2.29 America: a.d. 1501 to 1600  (Page 3/12)

All southern Indians were essentially farmers and maize was the staff of life. Farming techniques had progressed far beyond any primitive slash and burn type of agriculture. The impression for years has been that the squaws did most of the work, but this is not correct. These Indians lived chiefly in towns and had their fields in the countryside. While women may have attended small garden plots, men did much of the work in the principal fields, clearing them, girdling large trees with stone axes and knives and fire, disposing of stumps, breaking the ground with hoes consisting of wooden handles with stone, conch shells or large animal bones at the ends. The maize was grown quite scientifically, planted at stated intervals in hills. As growth occurred, more dirt was piled up around the hill, keeping down weeds, trapping moisture and ensuring a higher yield. A Timucuan practice in Florida was to plant one crop of maize in the early spring and another in the summer on the same ground. It was also possible to grow dent, sweet, pop and other varieties of corn, which matured at different intervals. Although secondary in importance, hunting and gathering did occur. Deer were important, not only for food but for skins, and bears were hunted particularly for their oil, as well as fur and meat. It is not known whether maize was brought up from Meso-America overland via Texas or by sea through the West Indies. (Ref. 267 )

It was in the Virginia and Carolina Tidewater area where mixing of the northern hunting-oriented culture with the southern maize-agrarian civilization can best be documented. The Algonquians, originally spread over Canada, were late arrivals in the Tidewater, becoming in part, the Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia and Pamlico and Machapunga of eastern North Carolina. A feature conspicuously absent in the Tidewater was the temple platform mound. Other Algonquians were the Roanoke, Croatoan and Chowanoc. At the time of white contact there were powerful chiefdoms which might almost be called empires all over the south and southeast, including the Cofitachiqui, Powhatan, Natchez and Calyusa. When the Natchez Sun died, his subjects staged an elaborate funeral which included immolation of his wives. Nearer the east coast local natives had had extensive contact with Europeans for generation before Raleigh's Roanoke fiasco, some from Spanish land contact, such as with Ayllon and otherwise with ships either wrecked or coming ashore for provisions.

In spite of their early failures, Spain did not give up. Tristan de Luna took 1,500 men, women and black slaves to try 2 settlements, one at Pensacola and the other at Saint Elena (Port Royal). Lack of supplies, disease, internal bickering and native hostility again defeated the expectations. St. Augustine was founded by Menendez with more than 1,000 soldiers, farmers, artisans, their wives and Negroes in 1565. At first it was really a military base from which to attack the thousand or so French Huguenots, who had fortified Ft. Caroline just north on the St. Johns River. After these French were finally expelled, St. Augustine, with only a mediocre harbor and sandy, relatively unproductive soil, declined in significance. But from St. Elena, founded in South Caroline in about 1566 on the site of present day Parris Island Marine Corps base, soldiers and missionaries trekked into the interior, planting at least five garrisons in the Carolina back country and on the western side of the mountains. For 6 years a Father Sebastian Montero lived among the pagans, teaching them Spanish and the rudiments of Christianity. St. Elena existed for about 21 years and once had about 400 people in some 60 houses. (Ref. 267 , 39 )