The Spanish were the first Europeans in Georgia. Explorer Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539, and in 1540 his expedition crossed the Savannah and Ocmulgee rivers. In 1566 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded a mission and fort on Saint Catherines Island. Over the next 100 years the Spanish built forts and missions along the coast of Georgia, which they called Guale.

Franciscan friars, members of a Roman Catholic religious order, were the central agents of Spanish civilization. In the mid-1590s a dozen priests and lay brothers, supported by a few Spanish soldiers, established missions to convert the Native Americans along the Atlantic Coast from Florida to South Carolina. About half were located in the principal villages of Guale. Their efforts were rewarded with many converts, but also the first major conflict with Native Americans in Georgia. In 1597 a young Guale man named Juanillo, angry that a priest had blocked his selection as mico (chief), killed the meddling cleric. He then launched a war that left most of the Franciscans dead. The war continued about ten months and ended only after a Spanish army arrived from Florida. Afterward the Franciscans returned, and in the first half of the 17th century they were highly successful. At one time they had 25,000 converts in 38 missions. This was the golden age of Spanish influence in the South.

Spain claimed the right to govern Guale, but its claim was contested. England asserted a claim in 1629, when King Charles I included the area in a land grant of “Carolana” to Sir Robert Heath. However, because Heath failed to establish a settlement there, King Charles II regranted Carolana—changing its name slightly to Carolina—to eight lords proprietors in 1663. After founding a colony at Charleston (now in South Carolina) in 1670, the Carolinians pushed southward along the Atlantic coast. In 1680, with Native American allies, they attacked the Spanish missions and outposts and forced the Spanish to give up Saint Catherines Island. By 1686 the Spanish abandoned Guale, but for more than 70 years they continued to fight for possession from their bases in Florida.

part from: "Georgia (state)," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The Creek Indians of Georgia

At the dawn of the 16th century Europeans had barely reached the coast of the North American mainland. Spanish sailors heading north from Florida encountered a vast Indian culture living in a land they called Guale (Wah-li). These coastal Indians were the largest group of a tribe that covered much of the present-day Southeastern United States, The Creek.

Moundbuilder origins

Moundbuilders, the first great civilization in North America, arose 4,000 years before the Spanish set foot on the islands of coastal Georgia. From the oldest of these sites, Poverty Point in Louisiana, this great culture spread across two-thirds of the United States, following the Mississippi north to Minnesota, its tributaries, including the Ohio, east and west deep into the continent, and around the Florida peninsula into coastal Georgia.

By the time Spanish conquistadors worked inland in search of the wealth of a continent the Moundbuilder culture was in steep decline. Cahokia, Etowah and Ocmulgee, major cities of a dying culture, were no longer active sites. The remaining Moundbuilders were absorbed into the Woodland cultures which they dominated. With few exceptions in the state of Georgia, the Indians that deSoto met were not Moundbuilders, but these remnants of that tribe.

Spanish Missionaries

Spanish missionaries and their accompanying garrisons are interesting to study, but in fact this was a minor cultural development in relation to the Creek Indians. It is doubtful that there was ever more than 200 people in these missions and garrisons, and there physical location is a subject of intense debate. Evidence of long-term Spanish habitation exists in three places in Georgia, Genesis Point (site of Fort McAllister), Mount Yonah in northeast Georgia, and Rome (in northwest Georgia). There was a mission at the confluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers, one at the falls on the Chattahoochee and a number along the coast in Guale and the other fiefdoms.

In the late 1600's English traders found an interconnected Indian culture south of the Carolinas. Nomadic tribes wandered throughout the land, but remained centered in a group of villages along the Ocheesee Creek that were probably pre-Colombian in origin. The traders named them because their villages were near this creek. They were known to other Indians as the Muskogee, probably a Shawnee term who's meaning has been lost to time.

part from: http://ourgeorgiahistory.com/indians/Creek/creek01.html