeast, there are also hubs where important trails going in different directions crossed and branched. Significant examples of this feature of the communication system are present in Nashville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in Montgomery, Alabama —places that have always been geographic focal points. The Hiwassee River valley near Murphy, Tennessee, close to the Georgia–North Carolina border, was another focal point of aboriginal travel.5 These townsites are all in the interior heartland of the Southeast, but the trail system spread out to touch points on both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, frequently following paths from the highlands to the coastal plain along river valleys such as the Santee, Savannah, Chattahoochee, and Coosa. The most comprehensive work on regional land trails is the monograph of William E. Myer, edited by John R. Swanton and published in 1928.6 In his summary of thirty-five years of research into the trail system of the southland and water communication systems [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 05:22 GMT) eastern United States, Myer identified 125 separate trails. His investigation of Tennessee and Kentucky was exceptionally...