“Skilful Jockies” and “Good Sadlers”

This chapter introduces and assesses the roles horses played in the economies and societies of eighteenth-century southeastern Indians. Villagers throughout the region found horses essential in hunting, trade, and war. If the future of borderlands history centers partly on issues of spatial mobility and ambiguities of power, then horses are especially relevant to borderlands scholarship. In the early South, horses facilitated cross-cultural and economic exchanges while undermining the structures of authority for both Indians and whites. A closer look at the interrelationship between Indians, horses, and the environment affords new insights into borderlands history by underscoring how human and animal mobility not only complicated territorial boundaries and cross-cultural interactions but also subtly modified the socioeconomic foundations and ecological landscape of southeastern Indians.

Commodity Exchange

Southeastern Indians and British settlers used both asocial and social forms of exchange, and thus commodity exchange was not a foreign concept to either party. Under the logic of mercantilism, the British were anxious about commodity exchange and strove to curtail the trading relationships formed between white Indian traders and Southeastern Indians. Southeastern Indian leaders envisioned their role as protecting their town’s consumers and traders. They negotiated trading terms and practices.

Lives in Objects

The Lives in Objects presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, which is equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and the consumption of goods. It challenges long-standing assumptions about Native American and European economic cultures in Early America, particularly the dichotomy that other scholars have drawn between gift-giving (associated with native pre-capitalist economies) and commodity exchange (associated with colonial market economies). This interpretation has tended to cast Native Americans as unwitting victims drawn into and made dependent on a trans-Atlantic marketplace. This book complicates that picture by showing how both sides (Southeastern Indian and British American) mixed gift-giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, so much so that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard scholarly interpretation accords them. The result is a much more nuanced view of the trade and its impact on the economic and material lives of Southeastern Indian and British individuals. In this pursuit, this book also complicates the deerskin trade from the British perspective, showing that royal and colonial governments were not as willing to embrace modern free market values as we might assume.

Production

This chapter compares Southeastern Indian and British myths and ideologies about labor. It argues that whereas the British drew a direct line between a product and its manufacturer, Southeastern Indians obscured individuals’ labor to emphasize social cohesion. These myths were sometimes at odds with live realities.