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Copyright (c) 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Chapter 1

Dollars Never Fail to Melt Their Hearts

Native Women and the Market Revolution

James Taylor Carson

In the spring and summer of 1797, Louis-Phillipe, Duke of Orleans and heir to the French throne, fled the violence of the French Revolution for the hustle and bustle of the New Republic. During his tour of the United States, he and his fellow exiles visited the big cities of the Northeast, the small towns of the West, and, most remarkably of all, the Cherokees of East Tennessee. The duke wrote down much of what he saw, and among the several things that struck him as either odd or novel about Cherokee culture was the allegedly amorous proclivities of the women. He compared their sureness in matters of the flesh to the women of his homeland, but the apparent commonplaceness of prostitution in the Cherokee towns shocked his otherwise open mind. "[A]ll Cherokee women," Louis-Phillipe reported, "are public women in the full meaning of the phrase: dollars never fail to melt their hearts."[1]

The love of the dollar that the duke noted was linked to the particular sexual and hospitality mores of Cherokee women that predated contact with Europeans as well as to the inroads that new forms of economic production and exchange were making among the towns and households of the native South in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the most part, native women lived and worked beyond the gaze of the settlers, the officials, and the missionaries who created the historical record ethnohistorians use to study the past. They also left very few documents of their own. But when native women appear in diaries, letters, and papers, it is clear that the market revolution challenged older modes of production and exchange and introduced new demands, new forms of exchange, and new forms of household production.

Scholars who have studied native women and the market revolution generally have characterized the changes that resulted in their lives as deleterious and degrading. The switch from household subsistence production to production for sale in a money economy not only subjugated native women to an alien economic order, some have argued, but also eroded their self-sufficiency, influence, and power within their own societies.[2] To be sure, the economic changes that accompanied the market revolution of the early nineteenth century impinged upon women's self-sufficiency and power. Creeping capitalism also introduced to native people the style and substance of the class system that structured southern settler society. Before the federal government removed the southern First Nations in the 1830s, such economic inroads introduced to native people notions of consumerism and class but failed to overturn wholly older forms of inherited and earned status. As long as native women maintained control over their homes and families, the means of production, buying, selling, and trading, they were able to retain the cultural, social, and political rights and responsibilities that had defined them as women long before Europeans had set foot in North America. Finding a balance between material innovation and cultural conservation constituted the central theme of their working lives. b.c., women in some parts of the South had domesticated a variety of wild plants, which they added to the nuts, berries, roots, and fruits that they gathered to complement the meat procured by the men who hunted.[3] The introduction of corn to the South between a.d. 700 and 900 enabled women to assume an even more important role in the economy. They raised the large quantities of food that fueled the formation of the great Mississippian societies that covered the region on the eve of contact. With the development of horticulture, women replaced the old hunting and gathering subsistence economy with a form of production that met the societies' subsistence needs while also providing a surplus that could be stored for future use.[4]

Stories told by the descendants of the Mississippians and other early peoples placed women, corn, and farming at the center of their lives. According to the Cherokees, corn came from their ancestral mother, Selu, and was passed on to them through the shedding of her blood. Choctaw elders told children the story of a crow that flew up from the south and dropped a small grain at the feet of a little girl. "What is this?" the girl asked. "Corn," replied the mother. The Creeks believed that corn came to them in the guise of an old woman, and that "if it is not treated well it will become angry."[5]

It is not altogether clear how men and women in Mississippian societies partitioned economic and political power. Because of their association with warfare and diplomacy, men controlled relations with outsiders and dominated political offices. Vested with the official power to make decisions on behalf of the communities that they represented, men held what scholars have defined as "authority." Women lacked access to such formal expressions of power, but through the institutions of the clans and the households, women were able to enjoy the "influence" that came with the control of land, property, and children.[6] There were, nevertheless, important exceptions that suggest women's exercise of power was more complex than notions of either authority or influence allow. Early reports of Spanish explorers, for example, make clear that women governed some Mississippian chiefdoms. The Lady of Cofitechequi attempted to enlist Hernando de Soto as a military ally in 1540. Some years later, Juan Pardo met the female chief of Guatari in the piedmont of present-day North Carolina. Female leadership may not have been common in the Mississippian South, but it is reasonable to conclude that women could exercise considerable authority as well as influence.[7]

