Mississippian shatter zone
The chiefdoms were ravaged in the mid-16th century by the Spanish exploratory missions of de Soto and others, initiating an irrevocable decline.
The most important factor in their gradual disappearance was the chaos induced by slave raids and the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians.
These included tribes prominent in 18th and 19th U.S. history such as the Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Yamassee, and Catawba.
From 1000 to 1600 CE, the Mississippian culture of the American Indian people flourished in much of what would later become the southern and mid-western United States.
The early Mississippian culture (1000 to 1300 CE) featured the rise of Cahokia, located in East St. Louis, Illinois.
Cahokia became the largest city north of Mesoamerica covering an area of 14.5 km2 (5.6 sq mi) and with a population estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000 people.
The period between first contact of the traditional chiefdoms with the Europeans in 1540 until the demise of the Mississippian culture in 1730 is called a "shatter zone" by scholars.
The average chiefdom had a population of 2,800 to 5,400 people of whom 350 to 650 lived in the main town, characterized by large earthen mounds.
Hernando de Soto and 620 Spanish soldiers (along with hundreds of horses, dogs, and pigs) traveled a circuitous route through nine southern states from 1539 to 1542 searching for wealth.
Among those chiefdoms de Soto visited were Cofitachequi (probably located near Camden, South Carolina), the easternmost chiefdom of the Mississippians; Joara (probably near Morganton, North Carolina) one of the most northern of the chiefdoms; Coosa (located along the Coosawattee River in northwest Georgia; Tuscaluza (near Tuscallusa, Alabama) where de Soto fought the largest battle of his expedition at the town of Mabila; and Tula (probably in Yell County, Arkansas), near the western limits of the Mississippians.
De Soto created havoc in this passage, killing and enslaving Indians, confiscating food supplies to feed his soldiers, and possibly spreading European diseases among the people he encountered, although no firm evidence of epidemics among the natives as a result of de Soto's passage has been found.
[7][8] In 1559–1560, a Spanish expedition headed by Tristán de Luna y Arellano attempted to found a colony on Pensacola Bay, Florida.
Still in need of food and looking for a place to establish a viable settlement, the Spanish continued north to the homeland of the Coosa paramount chiefdom.
[9] The Spaniards were disappointed in the meager results of their expedition, soon departed Coosa, and abandoned de Luna's colony on Pensacola Bay.
St. Augustine (founded 1565) in Florida became the center of the much-reduced Spanish activity in the inland areas of the southeastern United States.
[13][14] In the 1620s people of the Chiscas chiefdom from northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia migrated, for unknown reasons, hundreds of miles south to northern Florida.
"[21] The founding of English settlements in Virginia in 1607 and South Carolina in 1670 resulted in a demand for American Indian slaves.
[23] In the words of scholar Andrés Reséndez, "In the period between 1670 and 1720, Carolinians exported more Indians out of Charleston, South Carolina, than they imported Africans into it.
The Iroquois motive for the Beaver Wars was to gain control of trade with the French, Dutch, and English colonies in their region.
Other important slaving tribes in the late 17th century were the Yamasseee of Georgia and South Carolina and the Chickasaw based near present-day Tupelo, Mississippi, 800 km (500 mi) west of Charleston.
In 1683, the Yamassee, in cooperation with white colonists in South Carolina, began to launch slave raids into Spanish Florida.
The Yamassee and their allies killed most of the English slave traders, the colonial governments took steps to regulate the colony's trading relationships with Indian tribes, and many Indian tribes, such as the Yamassee, continued to be anti-British after the war and established better relations with the Spanish and French.
Several of the important southeastern Indian tribes learned to balance their relationships with the colonial powers, trading and accepting gifts from all, but establishing alliances with none.
They simplified religious practices and became integrated into a trade system with European colonists exchanging deerskins and slaves for guns and other manufactured products.
Indians began to practice a variety of occupations: "guide, translator, mercenary, postal rider, horse thief, slave catcher, prostitute, etc."
[36] In the early 1700s European settlement in the United States was still sparse and mostly near the coasts with the Indian peoples in control of the very large hinterland.
The confederacies of the varied peoples were held together by the need to protect themselves from slave raids and, increasingly, from the encroachments of European colonists onto their lands.
