In this study, James Axtell depicts the range of transformations in southeastern Indian cultures as a result of contact, and often conflict with European settlers in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Stressing the dynamism and change in native cultures while showing no loss of Indian identity, Axtell argues that the colonial southeast cannot be fully understood without paying particular attention to its native inhabitants before their large-scale removal in the 1830s. Axtell begins by treating the irruption in native life of several Spanish entradas in the 16th century, most notably and destructively Hernando de Soto's, and the rapid decline of the great Mississippian societies in their wake. He then relates the rise and fall of the Franciscan missions in Florida to the aggressive advent of English settlement in Virginia and the Carolinas in the 17th century. Finally, he traces the largely symbiotic relations among the South Carolina English, the Louisiana French, and their native trading partners in the 18th-century deerskin business, and growing dependence of the Indians on their white neighbours for necessities as well as conveniences and luxuries. Focusing on the primary context of interaction between natives and newcomers in each century - warfare, missions, and trade - and drawing upon a range of ethnohistorical sources, including written, oral, archaeological, linguistic, and artistic, Axtell gives sense of the variety and complexity of Indian-white interactions and an interpretive matrix by which to assimilate details.