Inside Alabama: A Personal History of My State

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1 Back When It Belonged to the Indians

IN THE BEGINNING

It is hard to say, exactly, when or where Alabama’s prehistoric founders wandered in, but they did. Maybe first into the Tennessee Valley, that rich divot of red land north of the river where part of Alabama’s plantation system will later take root. Or maybe they followed hills and mountains of the Appalachian Plateau, tumbled south until they stood on the heights above the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, and looked out across what later men in later times would call the Black Belt. Some surely came in from the west, into the canebrakes and prairies of that same half-moon stretch of dark, chalky-rich soil where one day a few who were white would live rich and many who were black would live as slaves. And others surely moved in along the coast, where they stayed to fish a little, eat a lot of oysters, fight among themselves, and generally do things that gulf people would do for centuries after them.

Wherever they settled these stone-age immigrants hunted and gathered. They followed the animals, lived in simple shelters or clustered under rock overhangs where today archeologists find their camps. In time they settled in small family units along streams and back in sheltered coves. They refined tools, made better use of food resources, established trade routes, and so stabilized their lives that populations grew, villages developed, and a social order emerged and flourished.

Sometime around 1000 B.C. they began to make pottery, an accomplishment for them and a big deal for anthropologists who use that development to mark the beginning of what they call the Woodland Period. Clay vessels enabled these natives to store and cook the food that made their lives better than that of their ancestors. In these pots they put plants—first nuts, seeds, and berries, which they picked (or picked up), and later corn or maize, which they grew to supplement the traditional hunters’ diet, a diet that improved with the development of the bow and arrow. A more healthful (and more plentiful) supply of food resulted in a population explosion that turned family settlements into villages and, in some cases, villages into towns.

Influenced by contact with similar cultures to the north and west, Alabama’s Woodland tribes laid the foundation for a complex religious system, marked by ceremonies far more elaborate than those conducted by Indians before them. Because the evidence of this is best preserved in the mass graves found beneath and within their large, dome-shaped burial mounds, our knowledge of these people is both extensive and at the same time less complete than we would hope. However, careful excavation and analysis have taught us that these were a rapidly developing people with their own social, political, artistic, and religious culture, a people who might appear primitive when compared to those who came later but, seen in context, were innovative, energetic, and advanced.

Toward the end of the two-thousand-year Woodland Period (around A.D. 1000), Alabama Indians came in contact with the vibrant cultures that were developing in the Mississippi Valley and in northern Florida, and this combination of influences from the south, west, and north helped create the region’s last prehistoric period—the Mississippian (A.D. 1000 to 1550). Marking this transition was a significant change in the way people lived and were governed. Woodland culture, so we believe, was distinguished by a sociopolitical system based on shared resources, with power and authority distributed on the basis of individual accomplishments. The Mississippian period was characterized by chiefdoms, where political, religious, and even economic authority was in the hands of an elite group, bound together by bloodlines and served by the general population. It was a system that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alabamians, white and black, would have recognized as similar to their own. This hierarchical culture matured over the centuries, and though the political system that grew from it appears to have declined toward the end of the Mississippian era, it was one of the few elements of Indian culture that Europeans found familiar when they arrived.

During the Mississippian epoch Indians developed shell-tempered ceramics, improved their stone tools, and created ceremonial objects that showed an artistic sophistication previously unknown in the region. We know this and more because evidence of their way of life, and way of death, has been preserved in large, flat-topped earthen mounds found in or near their towns and cities. Topped by temples or by the houses of their chiefs, the mounds were located around a plaza, which was the ceremonial center of the community. Excavations of these mounds have revealed a highly structured religion that functioned as an element of the social system, where priests and chief served complementary functions and in some instances may well have been the same people.

Two of the most important Mississippian sites located in what would become Alabama are found at Moundville, on the banks of the Black Warrior River, and at Bottle Creek, in the Mobile-Tensaw delta. Today Moundville is the more accessible. Around that site, on the rich flood plain along the Warrior, early Indians found plants, fish, and game enough to feed a growing community. Slowly, steadily, the population expanded, agriculture improved, corn was introduced, and the hierarchy associated with Mississippian culture took shape. Then, around A.D. 1000, they began to build their mounds. We don’t know why. Maybe one of them saw some on a trading trip into the Ohio River Valley, came back and told his friends what this place needs is mounds. Or maybe a chief got up one morning, decided he was tired of living on the same level with the common herd, and told them to pile up some dirt and put his house on top. Maybe the motive was religious, maybe political, or maybe it was just one of those examples of vanity that was and is part of the human condition, but whatever motivated the builders, the structures became an important expression of who they were, so they kept building them.

