ally abandoned their Mississippian culture and thrown themselves into the
getting of skins and European goods, the figure increased to to
each year. Good estimates of exports from Charleston and other depots cap-
ture the enormity and international scope of the deerskin business: From
about into the first few years of the eighteenth century, about ,
skins were shipped each year from Charleston and Virginia ports. In
Charleston alone sent ,. By the mid-s, according to a British
administrator, all American ports under national control shipped around
,. Add smaller but still quite substantial French and Spanish ex-
ports, and the total reaches at least half a million per annum on the eve of
the American Revolution. Add the deer killed for domestic purposes, as the
principal historian of the trade suggests, and the total approaches a mil-
lion a year.^26
No wonder that American colonial governments instituted the first hunt-
ing laws to restrict takes. Legislative leaders, often businessmen engaged
in the trade as well as planters, understood threats to the commons. Vir-
ginia actually closed the whitetail season one year. This action was to little
avail, of course, because to the west natives continued the slaughter. Inter-
national tensions, war and disruption, and worsening intertribal wars over
hunting grounds finally, early in the nineteenth century, effectively ended
the trade. In another two centuries, throughout the East, huge deer popu-
lations would plague suburban gardeners and motorists, prompting the
city of Princeton, New Jersey, to authorize in-town hunting with shotguns.
Other localities, especially in the South, licensed night hunters with infra-
red scopes on rifles. In the long interregnum between the international
trade and today’s clashes between humans and deer over habitat, the white-
tail, both ancient and modern factotum and staple, was a rarely seen crea-
ture.
tNatives themselves faded into the netherworld of millions of deer. Be-
fore the first European set foot and loosed war, enslavement, greed, and
pathogens upon North America, native clans, cultures, and polities had
moved, merged, or disappeared. Recall that the very names of Chief Tazca-
lusa and his capital suggest a confederation using at least two languages,
which probably evolved into the Creek Nation, so called in the late eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries. But it was surely the Europeans who
nearly destroyed the native peoples even as they certainly brought about
the ruin of native civilizations, Mississippian and other.^27
Hernando de Soto was not the first European to visit the continent. Juan