to Muscogee oral tradition, the mounds area was "the place where we first sat down", after their ancestors ended their migration journey from the West. In 1690, Scottish fur traders from Carolina built a trading post on Ochese Creek (Ocmulgee River), near the Macon Plateau mounds. Some Muscogee settled nearby, developing a village along the Ocmulgee River near the post, where they could easily acquire trade goods. They defied efforts by Spanish Florida authorities to bring them into the mission province of Apalachee. The traders referred to both the river and the peoples living along it as "Ochese Creek." Later usage shortened the term to Creek, which traders and colonists applied to all Muskogean-speaking peoples. The Muscogee called their village near the trading-post Ocmulgee (bubbling waters) in the local Hitchiti language. Carolina European colonists called it Ocmulgee Town, and later named the river after it. . The Muscogee traded pelts of white tailed deer and Native American slaves captured in traditional raids against other tribes. They received West Indian rum, European cloth, glass beads, hatchets, swords, and flintlock rifles from the colonial traders. Carolinian fur traders, who were men of capital, took Muscogee wives, often the daughters of chiefs. It was a practice common also among European fur traders in Canada; both the fur traders and Aboriginal Canadians saw such marriages as a way to increase the alliances among the elite of both cultures. The fur traders encouraged the Muscogee slaving raids against Spanish "Mission Indians." The English and Scots colonists were so few in number in the Carolina region that they depended on Native American alliances for security and survival. In 1702, governor of Carolina James Moore raised a militia of 50 colonists and 1,000 Yamasee and Ochese Creek warriors. From 1704 to 1706, they attacked and destroyed a significant number of Spanish missions in coastal Georgia and Florida. They captured numerous Indians who were referred to as Mission tribes: the Timucua and Apalachee. The colonists and some of their Indian allies sold their captives into slavery, with many being transported to Caribbean plantations. Together with extensive fatalities from epidemics of infectious diseases, the warfare caused Florida's indigenous population to fall from about 16,000 in 1685 to 3,700 by 1715. As Florida was depopulated, the English-allied tribes grew indebted to slave traders in Carolina. They paid other tribes to attack and enslave Native Americans, raids that were a catalyst