Book description
In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia,
exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With
these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American
Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region.
Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for
profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as
cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing
their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and
later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance
of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful
Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.
Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three
empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh
insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history,
including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640
and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after
1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which
pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina
in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts
highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be
understood without each other.
"Zamumo's Gifts is a book with many gifts to bestow.
Ranging widely across the centuries, going deeply into English,
French, Spanish, and native sources, Joseph Hall reads the evidence
with insight and imagination to shed important new light on America's
'dark ages,' a largely forgotten era when natives and newcomers
contended for the Continent."-James Merrell, author of Into
the American Woods
Joseph M. Hall, Jr. is Associate Professor of History at Bates
College.
