the trade with speculation in land and cattle raising. The economic impor-
tance of these interrelated activities underwrote the success of all four colo-
nies. At the individual level, a substantial part of the backcountry popula-
tion depended on the deerskin trade for a livelihood. Charleston, the early
South's greatest commercial city, owed much of its success to its position as
wholesaler for the Indian trade.

The trade and the regulation of the traders were viewed by many British
administrators as a vital tool for the management of Indian relations. For
frontier farmers, the trade and peaceful relations with their Indian neighbors
were a life-and-death concern. With the retrocession of the Floridas to Spain
in 1783, that nation too found the deerskin trade an indispensable aid to its
foreign policy, as did the new American nation. Thus, this study will also
attempt to detail the white end of the trade: as an adjunct of foreign policy
and as an economic force in southeastern history.

My interest in the Creek Indians started at Auburn University, Alabama,
which sits in the heart of the land once claimed by the Muscogulges. There,
Frank L. Owsley, Jr.'s excellent lectures on the early South provided my first
glimpse at the exciting world of the southeastern frontier. As I began my
studies in earnest, I was amazed at what appeared to be three different kinds
of literature on the eighteenth-century Southeast. There were the histories
of colonial South Carolina, Georgia, West Florida, and East Florida. Such
works, even the best ones, seemed populated by cardboard Indians, if indeed
the Indians were mentioned at all. There were also Indian histories, such as
David H. Corkran's outstanding works on the Creeks and Cherokees, which
detailed white-Indian relations during the colonial era. Corkran's ground-
breaking studies told the story from the Indian point of view, with heavy
emphasis on foreign relations. Then there were the works by John R. Swan-
ton and others that concentrated on ethnology but hardly mentioned impor-
tant historical details and trends. Even taken together, these studies, at least
for me, presented a disjointed picture. The Creek side of the story remained
obscure.

After reading Verner W. Crane classic work The Southern Frontier, 1670-
1732 ( 1929), I became fascinated with the deerskin trade and began my
writing career detailing the attempts by colonial and imperial governments
to police the commerce. It was Robin F. A. Fabel who pointed me to
the eighteenth-century British manuscripts that detail so much eighteenth-
century Creek history. His expert counsel during the early years of my grad-
uate studies propelled me further into the dark recesses of dusty library

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