European colonization of the South introduced to Mississippians many things that shaped the way native women lived and worked. First and foremost were lethal Old World diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza that decimated the region's population and brought a quick end to the Mississippian societies. In the aftermath of the demographic collapse, remnant groups clustered into new social groupings that shared certain Mississippian cultural features but that held identities wholly distinct from the earlier societies. In the Lower Mississippi River valley, remnants coalesced into groups that French and English traders called the Choctaws, who, in 1700, numbered approximately twenty-one thousand, and the Chickasaws, who had a population of nearly five thousand. In present-day Georgia and Alabama, the same process produced the roughly nine thousand Creeks. Future infusions of other remnant groups augmented the Creek population throughout the eighteenth century. In the Appalachians, new groups infiltrated the fertile valleys, merged with the people who had survived contact, and formed the original sixteen or so thousand Cherokees.[8]

Equally important to the changing world in which native women lived were new flora, like peach trees and cotton plants, and new fauna, like poultry, cattle, and horses, that the Europeans had brought with them. When women adopted new plants and animals, they enhanced their ability to feed their families and their towns and to trade with the newcomers. Without forsaking the cultivation of aboriginal crops like corn, squash, and beans, the manufacture of pottery, and the weaving of cloth spun from plant fibers, women began in the 1730s to raise chickens and hogs, to use brass kettles and glass bottles, to sew clothing from European strouds, and to trade their produce to the skin traders who frequented their towns in order to cover the cost of the goods they purchased. By the late 1700s, women had become thoroughly enmeshed in the frontier exchange economy, a trade in foodstuffs, household items, and personal services that linked native people and colonists in economic relationships beyond the oversight of the imperial governments.[9]

Over time a new interest in profit challenged ancient traditions of hospitality and reciprocity that had previously conditioned women's behavior toward outsiders who came into their towns and homes. Cherokee women, for example, sought to make the English garrison at Fort Loudon dependent on them for supplies of corn and other fruits and vegetables. One woman in particular, Nancy Butler, worked for the soldiers as a purchasing agent.[10] Choctaw women as well provisioned military men stationed in their midst. "We began our Traffic for Provisions," one soldier reported, "with the Women, who for Paint and Beads gave us Fowls, Eggs, [and] Indian Corn."[11] Another visitor to the Choctaws remarked that the women carried on a lively trade in pigs and chickens and that they "carried the spirit of husbandry so far as to cultivate leeks, garlic, cabbage and some other garden plants, of which they make no use, in order to make profit of them to the traders."[12]

The frontier exchange economy created a tension between the traditional ethic of reciprocity by which native women had welcomed visitors with gifts of food and shelter and the novel idea of profit. Market possibilities that grew out of hospitality triggered women's departure from a subsistence-surplus economy toward a market economy. For the transition from a subsistence-surplus economy to a market economy to occur, economic activity had to be separated from the cultural moorings that tie production to gender roles and other cultural imperatives, and it had to begin to be replaced by alien ideas like price and profit. Southern native women never completed the transformation before their removal in the 1830s. Instead, they created what one historian has called a marketplace economy, an economy where cash, credit, and surplus production coexisted with the particular cultural conventions of the indigenous precontact economy.[13] By the middle of the eighteenth century, native women had begun to value market-oriented production and exchange, but they still looked to their cultures instead of to their markets for their identities as women, mothers, daughters, and farmers.