Construction went on for some two hundred years, and when the builders finished, there were about twenty mounds in the complex. Although not primarily for burials, some did contain human remains along with ritual artifacts, many of them intricately engraved or carved with human and animal figures. Also found in these burials were objects made of copper and other materials that could have come to the region only through an extensive trading network of which the Alabama Indians were part. Indeed, Moundville’s very location suggests that trade was an important part of the community’s way of life. The river was a ready means of transportation, and dugout canoes found at other Mississippian sites reveal that these Indians knew well the value of streams. But Moundville is also located at or near some of the major trails that would later open the land to Spanish, French, English, and finally American traders. Moundville was at a crossroads, and its location reflected its importance.

The Bottle Creek site is less well known and less studied, largely because it is difficult to reach. Its location has also protected it from looters, who have defaced and destroyed many of the state’s archaeological treasures. Bottle Creek Indians began building their mound complex on an island in the Mobile–Tensaw delta swamp, some time after work began in Moundville, and apparently the community was able to retain its supremacy as a political and cultural center longer than its counterpart to the north. At its zenith it contained at least eighteen mounds, and from that location much of the region to the south and east was governed.

We don’t know why the Mississippian culture went into decline, or why the mound complexes at Moundville and Bottle Creek were abandoned. Some have suggested increased economic competition between chiefs and chiefdoms led to wars between the cities, and they point to evidence of defensive stockades that were built at many of the sites. What we do know is that about the same time mound building ceased, long-distance trade seemed to wane, and in burials there were fewer of the finely wrought ceremonial items that characterized Mississippian culture at its height. Not surprisingly, as the centers declined, the power and influence of the elites who governed declined as well, though it is impossible to say if one led to the other, or if all of this change was part of the general disintegration throughout the region. We can say, however, that when Europeans began to arrive, the Indians who met them were not the powerful force they once had been.

EUROPEANS IN ALABAMA

Europeans called America a New World, and to them it was. But we should take care not to speak of the New World as if it were new only to the invaders. In the years that followed the white man’s arrival, Indians witnessed their old way of life fade away and a new one take shape. Thus it became a New World for the Indians as well, and, in a very short time, it would become newer still.

We should admit up front that we are anything but sure about when and where the first Europeans arrived in Alabama or had their initial impact on native cultures. The Spanish captain Alonzo de Pineda was probably the first, with probably the operative word. In 1519 Pineda led an expedition west along the Gulf Coast, from Florida to Texas, stopping from time to time along the way. At his party’s last landfall it was attacked by natives, who killed the commander and many of his men. Then the victors skinned and ate a few of the fallen and hung the human hides as trophies. Those who escaped brought back the grisly tale, along with maps that included a deep inlet that looks very much like Mobile Bay. Maybe it was.

Then came Panfilo Narvaez, who was either Spain’s most unlucky or most incompetent explorer. Opinion seems to lean to the latter. Narvaez left Spain with five ships and a force of over six hundred, including African slaves. By the time he arrived at the Gulf of Mexico off the west coast of Florida in 1528, desertions and storms had reduced the fleet by two and his army by a third. Landing with some three hundred men, he sent his ships and the remaining crew off to find a safe harbor. Thus separated from supplies and a means of escape, the expedition set out across what would later be known as the Big Bend.

Believing a show of brutality would convince the natives to leave the expedition alone, the commander ordered the nose of a captured chief cut off, then had the mutilated Indian’s mother killed by the expedition’s dogs. But rather than cow the natives, these acts enraged them. Spanish scouts were ambushed, stragglers were attacked, arrows flew in without warning, and no one was safe. Finally Narvaez realized the march was futile. He returned to the gulf, constructed crude boats, then set sail, if sail it could be called, west along the coast. One by one the vessels sank. Sailors and soldiers drowned, and natives killed those who got to shore. The quickly dead were the lucky ones, for many on the remaining boats slowly starved. Drifting toward Mexico, the little flotilla might have entered Mobile Bay, though it is impossible to tell just where they went. Of the hundreds who set out on the expedition, only four survived. Panfilo Narvaez was not among them.

One who made it was Cabeza de Vaca, who returned to Spain with fantastic stories of his adventures and of rumors of cities of great wealth that lay in the interior. With the riches of Mexico and Peru in its treasury, Spain was ready to believe the tale.

This is where Hernando de Soto comes into the picture. De Soto has always fascinated Alabamians. One historian even went so far as to claim that Alabama history begins with him, which could be the case, if it is written history you mean. Journals and accounts scribbled out by members of the expedition do provide our first literary description of Alabama, although we are not exactly sure just where in Alabama the writers were writing about when they wrote, a mystery that is part of the fascination. While those interested pretty well agree that in 1540 the Spanish conquistador did travel through the heart of the state, no one has been able to prove conclusively where the expedition went. Back in the 1930s a federal commission marked what was then thought to be the De Soto Trail, and many on that route accepted it as the final word on the subject, mainly because they wanted it to be. So it followed that when later research revealed that some of the commission’s de Soto sites were mislabeled, many along the commission’s route were angry. Some claimed politics was behind it all, others hinted at dark plots by communities along the new route, and others simply refused to accept the evidence.

