Looking for cattle knowledge in eighteenth-century Creek and Seminole country

Herrmann, Rachel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1676-7164 2024. Looking for cattle knowledge in eighteenth-century Creek and Seminole country. The Historical Journal

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Abstract

In 1736 a Creek (Muscogee) woman named Senauki gave a gift of wild honey and milk to English leaders in the new colony of Georgia. Senauki’s milk was not cow milk, but hickory nut milk, which she paired with grievances conveyed by her husband, Tomochichi, to complain about colonists’ trespassing cattle. By 1797 the merchant responsible for Creeks’ trade with the Spanish in Florida was trying to secure tariff-free export of cattle hides but not beef by arguing that these ‘Cueros de Buy’ were a Creek commodity commensurate with deerskins. Cattle and the meat, hides, and other products that they yielded are consistently discernible in Creek history, but the presence of cattle (ganado) did not necessarily indicate Indigenous peoples’ consumption of beef (buey) or dairy milk. People could possess knowledge about cattle without eating them. Senauki and Tomochichi relied on a cattle-trading Creek named Mary Musgrove, and the end of the eighteenth century was characterized by Creek and Seminole disagreements about cattle ownership. This essay argues that historians must learn to recognize and rule out evidence of Indigenous knowledge of cattle as food. This ability will better equip scholars to distinguish between Indigenous and non-Indigenous food knowledges and make them less likely to interpret animals as food in instances where Native Americans consumed neither animals nor their byproducts. This essay examines the ways that Creeks and Seminoles treated these ungulates: as invasive pests that destroyed Indigenous crops and wild plants; prestige gifts; beef on the hoof; and the raw material of inedible trade goods.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DP Spain E History America > E11 America (General) E History America > E151 United States (General)
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISSN:	0018-246X
Funders:	The Leverhulme Trust
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 December 2024
Date of Acceptance:	12 December 2024
Last Modified:	16 Dec 2024 15:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174728

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