What changed was their power as women relative to the power of their sons and husbands in the postcontact South. The ambiguous mixture of authority and influence enjoyed by native women in Mississippian times survived well into the eighteenth century but diminished in the face of the deerskin trade and colonial warfare. Among the Creeks, "Beloved Women," who belonged to the most prestigious clans, weighed in on discussions of government and diplomacy.[14] The Cherokees, too, had "Beloved Women."[15] Captain Henry Timberlake likened them to "Amazons," and trader James Adair marveled at what he described as their "petticoat government."[16] The extent of Cherokee women's power is, however, a subject of some debate. Anthropologist Raymond Fogelson has characterized their power as one of indirect influence on brothers, sons, and clan members. In contrast, historian Theda Perdue has attributed to Cherokee women a much more direct role in government and diplomacy. From deciding the fate of war captives, to exchanging wampum belts with Seneca women, to adjudicating infractions of certain cultural rules, it is clear, Perdue argues, that Cherokee women exerted an important influence in the home as well as in the council house.[17] Choctaw women, like their Cherokee counterparts, also made decisions regarding war captives, and their oral tradition attributed a great deal of importance to a female chief named Ohoyao Minko.[18] By the latter decades of the 1700s, however, women's power seems to have diminished, becoming, in the words of one historian, "almost negligible."[19] The deerskin trade and the colonial system of client warfare had put more and more economic and political authority into the hands of male hunters and warriors, which may have circumvented traditional avenues of female power and transformed it from fact to rumor. "I never heard of, or knew of," naturalist William Bartram wrote in the 1770s, "any late instances of the female sex bearing rule or presiding either in council or the field, but according to report, the Cherokees & Cricks [sic] can boast of their Semiramis's [sic], Zenobeas, & Cleopatra's [sic]."[20]

Although their power may have decreased over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the early nineteenth century was a world where farming replaced deer hunting and warring as the economic mainstays of the South's First Nations. Women stood at the forefront of the new economy, and as they adopted new agricultural products and livestock and new technologies, they reinvigorated traditional gender roles and responsibilities. Nowhere is this more clear than in their relationship to livestock because men, not women, had always shared a deeply spiritual relationship with animals. But because chickens, pigs, cattle, and horses were animals associated with farming and domestication as well as the forest and hunting, women incorporated them into their household economies.[21] The profusion of European animals on native farms struck visitors to the South. During a trip among the Cherokee towns, federal agent Benjamin Hawkins passed two women on horseback who were driving their cattle to market. Among the Creeks, economic innovation may have been tied to political power, for the "Queen of Tuckabatche" possessed a "fine stock of cattle." Creek and Cherokee women also began to supplement their daily diet with milk, cheese, and butter.[22] The Chickasaws raised "plenty of hogs and cattle." Beef and pork, wrote their federal agent, were two of their most important "articles for exportation."[23] Choctaw parents gave daughters and sons and nieces and nephews a cow and calf, a sow and piglet, and a mare and colt, so that as the children grew older they would, upon marriage, have a sizable herd.[24] "These people," one observer remarked, "have stocks of horses, cattle, hogs, etc. some of them have large stocks, and appear to live plentifully."[25]

Raising and selling livestock were important to women, but horticulture still occupied the bulk of female labor in the early nineteenth century. Female farmers adopted the profit motive that had come with colonization. Disappointed by the lack of hospitality he witnessed during his tour of the South, Englishman Adam Hodgson remarked of Creek women, "A desire of gain, caught from the whites, has chilled their liberality."[26] While staying overnight at an inn in the Creek nation, Hodgson noted several women who sold chickens and corn to travelers. Judging from the amount of silver jewelry they wore, business must have been brisk.[27] Benjamin Henry Latrobe likewise deplored the dearth of free food and accommodation in native towns. "Hospitality exists everywhere food cannot be bought or sold," he wrote of his trip through the Choctaw towns along the Natchez Trace, "[but] a good market in the neighbourhood always puts and end to it."[28] "[A]lmost every Indian we passed had something to sell," remembered the Reverend Jacob Young of his trip down the trace, "especially corn at two dollars per bushel, corn blades at a bit, [and] pumpkins for a quarter."[29] Cherokee women provisioned travelers as well, but unlike their counterparts in the other nations, they also exported their crop surpluses. Wagons laden with corn bound for American settlements were common sights. One chief believed that because market prices for Cherokee produce were so high the women were reluctant to devote energy to anything else.[30]

Despite the success of some native women in the marketplace economy, the federal government believed that they were impoverished and doomed to extinction. In order to save them from such a fate, federal officials crafted a plan to introduce settler ways of life to native men and women. First, federal agents would be sent among the various tribes to teach men how to farm and to own private property and to take women out of the fields and to put them in the home. Second, if native families could be confined to small private farms, policymakers reasoned that they would cede their surplus land to the federal government for sale to settlers. Assimilation, the ultimate goal of the "civilization" policy, proved illusive, but the federal government acquired native land through a number of treaties negotiated between the government and the southern First Nations in the 1810s and 1820s.[31]

