Attributes in tile indexes?

[Jeff Dege]

I have a shape file that's too big to draw maps with - takes far too
long.

In an attempt to speed things up, I split it into 16 smaller shapefiles,
using:

   ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" -spat xmin ymin xmax ymax newXX.shp
old.shp

Then did a shptree on each of these new files, then a shptinidex to
create a single tile index shapefile on them, and tried to build a map.

It works fine, so long as I don't try to display labels.  But if I do, I
get errors:

   msDBFGetItemIndex(): Item 'NAME' not found.

Where "NAME" is the attribute I'm trying to use for the label.  It looks
like the tileindex shapefile doesn't expose the attributes of the
underlying shape tiles.  I've done an ogrinfo on the shapefiles that I'd
generated, and the attributes are there.

Can I expose the attributes through the tileindex?

How?