The Frontier Exchange Economy of Creek Country

Robbie Ethridge. Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 369 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

Creek Country explores the social, economic, and cultural implications of continuing encounter among Indians, Euro-Americans, and African slaves. Robbie Ethridge creates "a histoire totale that attempts to account for the regular events of regular people in daily life as well as the structural and historical underpinnings of their daily lives" (p. 3). Ethridge describes her work as historical ethnography. The Creeks, like most Indians, left few written records, therefore, Robbie Ethridge turns to oral traditions; the plentiful records left by Benjamin Hawkins, the U.S. Indian agent from 1796 to 1816; and archaeological research to describe the intercultural relations that evolved within this region. Hawkins's thickly descriptive records enable Ethridge to locate Creek towns and the multiple personalities that inhabited the landscape. Ethridge establishes a Creek perspective that, in effect, brings the reader in at ground level "so that the reader may imagine, for instance, what it was like for a Creek woman to walk with her sisters and cousins to the nearest stream to collect water" (p. 6).

The continuing incorporation of strangers into Creek country resulted in the formation of a regional identity, rather than one distinctive monolithic group. Ethridge's analysis of how Creek country became an identifiable region rests on an integrative dialectic: understanding the natural landscape, Indian inclusiveness toward strangers, the kinship structures of indigenous society, and the creation of a socio-political process of townships and provinces that gave rise to a political structure that became synonymous with the Creek Confederacy. For Ethridge, the landscape "defined Creek country" and the heart of the land was the river valleys (p. 91). Ethridge focuses the reader's attention on the environmental mosaic of the landscape. People moved into the area, both drawn by and often separated from each other by the natural features of that landscape. River valley lands with their rich bottomland soils housed the majority of communities and contained the highest levels of populations. Some town lands had been occupied for at least one hundred years. Adjacent upland forests were affected by dense settlement patterns along the river lands. Creek country was a landscape transformed by the Indians who settled there. Repeated burnings created park-like landscapes; the land was far from pristine. For Ethridge, this transformation of the land is key to understanding Indian settlement in the region. Indians shaped the lands that they inhabited and were often affected by poor soil and the overuse of soil. The riverine divisions of Creek country enabled outside observers to draw comparative judgments; they discerned that some towns were better situated than others, that some were wealthier than others, that some towns had existed for generations while still others disappeared or moved onto unoccupied lands to form new towns.

Creek country was shaped by the ways in which Indian inhabitants drew sustenance from the landscape. Because the people were agricultural, the most obvious evidence of human activity was the cultivated fields. Fields were owned by the townships and farmed communally. Agriculture often appeared as a vast and expansive activity to outsiders because abandoned fields adjoined more recently cultivated fields. However, in Creek country sustenance depended on a multiplicity of sources: on herding, hunting, and gathering as well as agriculture. In the midst of Creek settlements were the homes of their "Indian countrymen," traders who had married into Indian families, established farms or ranches, and lived their lives and raised their children among their wives' people. These men did not own their lands; they were granted the right to use them (usufruct), and it appears that their wives retained agricultural responsibilities. Indian townships did not hesitate to demand the removal of these traders when they found their actions offensive. Indeed, these traders proved less than successful in attempting to assert...