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Steven C. Hahn 81 their payments with products which could easily be plundered from Spanish Florida, such as pigs, rice, cattle, chickens, and lard. Through the grapevine, the chief of Coweta's plan appears to have reached the ears of South Carolina governor Charles Craven, who, according to Brave Dog, "put them at apparent ease, by saying that the bad lieutenants would leave and they would put good men in their place." But when the Indians learned that Governor Craven intended to fortify the Carolina frontier and that the traders had rejected the plan for debt payment, the chief of Coweta convened a large gathering of the chiefs at the Yamasee town of Pocotalico. There, the chief of Coweta and his Yamasee hosts debated whether or not to "liberate" themselves from the English, by force if necessary. As Brave Dog explained, on the morningof Good Friday, April 15, 1715, the Indians assembled at Pocotalico learned that Governor Craven had sent his Indian agents there to "inquire into the causes of the meeting"—to spy. Believing that the Carolina agents harbored bad intentions, Yamasee and Creek warriors stripped naked, painted themselves red and black—the grim gear of war of the southeastern Indians—and fired their flintlocks indiscriminately upon the Carolina agents, torturing those who had managed to survive the initial volley. With this bold stroke, Carolina's former Indian allies sparked a smoldering frontier conflict that, with the passage of time, became known as the Yamasee War. Few single events in the early history of the Southeast have so captured the attention or the imagination of historians as the Yamasee War of 1715. And rightly so. As the eminent historian Verner Crane once argued, the Yamasee War caused a "revolution in frontier politics" that had a lasting effect on Carolina colonists and the southeastern Indians alike. For this reason, many historians rightly believe that the Yamasee War brought an end to what might be called South Carolina's "first system" of trade and exploration. In South Carolina, for instance, the war produced a varietyof reforms in frontier defense and trade that would guide wary South Carolinians for generations to come. And the Yamasees, who bore the brunt of the fighting, fled to the Spanish presidios to eke out a marginal existence as dependent clients of La Florida.4 Because of the Yamasee War's indisputable influence on both the colonists and Indians, it should come as little surprise that the Carolina colo- 82 Making of a New Order in the Southeast, 1670-1763 nists and later historians inquired and continue to inquire into the causes of the war. Most contemporary accounts blamed the English traders for abusing the Indians in many unspeakable ways. Others were more willing to blame the influence of the Spanish and French. Verner Crane, for example, argued that the war was a "sui generis" revolt against the Carolina traders, who had committed unspeakable atrocities against the Indians in their effort to secure payment for debt. One scholar has suggested more recently that the war stemmed from the erosion of the Indians' economic base, principally deerskins. The most recent analyses of the Yamasee War suggest that the Indians' fear of being made slaves may also have been a contributing factor. Others still caution that the search for the Yamasee War's origins remains elusive, because each Indian nation that joined in the revolt had different motives, a fact which led ultimately to the revolt's collapse in 1717.5 Though there is an element of truth to most of the above interpretations , Brave Dog's discussion suggests that the roots of the revolt were much deeper than either the Carolina colonistsor later generations ofhistorians have recognized. As Brave Dog's interpretation suggests, the trade in Indian slaves had trapped the Creek and other Indians in a downward spiral of warfare, debt, and more warfare, fueled by the Creeks' own desire for English trade goods. Briefly put, Brave Dog's discussion leads one to believe that the establishment of Carolina as a center of trade caused a remarkable, if not radical, shift in the political economy of the Creek Indians, who had become fully "dependent" upon English trade goods before the year 1715. This assessment contradicts most current studies of Indian behavior in the Atlantic marketplace, which emphasize continuity in Indian life and portray dependency as a gradual, rather than an immediate, process.6 By drawing upon Brave Dog's analysis, however, this essay will argue that Creek...

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