So why all the fuss? Well, part of it was local pride. After years of believing your town or county was visited by a famous explorer, having a bunch of college professors tell you it wasn’t could be quite a letdown.

And then there was money. In 1992, with all the hoopla surrounding the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery, federal grants came available to those researching the Spanish exploration. All you had to do was prove you had something worth researching. So de Soto scholars began competing for the cash. Things got pretty nasty.

Some realized how ridiculous it all was and said so. One archeologist threatened to apply for a grant to dig a site near Childersburg where he claimed to have discovered a hubcap from a 1952 De Soto automobile—clear evidence of a Spanish presence. Another scholar, when asked by a South Alabama hunting club to confirm that de Soto had crossed the land they leased, wrote back with his own solution for determining the actual route. First, he suggested, find a bone from one of the pigs that the Spaniards took along. Then extract the DNA, clone a modern pig with the route imprinted in its genetic structure (the biology of it all gets a bit fuzzy here), and put the pig on the ground near Tampa Bay, where we think the expedition landed. Then follow the animal as it rambles through the Southeast. This could confirm once and for all the route taken by de Soto and his men. And when the pig arrives at its destination, its followers could barbecue it—not an inappropriate end to the noble animal, at least from an Alabama perspective.

Yet all this modern-day whoop-de-do notwithstanding, the fact remains that de Soto was and is an important part of Alabama history. If his route can be identified, then sites his chroniclers reported might be found and studied. This study would increase our knowledge of Native American culture long ago and would help us better understand changes in settlement patterns that followed in de Soto’s wake.

THE INDIANS AND HERNANDO DE SOTO

Along his route de Soto found towns and villages large and prosperous and a native society that was vibrant and complex. This we know from the chroniclers who wrote of the expedition, and though they were generally condescending in their attitude toward the inhabitants, there remains a sort of grudging admiration in their accounts. From them we also get a hint of what the Indians thought of the clanging, banging, shouting, grumbling mass of foot soldiers, horsemen, craftsmen, priests, and drovers (remember the pigs) who, by the time they entered Alabama late in the summer of 1540, were surely wondering if their commander had a clue where he was going. De Soto, for his part, was willing to go wherever he might find riches like those his countrymen found in Mexico, so he asked in every village where the wealth lay. And every time he asked, the natives, who realized the sooner the Spaniards left the better off they would be, swore the expedition had not gone quite far enough and wished them good luck on their journey—or was it good riddance?

It is unlikely de Soto believed them, but since there was nothing where he was, the only alternative was to push ahead. So he took hostages—men to carry the baggage and women, as one historian diplomatically explained, to entertain the Spaniards. They followed a river, the Coosa we think, south to where it joined another river, probably the Tallapoosa. There the expedition entered a region governed by Chief Tuscaluza (Tuscaloosa), who, full of dignity and seated on a large mound with retainers all about, received the invaders in a tableau created to impress the Spaniards, which it did, and discourage them from further aggression, which it did not. De Soto told the chief what he wanted—precious metal, more bearers to carry the riches, and women. Tuscaluza told him these things and more could be found at Mabila, a town a week or so farther downstream. To make sure the inducements actually existed, de Soto ordered Tuscaluza taken hostage, and with the chief (accompanied by an attendant carrying a sunshade) the army moved west. Making their way along the craggy gorge of a wide and winding river that must have been the Alabama, they reached their destination, which according to some modern scholars was near where Alabama’s first state capital, Cahawba, would be built. Others claim the site was farther south. Some say it was off to the west. But nobody has ever found it, so nobody knows for sure.

Apparently Mabila was one of those fortified towns whose construction signaled the decline of Mississippian culture, and it was there that Tuscaluza and his allies planned to end the Spanish expedition once and for all. Within its walls natives from throughout the region assembled, planned, and waited. On 18 October 1540 de Soto with an advance party entered the main plaza, and the Indians sprang their trap. The fighting was brief and bloody, but the commander and most of his men were able to escape. The main army soon arrived, and the battle commenced in earnest. It was modern warfare—iron, steel, armor and gunpowder—against stone arrows, clubs, and spears, and as would happen often in years to come, modern technology carried the day. There were repeated assaults and heavy casualties before the walls were breached, but once inside the Spaniards put the town to the torch. One cannot know for sure how many Indians died—maybe three thousand, maybe more—but even by conservative estimates it was the bloodiest single day of battle on American soil until Union and Confederate soldiers slaughtered each other at Shiloh more than three hundred years