American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Creek and Seminole Indians are closely related tribes who originally lived in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. During the eighteenth century and earlier, they occupied medium to large permanent villages and engaged in intensive riverine agriculture, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Creeks and Seminoles became heavily involved in the southern deerskin trade with the Europeans. They also adopted livestock raising at this time. Scholars generally have noted that the Southeastern Indians adopted stock raising early, but primarily have viewed it as significant only later in the nineteenth century. Most see the only economic significance of livestock as first supplementing, then replacing, game in the Indian’s diet during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is not until the establishment of large-scale commercial cattle-raising operations by some ”mixed-bloods” in Indian Territory during the later nineteenth century that livestock raising is viewed generally as significant. I would argue that stock raising had greater social and economic significance from the beginning. Its role in the domestic economy as a source of meat was, as generally noted, increasingly important during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is the role of livestock in the export economy and in the internal political economy of the Southeastern Indians during the same period and earlier that largely has been ignored. Within this arena, livestock raising played simultaneous roles in both maintaining older sociopolitical patterns and introducing change through class formation. Further, differences in patterns of social change among the Creeks and Seminoles were partially linked to differences in the ways in which livestock raising was integrated into their societies and economies.