Hidden Literacies

Page 1 - Who was Coosaponakeesa?

Coosaponakeesa (ca. 1700-1764) was an eighteenth-century Native American diplomat also known as Mary Musgrove, Mary Mathews, and Mary Bosomworth1. She spent her first years with her maternal Muscogee Creek kin in what is now the southeastern U.S. before moving to colonial Carolina to live with her white father, who was a deerskin trader. While with him, she received an education in English language reading and writing as well as arithmetic and Protestant Christian principles. When British colonists arrived in 1733 to establish Georgia, Coosaponakeesa and her first husband awaited them at their trading post on a bluff overlooking the site of the first settlement, Savannah. She played an essential role in Native-Georgia relations during the colony’s early decades. Besides interpreting for the British with the local Yamacraw Indians and the larger, more powerful Native nation nearby, the Creek Confederacy, she ran a series of trading posts and plantations alongside a succession of three husbands, assisted during trade and land negotiations, and helped enlist Creek military support for British struggles with other Indian nations and European powers in the region.

As a result and counter to her ambitions, she incurred significant debt and loss of property. Acknowledging her national service, certain Creek micos, or chiefs, ceded to her three coastal islands. In contrast, despite (or perhaps because of) their initial dependence upon this Creek woman, Georgia’s British leaders refused her petitions for financial recompense and for recognition of her claims to the coastal islands until the last years of her life, when Governor Henry Ellis completed a legal document called an indenture, affirming her rights to the coastal island St. Catharine’s and paying her to relinquish her claims upon two other islands. The digital image provided here is of a testament included with a manuscript copy of the indenture. In the eighteenth century, copying documents by hand was a common and necessary way to preserve, collect, and circulate content, especially for legal and governmental purposes. Also included on this site are transcriptions of three supplementary items, discussed below. 

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  1. Coosaponakeesa began signing documents with this name in the 1740s. As it was her last consistently chosen name, I use it throughout to avoid confusion. Her given English name was Mary and the varying English last names are those of her husbands.