from’’ the herd, ‘‘who, out of humour and experiment, trained his dog up
from a puppy to this business: he follows his master’s horses only, keeping
them in a separate company where they range; and when he is hungry or
wants to see his master, in the evening, he returns to town, but never stays
at home at night.’’^24 Here was a canine servant—conceivably a blend of the
American and European—to render the fictional Lassie a slacker by com-
parison. And here also was a native man ingenious both as trainer and as
gentleman of apparent leisure, yet at ease, too, in a world of commerce.
tIn the long meanwhile, trade—in deerskins and much else—was al-
ready ancient when Timucuans and others responded to Spanish interest
in Florida during the s and s. As previously observed, through-
out eastern North America, even in Archaic and Woodland times, people
sought to exchange what was plentiful to them for the exotic and distant,
and skins were an important commodity in such native trade, as well as
a commonly used tribute paid to paramount chiefdoms by satellite towns
and villages. Certainly among the most exotic (if not bizarre) commodities
in long-distance exchanges between native groups, and before Europeans
arrived, were the beaks of ivory-billed woodpeckers, which were natives to
the lower Mississippi hardwood forests and the Gulf coast. The English ex-
plorer and naturalist Mark Catesby (writing in ) noted that Canadian
natives and other ‘‘Northern Indians’’ coveted the beaks, which they strung
together into coronets, points facing outward, for their nobility. North-
erners paid lower Mississippi suppliers no less than two and occasionally
three deerskins for each beak. Perhaps one should not be surprised, then,
at the discovery (during the s) of an ivory-bill, along with the beak of
a pileated woodpecker, in a grave in Colorado. To some western peoples,
woodpecker parts were not only aesthetically pleasing but instrumental in
curing venereal diseases.^25 It may be likely that southern hunters who har-
vested ivory-bills and pileated woodpeckers took their feathers for their
own decorative uses. Much of the rest of these beautiful creatures may as
likely have been consigned to middens as waste, fit ultimately to fertilize
domestic gardens. Birds as well as skins were private property, commodi-
ties, after all. The effect of the European-managed transatlantic trade in
skins, then, was simply, albeit devastatingly, to accelerate the carnage.
Credible estimates of Creek skin-trading illustrate this effect. Before
contact with Spanish and British traders, a Creek household required the
killing of about to deer annually for its needs, which probably in-
cluded some exchange as well as family use. Once the Creeks had virtu-