Episode Details

Four hundred miles from the coast, an English trader winters in a town that will never see an English soldier — selling guns, buying deerskins and human beings, the farthest reach of a colony into a continent it cannot control. This is the world the southern wars were fought in: a borderland where three empires pressed against the most powerful nations in the South, and where none of them gave the orders. Carolina, armed and hungry and pointed at the interior. Spanish Florida, a century and a half old, holding a line of mission towns that doubled as pens for slave-raiders. And, newly landed on the Gulf in 1699 to cage the English between the mountains and the sea, the France of d’Iberville. At the center of all three stood the Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw — nations that had dealt with Europeans since before Jamestown, were partly forged by the slave trade that preyed on them, held the balance of the whole region, and were already being taught, by the colony that armed them, exactly what its friendship was worth.