In 1542, the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon died of a fever in what is today the southeastern United States, ending three years of his expedition wandering randomly around, looking for an imaginary city of gold and in general being a dick to the local Muskogean people he encountered. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of troubles for said locals, whom soon after falling sick with various Old World diseases, which in less than a decade or so killed some 90 percent of the population. As you can probably expect, this somewhat destabilized things, by which I mean all traces of the old civilizations that once called the area home disintegrated, leaving behind a post-apocalyptic shitshow. Luckily, if you can say that, the region had little of value to the Europeans, having no gold or beaver, and tribes from neighboring regions were less than willing to travel into the region for reasons related to holy shit everyone there just died, with the exception of a few Iroquoian peoples like the Cherokee. As such, aside from a few coastal raids by the Spanish to capture slaves, the region was largely left alone for a century or so, giving the Muskogean peoples the needed time to rebuild, forming new tribes, nations, and cultures.
Unfortunately, this all came to an end in the latter half of the seventeenth century as sugar production grew in the Caribbean, greatly increasing the demand for slaves. As a result, the English began trading with various tribes along the Atlantic coast for slaves, who were overall more than happy to provide them because they were enslaving each other anyways and it gave them access to all sorts of sweet European goods. As one can probably imagine, this did not work out well for anybody, except the English, with a number of tribes being wiped out by and those remaining coalescing into several large confederacies, the most dominant being the Muskogean speaking Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, and the Iroquoian speaking Cherokee. Horrified by the violence, the English gave up on enslaving the native peoples. Okay, not really, they actually did it because the demand for buckskins exploded, making the natives more valuable as deer hunters rather than slaves, a value that only increased when a smallpox epidemic ripped through the region in 1738, killing some 50 percent of the native population. With the native slave trade drying up, the growing plantations in South Carolina shifted to importing more African slaves, which was somehow even worse, since at least when a native slave escaped, they could at least walk home.
Anyways, the buckskin trade caused a new focus on the region by both the English from the east and the French from the west, who found strong trading partners in the Chickasaw and Choctaw respectively. Desperate to control the valuable buckskin trade, and prodded on by their respective European allies who were more than happy to supply all the guns and ammo they needed, these two groups fought a forty-two year long war from 1721 to 1763, which historians later creatively called the Chickasaw Wars. You can probably guess who won just by the name. Despite being fewer in number, the English-backed Chickasaw managed to fend off attacks by both the French allied Choctaw and Illinois Confederacy, though the fact the Choctaw fell into a civil war from 1747 to 1750 over whether or not to switch sides likely helped quite a bit. Either way, by the middle of the century the deer were largely gone and both sides were fairly devastated and dependent upon European goods for survival.
Further east, the Creek and Cherokee fared little better. As deer populations declined, desperate to retain their access to European trade goods, the two groups increasingly came into conflict with one another. During this period, both sides encouraged their women to marry British traders, hopeful that it would help secure better trading rights. The offspring of these unions, who had a knowledge of both the American and European worlds, later rose to leadership positions, speeding along the adoption of many European practices, including farming techniques and metal forging, which in turn allowed both groups to later stabilize their positions. Though by the 1770s, increasingly in debt, many bands of both groups began selling their lands to colonists and moving further west and south.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the number of European colonists continued to grow, moving inland, at first to hunt deer, and then to establish new plantations and farms. Though they too at times came into conflict with both the Cherokee and Creek, both sides avoided significant conflict, so as not to disrupt the value buckskin trade. In 1733, the colony of Georgia was founded in what had once been a no man’s land between the British colony of South Carolina and Spanish Florida, an area which had largely been depopulated during Queen Anne’s War. Originally created by philanthropic members of the British Parliament to be a colony for the poor of Britain to have a new start, it was split into small parcels and slavery was made illegal. However, by 1750 all of that had gone out the window and it was basically just a new version of South Carolina, with Savannah a new major trading port and gateway for further European incursions into native lands.