Native men and women worked out their own compromises to the civilization policy. Among the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws men began to farm, but they relied on slaves to labor for them in the fields so that they did not violate their cultures' proscriptions that forbade them from farming.[32] Cherokee men and women struck a deal whereby men plowed fields with horse-drawn ploughs and helped the women to sow seed, but women continued to tend and harvest the crops.[33] Choctaw women, however, resisted attempts to transform their gender roles. When the wife of an American trader urged a woman she had hired to weed her garden to put her son to work as well, the woman replied, "Would you have me make a woman of my son? He is to be a man and a warrior & he is not going to work like a woman!"[34] As long as little boys grew up to be warriors, the Choctaw woman knew, women could remain farmers.

Federal agents enjoyed little success in completely overturning native gender roles in horticulture, but they made substantial gains introducing to women other ways to make a living. Benjamin Hawkins was by far the most influential of the various men appointed to oversee the implementation of the "civilization" policy in the South. Stationed among the Creeks, Hawkins distributed cotton seed and handed out cotton cards, spinning wheels, and looms. More important, he and a weaver he had hired taught women how to spin cotton fibers into thread, which could be woven into cloth.[35] Creek men resented the agent's plan. "[T]hey are," Hawkins wrote, "apprehensive that the women by being able to clothe themselves will become independent and compell [sic] the men to help them in their labour."[36] The women were nevertheless overjoyed at the spinning and weaving skills Hawkins had taught them. In 1798, two of the weaver's pupils provided Hawkins with fifty yards of fine cloth. Private individuals soon took advantage of the women's new skills. One Scottish planter set up a shop in which eleven women worked five wheels and one loom, and an Irishman established a business that employed slaves and Creek women to turn out yards of cloth. In a demonstration of just how far they had moved from the imperatives of a subsistence-surplus economy to a marketplace one, some Creek women reinvested their profits, buying hogs and cattle with the money they earned from cloth sales.[37] Indeed, the desire for more cards, wheels, and looms led several women to pressure the male chiefs to demand more supplies from the federal government. "Our women have told us to come to you," explained the chiefs of Coosa and seven other towns to Hawkins, "and beg you to give them some wheels and cards and they will give us clothes."[38] Similar pressures may have been behind the chiefs' demand for one thousand spinning wheels in exchange for giving the federal government permission to build a road through the nation.[39] Cherokee women had heard Hawkins's implicit message of economic independence, and they promised him that "they were willing to labour if they could be directed how to profit by it."[40] The cloth economy took off rapidly with the help of missionaries from the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which set up schools to teach young girls how to spin and weave. Between 1810 and 1826, Cherokee women increased the number of looms and spinning wheels in their homes from 467 to 762 and from 1,600 to 2,488, respectively.[41] According to the missionaries, by the 1820s, women's capacity to provide clothing for their families equaled or bettered settler women's.[42] The plan introduced by Hawkins and overseen by the American Board missionaries and by Cherokee agent Silas Dinsmoor had worked. As one Cherokee chief recollected, "When Mr. Dinsmoor . . . spoke to us on the subject, about fifteen years ago, many of us thought it was only some refined scheme calculated to gain an influence over us. . . . He then addressed our women, and presented them with cotton seeds for planting. . . . They acquired the use of them with great facility, and now most of the clothes we wear are of their manufacture."[43]

Cotton cultivation and weaving made similar inroads among the Choctaws. In December 1801, a prominent chief requested that the federal government send weavers to the Choctaw towns to teach women how to spin thread and weave cloth. One year later, twelve families had begun to produce homespun cloth, and, thanks to the efforts of agents like John McKee and regular requests by chiefs for weeding hoes, cotton cards, and other necessary tools, the cotton economy took off.[44] In 1820, one federal investigator reported that women had spun and woven ten thousand yards of cloth.[45] According to Stephen Ward, the federal subagent, they produced such surpluses that they sold cloth regularly to travelers on the Natchez Trace.[46]

