miles inland, the yaupon and black tea appear, astoundingly, in Bartram’s
Travels. William was among the Cherokees in the mountains when he ‘‘ob-
served a little grove of the Casine yapon, which was the only place I had seen
it grow in the Cherokee country.’’ They ‘‘call it the beloved tree,’’ he reported,
‘‘and are very careful to keep them pruned and cultivated, they drink a very
strong infusion...which is so celebrated, indeed venerated by the Creeks,
and all the Southern maritime nations of Indians.’’^16 By this time, one must
expect, a tea derived from an oceanside desert landscape generally hostile
to agriculture had become common and essential to the Green Corn Cere-
mony among late-Mississippian peoples living in lush farming subregions.
I am not suggesting that tea-drinkers or makers of beautiful drinking
vessels and other art or ingenious rearrangers of landscape must neces-
sarily be Mississippian. Long before any North Americans farmed, a people
called Ortona undertook monumental civil engineering. Ortona is a small
town in present-day Florida about fifteen miles west of Lake Okeechobee,
just north of the Caloosahatchee River, which winds westward to the Gulf
of Mexico at Fort Myers. The Ortona site, settled about ...and last-
ing probably , years, approached its cultural and commercial peak be-
tween about and .., when its central town was two square miles
large and fully realized with finely sculpted earthworks—one portion in the
approximate shape of a crescent moon embracing a star—mounds, water
impoundments, and geometric-designed main roads. About ..,the
Ortona began to excavate canals down to the Caloosahatchee. The water-
ways were twenty feet wide and three or four feet deep—all excavated, of
course, with wooden and shell digging tools and presumably woven baskets
to carry out spill. For the Ortona were travelers and traders whose destina-
tions, archaeologists now believe, included not only the Gulf coast but, via
the Apalachicola and Chatahoochee rivers northward, ultimately over the
mountains all the way to the center of the contemporary Hopewell culture
in the Ohio Valley. Ortona architecture and ritual, only recently uncovered
and dated, closely resemble those of the long-known Hopewell. Among the
most curious artifacts found in southern Ohio mounds were alligators’ and
sharks’ teeth and skins, and shells and bird feathers from Okeechobee.
Their source in Florida now seems confirmed. Ortonans, in turn, seem to
have taken flint, copper, beans, and perhaps effigy pipes back south, in ex-
change.^17
The Ortonas’ great successors in southwestern Florida, contemporaries
of Mississippian peoples to the north, were the mighty Calusas. The Calusas
politically dominated the Caloosahatchee Valley, the shores of Lake Okee-