Coosa

A major MISSISSIPPIAN chiefdom centered in northwest present-day Georgia in the 16th century, Coosa dominated several ethnic communities that occupied the areas of eastern Tennessee, northwest Georgia, and northeast Alabama, and it survived the Hernando de Soto, Tristan de Luna, and Juan Pardo expeditions into the region only to suffer tremendous population losses caused by the introduction of European epidemic diseases.

The name Coosa referred to a chiefdom in the areas of eastern Tennessee, northwest Georgia, and northeast Alabama and the capital town of that chiefdom situated along the banks of the Coosawattee River in Georgia. In 1540 the Soto campaign entered this province in the Tennessee River Valley after crossing the Appalachian Mountains from the Carolinas. Soto proceeded to force the local inhabitants to serve as porters and provide his army with food and other supplies. After seizing the paramount chief of the province in the town of Coosa, Soto made additional demands on the population to replenish his forces, and he eventually marched toward central Alabama to invade the territory of the chiefdom of Mabila.

A detachment from Luna’s expedition next made contact with Coosa in 1560. They found the chiefdom to have declined in size, especially in the immediate vicinity of the capital town of Coosa. After helping the chief of Coosa put down a challenge to his authority by the Napochies along the Tennessee River, these Spaniards left the region to report their findings to Luna himself. The Spanish made their last contact with Coosa in 1567 with the Pardo entrada. Pardo entered the Coosa province from the Appalachian Mountains following the path Soto took several decades before this expedition. Pardo met open resistance by allied Native forces under the leadership of the chief of Coosa and finally returned over the mountains. The Coosa chiefdom seems to have declined after this point. It probably suffered severe population loss due to the accidental introduction of Old World epidemic diseases by the Spanish entradas and trade with coastal groups.

The demographic collapse, just one of the consequences of the COLUMBIAN Exchange, led to Coosa being driven from northwest Georgia by the Cherokees. Eventually survivors from the chiefdom arrived in east-central Alabama as part of the Muscogee alliance system often called the Creek Confederacy.

Further reading: David J. Hally, “The Chiefdom of Coosa,” in The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704, eds., Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 227-253; Charles Hudson, Marvin Smith, David J. Hally, Richard Polhemus, and Chester B. Depratter, “Coosa: A Chiefdom in the Sixteenth-Century Southeastern United States,” American Antiquity 50 (1985): 723-737; Charles Hudson, Marvin T. Smith, Chester Depratter, and Emilia Kelley, “The Tristan de Luna Expedition, 1559-1561,” Southeastern Archaeology 8 (1989): 31-45; Marvin T. Smith, Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).

—Dixie Ray Haggard