Chickasaw women were equally avid weavers but less committed to marketplace economics than either Creek, Cherokee, or Choctaw women. In 1800, a chief requested Agent Samuel Mitchell to hire a weaver to teach women how to make clothing. By the 1810s, chiefs complained to the federal government that the supply of cotton cards and spinning wheels was insufficient to keep up with production. By 1830, most Chickasaw females knew how to make cloth, and families proudly wore their finest homemade clothes to council meetings and when they went shopping in the American settlements.[47] As sellers, however, Chickasaw women seem to have lacked the acquisitive drive that motivated Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee women. Preferring to conserve the subsistence-surplus values of their culture, as soon as Chickasaw women earned enough money from weaving to satisfy their needs, "they converted their wheels," their agent reported, "into play things for their children and their looms into hen roosts."[48]

For women unable or unwilling to learn how to grow, spin, or weave cotton, other opportunities existed in the American plantation economy that surrounded their towns. In fact, picking cotton on plantations enabled hundreds if not thousands of women to move with their husbands during the hunting season and to preserve to a degree the seasonal lifestyle that had characterized life before contact. Planters near the Creek and Choctaw towns were quick to hire women to augment their slave forces. One man paid Creek women a half pint of salt or some beads for every bushel basket they filled with cotton. For two baskets, women could earn a bottle of tafia, rum diluted with water. On average, the women picked two to three baskets a day. Other landowners paid cash wages, and although few believed Creek and Choctaw women worked as well as slave women, without them, one planter's wife remarked, they would not have been able to harvest the large volume of crops that they planted year after year.[49]

Some Creek or Choctaw women worked alongside slaves, but other native women owned them. Outside of the home, slaves were important markers of status. Theda Perdue has shown that chattel slavery initiated among the Cherokees the formation of social classes akin to those that characterized southern settler society and that coexisted in uneasy tension with traditional social divisions. Although the vast majority of Creeks did not own slaves, Kathryn Holland Braund and Claudio Saunt have argued as well that a small slaveholding elite emerged and imbibed the racist and classist notions that characterized settler society. It is reasonable to suspect the same also could be said for the Chickasaws, but among the Choctaws, social divisions that predated contact, like kin and clan, remained at least as influential as newer ideas of class and status.[50]

Prestige goods, like slaves, had long been indicators of status among the native inhabitants of the South. Mississippian chiefs wore copper breastplates and exotic shells, and chiefs in the colonial era brandished silver gorgets, military coats, flags, and swords as emblems of their economic power and chiefly authority. Women wore other markers like beads, jewelry, and cloth. The profits they earned in the marketplace economy enabled them to perpetuate older social categories as well as to generate newer class sensibilities. The women associated with Creek chief William McIntosh represented the fullest elaboration of the female prestige-goods system in both its indigenous and its settler forms. Susanah McIntosh, one of William McIntosh's wives, owned more jewelry than any poultry vendor Adam Hodgson had ever seen—fifteen pairs of silver earrings, two pairs of gold earrings, and twenty-four silver breastplates. She was equally conspicuous in terms of settler fashion given her predilection for silk and cashmere shawls and fine china. Her wealth, however, was not a function of dependence on her husband. She earned it from her considerable farm that was home to fifty-seven hogs, eleven cows and calves, and five steers. Louisa McIntosh was even wealthier. At one time she owned twenty pairs of silver earrings, thirty silver broaches, three spinning wheels, tools, a farm, forty chickens, thirty acres of corn, one hundred head of cattle, one hundred thirty hogs, four horses, and eight slaves. The wealth that such women could command was formidable and engendered serious resistance among Creeks who resented some women's ability to adapt and prosper in the marketplace economy.[51]

As far as can be seen, native women conducted marketplace transactions in cash as well as in kind. Only rarely were women able to obtain credit for their own purchasing power or for their own profit. One of the first of the South's native female entrepreneurs was Sophia Durant, the eldest sister of Creek chief Alexander McGillivray. While her slaves worked for themselves on her ramshackle plantation, she brokered trade between Creeks and Panton, Leslie and Company, a trading firm based in Spanish Pensacola. When Agent Hawkins met her in 1796, her business was apparently dwindling because she had exhausted her credit.[52] A Choctaw named Molly McDonald also made a go at credit purchasing. In the 1820s, she bought a male slave from some traders and made regular payments amounting to seven-eighths of the original purchase price. Because her creditors had specified no particular time for the total repayment, Ms. McDonald was shocked one morning to find the men on her doorstep demanding the final installment. Unable to pay and lacking any documentary proof of the purchase, Molly watched the men repossess the slave without returning any of her hard-earned savings. Her son James was furious, and in a letter to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun he asked, "How is a Choctaw to obtain redress, when he is debarred, by the statutes of Mississippi from giving his testimony in a court of justice?"[53] Lack of basic legal protections for native people in all of the southern states made any credit arrangements precarious.

One Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Pack, was thoroughly enmeshed in the paper economy. In 1826, John McGowan purchased on credit from Ms. Pack a slave woman and child. Lacking any legal standing in the United States, she entrusted McGowan with a set of notes worth $2,680 and asked him to redeem them for her. When Pack refused to share the proceeds of the notes with McGowan, he absconded with the slaves and eight of her cattle to Georgia, where he mortgaged the slaves to a man named Cunningham. When Cunningham pressed McGowan for payment, McGowan took the slaves and the purloined cattle back into the Cherokee nation beyond the reach of the Georgia courts. It was a bad move on McGowan's part because in the Cherokee nation Ms. Pack had legal standing and a well-established claim to the slaves and to the cattle, so she called the Lighthorse, the Cherokee national police force, to apprehend McGowan and to confiscate her property. With the tables turned against him, McGowan turned to the federal agent Hugh Montgomery, who found in his favor. Unable to compel Elizabeth Pack to pay him his proceeds from the redeemed notes, he demanded that Montgomery compensate him.[54] How many other women were engaged in such complicated financial transactions is difficult to say, but the credit nexus of the market revolution was not wholly out of the reach of native women.

Regardless of the variety of strategies native women undertook to make a living in the antebellum South, one thing linked the wealthiest slave mistress to the poorest potter woman; they continued to own their property separately from men, and most native men and federal agents recognized their property rights. Benjamin Hawkins, for example, warned settler men who were anxious to marry Creek women that the women were "in the habit of assuming and exercising absolute rule" over their children and their property.[55] Similarly, the Cherokee national council stipulated that if a woman married a settler, "the property of the woman so married shall not be subject to the disposal of her husband, contrary to her consent."[56] The Chickasaws as well continued to respect the long-standing rule.[57] Such arrangements assured native women that they could continue to control the production and the sale of their products in the market revolution in spite of the "civilization" program and without being trodden underfoot by their settler husbands, by their chiefs, and by agents of the federal government.

The ability of Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee women to prosper and to participate so fully in the market revolution without losing their responsibilities for production and their rights to property was, nevertheless, conditioned by their historically ambivalent relationship to the kinds of formal political authority like treaty councils that Europeans had taken to be the seats of native sovereignty. The formal circumscription of women's power in the aftermath of colonization was most systemic in the Cherokee republic founded in 1827. The planters and chiefs who sat on the national council passed a series of laws intended to abrogate matrilineal clan responsibilities and to shift inheritance from the mother's line to the father's line. The government also reserved political offices and seats on the national bench for men.[58] The first constitutional Choctaw government likewise sought to replace the judicial functions of the matrilineal clans with a national court system, brought inheritance rules into conformity with settler norms, and required Choctaw women who wanted to marry settler men to get permission from their chief before marrying, as one chief wrote, "cordin [sic] to white Laws."[59]

Whatever setbacks women might have encountered in the circles of their national governments paled in comparison to the complete disregard the federal and state governments held in political matters for the descendants of the Lady of Cofitachequi and the Chief of Guatari. In the mid-1820s the southern state governments called increasingly for the removal of the southern First Nations and for the sale of their land. President Andrew Jackson and his supporters pushed through Congress a removal bill that empowered the federal government to negotiate exchanges of native land in the South for tracts of land west of the Mississippi River.[60] The Choctaws signed the first such removal treaty, and although government documents make no mention of women's presence at the meeting, a former slave passed along his account of seven women who made a striking presence at the treaty talks. On the morning of 22 September 1830, federal treaty commissioners John Eaton and John Coffee sat themselves on a log before a small group of women and a broad semicircle of men between the forks of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The first man to speak, Killihota, urged that "the Choctaws ought to sell everything they owned, land, cattle, horses, and hogs, and all in a body emigrate west." Land, however, lay outside his and the other men's authority, and the seven women who sat between the men and the commissioners made this clear. "Killihota," snapped one of the women, "I could cut you open with this knife. You have two hearts." Although he survived the encounter, each subsequent speaker rebuked Killihota's advice and seconded the women's refusal to cede any land. The women had exercised authority and, for the time being, succeeded in defending their land. After the negotiations ended, most of the men and women returned to their homes, but a rump council consisting solely of men signed away their homeland.[61]

