Apalachee

HISTORICAL NOTES

historical notes In 1539, at the beginning of his trek though southeastern North America, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto wintered in Anhayca, the principal town of Apalachee. At that time the Apalachees were a powerful agricultural chiefdom. Although no generally accepted population estimates exist for aboriginal Apalachee, their numbers must have been many tens of thousands. In 1565 the Spaniards founded Saint Augustine, and in 1608 Franciscan friars made their first visit to the Apalachee country and estimated the population at that time to be only around 25,000. This sharp population decline in the seventy years since De Soto’s entrada had been caused by European diseases, to which Native Americans had little immunity. An epidemic of smallpox, for example, would normally take away at least onethird to one-half of a native population, and often more. Even though some migrants came to Apalachee from devastated Indian societies to the north, the total population fell. As the Franciscans expanded their mission effort through the seventeenth century, the population of Apalachee continued to decline, the people succumbing to further epidemics and to the harsh conditions of forced labor. At the height of the mission effort in 1675, there were some fourteen missions in Apalachee, with as many as two dozen satellite villages, but only 10,520 Indians, according to Spanish count. By January of 1704, when James Moore made his attack, there were at most 7,000 Apalachee people in the land. Moore killed and enslaved perhaps a thousand of them. In the months following, about eight hundred of the survivors went west to live near the French at Pensacola and Mobile. Between three and four hundred went east with the Spaniards to Timucua and Saint Augustine. Another thirteen hundred or so resettled among the Yamasees and Creeks near Carolina. Many others moved north into present -day Georgia and Alabama to join the Upper and Lower Creeks. By August of that year, the homeland of the Apalachee people was completely abandoned, and for the first time buffalo roamed freely in their old-fields. In 1715 came the Yamasee War. More Apalachees died, more were enslaved , and the survivors again emigrated and resettled. A few went south to Saint Augustine, but most went west to the Creek homeland along the Chattahoochee River. With this upheaval the remaining Apalachee people, except for those few around Mobile, were absorbed into the Creek Confederacy and their name receded from history. On September 3, 1763, the descendants of those at Mobile boarded ships and were taken to the village of San Carlos de Chachalacasin Tempoala in Mexico. Some of the great mounds of precolumbian Apalachee can be seen today at Lake Jackson State Park, a few miles north of Tallahassee, Florida. The archaeological site of mission San Luı́s is within the city limits of Tallahassee . It has a visitor’s center and is open to the public, while excavations there continue. It is ironic that the Apalachees’ name was settled upon the Appalachian Mountains, for they never lived in them. Their homeland was hundreds of miles to the south. It was the French who did the naming. In 1564 France founded Fort Caroline, a doomed colony at the mouth of the Saint John’s River on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Indians living nearby showed the French some sheets of copper which had come from Apalachee, 200 miles to the west. The French mistakenly assumed that the Apalachees also had supplies of silver and gold. We know now that the Apalachees were getting their copper through a native trade network that ran far into the interior of the South, and they evidently maintained control over that trade in the Florida region. The Indians who showed the copper to the French told them two things: that Apalachee was the only source of it, and that it had originally come from some mountains. The French, who never visited the Apalachees or the mountains, misunderstood, believing the Apalachees themselves to be living in a mountainous region. Thus, on a 1591 map by Theodore de Bry, the ‘‘Apalatci Mountains’’ first appeared, situated vaguely in the interior, running from east to west, with a notation that here silver and gold could be found. De Bry’s mountain range was transferred to subsequent maps drawn by Europeans throughout the seventeenth century. And so when the English founded Carolina in the late seventeenth century and went out to explore the backcountry, they expected to find mountains there, and though the mountains...