The original builders of the Omussee Creek mound had abandoned the site by around 1550, but Native American groups continued to occupy the area well into the early nineteenth century. By the 1630s, Spanish missionaries from Florida recorded native villages near the mound that were associated with the Chacato, a widely scattered but powerful people based in what is now northern Florida whose influence extended across a broad region including modern Houston County, Alabama. By the 1670s, Spanish authorities had established the nearby missions of San Carlos and San Nicolas to the Chacato, and several hundred members of the tribe had nominally converted to Christianity, but resentment of Spanish interference in cultural affairs led to conflict after a friar scolded the chieftain Dioscale for having more than one wife, a customary practice among his people. Dioscale fled to Chacato settlements in what is now Houston County when Spanish troops were sent in response to the unrest, but he was eventually captured and imprisoned, and the missions at San Carlos and San Nicolas were abandoned. Although the Spanish later established another mission to the Chacato, troubles with the Spanish and periodic raids by Native groups allied with England forced many to leave, and by the early 1700s most were living farther west in the Pensacola and Mobile Bay areas, with some as far away as Louisiana. The area they had long claimed was then occupied for more than another century by groups loosely associated with the Seminoles and Creeks, and a Creek village called Yamassee stood near the Omussee Mound around 1750; Omussee Creek is believed to have taken its name from a corruption of that settlement’s name.