Among the Chickasaws, women played no visible role in either the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek negotiations or in the 1834 Treaty of Washington, which amended the first document. Nevertheless, they influenced the chiefs' interpretation of the two accords. What concerned women most was a provision for reserves of land in Mississippi for heads of households that could be either sold for profit or lived upon after removal. The treaty made no mention of the gender of heads of households, but the federal government presumed that only men would qualify for the reserves. A group of Chickasaw women pressed their chiefs to make clear their claims to the reserves. After explaining in elaborate detail to President Jackson the Chickasaw customs of female control of the household and separate ownership of property, the chiefs concluded, "It is an ancient and universal law . . . that the wife had a separate estate in all her property whether derived from her relations or acquired by her. . . . The home of each [wife] is regarded as her own, and is generally so known and distinguished by the community."[62] Having had their wishes put to the president, it is unclear whether or not the women got what they wanted, but they had drawn on their long-standing and important place in Chickasaw society to influence diplomatic affairs and to seek redress for what they felt was wrong.

Of all the southern First Nations, Cherokee women had been by far the most active in what settlers understood as formal politics.[63] The restrictions placed on them by their national government notwithstanding, they continued through the early nineteenth century to impress upon men their concerns and their wishes, and when they could not influence affairs to their satisfaction, they took matters into their own hands. In 1816, prior to the selection of delegates to represent the Cherokees in negotiations for a land cession, several women held a dance in which they chose their partners. In one instant, remarked an observer, "a grave, aged Chief, is seized upon, and snatched from among his Brother Counsellors by these merry Dames."[64] If the possible choices for the delegation were seated in the council house to watch the dance, then it is reasonable to suspect that the women used the occasion to demonstrate their support for certain leaders and their views. Women also petitioned the national council to resist further cessions. At the urging of the "Beloved Woman" Nancy Ward, the petition read, "Your mothers, your sisters ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our land."[65] A year later, they turned up the pressure by invoking the sacred relationship between women, farming, and land. "The land was given to us by the Great Spirit above as our common right," the women asserted, "to raise our children upon, & to make support for our rising generations. We, therefore, humbly petition our beloved children . . . to hold out to the last in support of our common rights . . . we, therefore, claim the right of the soil."[66]

Unable to stop the land cessions of 1817 and 1819, women turned to securing the reserves to which the removal treaties entitled heads of households. Sally Lowry received such a reserve, but she was unable to occupy it because squatters had already made it their home. The Cherokee agent passed on to the secretary of war her desire for a new reserve.[67] Other women in a similar situation gave their powers of attorney to John Walker Jr. to press their claims to land in state and federal courts.[68] Walker's Cherokee wife, Elizabeth Walker, however, did not need her husband's services. She worked a "small Plantation" separate from her husband and claimed a reserve of 640 acres. Unable to gain clear recognition of her title, she pressed a congressman to forward her claim in the House of Representatives.[69] Some years later, when confronted with a squatter on her land, she filed suit and won her case before the Cherokee Supreme Court.[70] In spite of such gains, however, Cherokee women were unable to forestall the signing of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which set them on the Trail of Tears that the Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws had also traveled.

By keeping the scope of economic innovations within the boundaries of their traditionally accepted gender roles as farmers, southern native women adapted but did not abandon the cultures that gave their lives meaning. Regardless of the persistence of their culture or of the power that they held, they still could not resist the expansion of the United States. But contact was as much a phenomenon of interaction between individuals as it was between nations, and so long as the conflicts and accommodations that characterized native women's entry into the market revolution remained on the level of buyer and seller, producer and consumer, they could defend what had been theirs all along. In a sense, Louis-Phillipe had been right. Dollars did melt their hearts because many native women had acquired the skills and the motivations that were necessary to compete in the economy of nineteenth-century America. But the future king of France also missed the point. The desire for profits and for prestige goods was never so pervasive that it uprooted women from the ancient cultural traditions that had structured their working lives and that had defined them as women long before Europeans had ever arrived in the Americas.