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http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~mwellis/book/chapter1.html
BEFORE the English claimed the Carolinas, this entire region – appeared on Spanish maps as a part of Florida. In 1654, Provincial Governor Yardley described the “Haynoke” Indians, a tribe settled near Hillsboro on the Eno River and later called the Eno Indians, as a great nation which resisted the northward advance of the Spanish.
Dr. John Lederer, a German explorer, led an expedition through Haw’s Old Fields in the year 1670, and of the wilderness and its inhabitants, he wrote:
“The fourteenth of June, persuing a South southwest course, sometimes by a beaten path and sometimes over hills and rocks, I was forc’d to take up my quarters in the woods the ways were such, and obliged me to go so far about that I reached Oenock* (* Oenock was the “Haynoke” or Eno Indian village on Eno River.) until the fifteenth. The country here, by the industry of these Indians, is very open and clear of woods. Their town is built around a field, where in their Sports they exercise with so much labour and violence, and in so great numbers, that I have seen the ground wet with the sweat that dropped from their bodies; their chief recreation is slinging of stones. They are of mean stature and courage, covetous and thievish, industrious to earn a peny, and therefore hire themselves out to their neighbors, who employ them as Carryers or Porters. They plant an abundance of Grain, reap three crops in a summer . These and the mountain Indians build not their houses of bark, but of Watling and Plaister.
“In Summer the heat of the weather makes them chuse to lie abroad in the night under thin arbors of wild Palm. Some houses they have of Reed and Bark; they build them generally round: To each house belongs a hovel made like an oven, where they lay up their Corn and Mast to keep it dry. They parch their Nuts and Acorns over the fire to take away their rank Oyliness, which afterwards pressed, yield a milky liquor, and the acorns an Amber colour’d Oyl. In these mingled together, they dip their Cakes at great entertainments, and so serve them to their guests as an extraordinary dainty. Their Government is Democratick; and the Sentence of their old men are received as Laws or rather Oracles, by them.
“Fourteen miles West Southwest of the Oenocks dwell the Shackory Indians* (*The Shackory or Shokori Indians at this time inhabited Haw’s Old Fields, and were later identified as the Sissipahaw whose villages were in what became Alamance County) upon a rich Soyl, and yet abounding in antimony, of which they shewed me considerable quantities. Finding them agree with the Oenocks in Customs and Manners, I made no stay here, but passing thorow their town . . . ” 1 (1. Lederer, John. The Discoveries of John Lederer, London, 1672)
…….
“It is called Hau River from the Sissipahau Indians, who dwell upon this Stream, which is one of the main branches of the Cape Fair River, there being Rich Land enough to contain some thousands of Families; for which reason I hope in a short time it will be Planted. This River is much such another as Sapona; both seeming to run a vast way up the Country. Here is good Timber, and the Land is extraordinary Rich . . . “
“”As soon as it was Day we set out for the Achonechy Town, it being estimation twenty Miles off. We were got about half way, (meeting great Gangs of Turkies) when we saw at a distance 30 loaded Horses, coming on the road, with four or five Men, on other Jades, driving them. We charg’d our Piece, and went up to them. Enquiring whence they came from? They told us, from Virginia. The leading Man’s name was Massey, who was born about Leeds in Yorkshire. He asked from whence we came. We told him. Then he asked again, Whether we wanted anything that he had? Telling us that we should be welcome to it. We accepted of two Wheaten Biscuits and a little ammunition; He advised us by all means to strike down the country for Ronoack, and not think of Virginia, because of the Sinnagars, of whom they were afraid, tho’ so well armed and numerous.* (* Roanoke Island. The Sinnagar Indians were a Canadian tribe who ranged as far South as the Appalachians of western North Carolina , terrifying the settlers for many years.) They persuaded us also to call on one Enoe Will, as we went to Adshusheer, for that he would conduct us safe among the English giving him the character of a faithful Indian . . .”
“The Virginia Men asked our Opinion of the Country we were then in? We told them it was a very pleasant one. They were all of the same opinion, and affirmed That they had never seen 20 Miles of such Extraordinary rich Land, lying all together, like that betwixt Hau River and the Achonecy Town. Having taken our leaves of each set forward; and the country thro’ which we passed was so delightful t hat it gave us a great deal of satisfaction .”1
The “Occaneechi village was the first Indian settlement which Lawson and his partner encountered since leaving “Keyauwee Town. “About three o’clock,” continues the explorer’s account, “we reached the town, and the Indians presently brought us a good fat Bear, and Venison, which was very acceptable at that time .. no Indians have greater plenty of provisions than these. The Savages do, indeed, still possess the Flower of Carolina; the English enjoying only the Fag-end of that country.
“We had not been in the Town two Hours when Enoe-Will came into the King’s Cabin; which was our quarters. We ask’d him if he would conduct us to the English, and what he would have for his pains; he answered that he would go along with us, and for what he was to have he left that to our discretion.
“The next Morning we set out with Enoe-Will towards Adshusheer, leaving the Virginia Path and striking more to the Eastward for Ronoack. Several Indians were in our Company belonging to Will’s Nation, who are Schoccories (SISSIPAHAW), mixed with Enoe Indians, and those of the Nation of Adshusheer. Enoe-Will is their chief Man, and rules as far as the banks of the Reatkin.”* (* Lawson, op cit By the name Reatkin, Lawson meant the Haw River.)
The Trading Path
Explorers and traders had visited the Sissipahaw and other tribes of the piedmont before John Lederer or John Lawson journeyed through this territory. The Trading Path, or trail from the north, had become the most famous North-South highway. From the Roanoke River of Virginia, this trail crossed the Tar, the Flat and the Little Rivers to the place where Hillsboro now stands; thence it crossed Haw River not far from the present-day village of Swepsonville. At that point it divided into two paths, an upper trail which crossed Little Alamance and Great Alamance Creeks, and a lower trail which led southward and which was designated as the Western Trading Path.
In the late seventeenth century, the natural wealth of the frontier began to attract the merchants of Virginia and other northern colonies, and soon traders were driving their packmule trains into Carolina to do business with the red man.
“Firewater,” potent corn whiskey on which young braves frequently became murderously intoxicated, was one of the chief commodities offered by the traders to the red man. Guns with powder and shot to use in them, brillantly colored dyes and paints, knives and other implements of metal, all new to the wilderness, were wanted by the savages.
“Although John Lawson did not visit the Sissipahaw Indians on his Journey through what is now Alamance County, it is quite plausible that Indian traders did business with the villages in this section. Unfortunately, none of them left an accurate description of the Sissipahaw, and only from general descriptions of the red man of Carolina by Lawson and his contemporaries, can we form a picture of the tribe which once roamed the forests and tilled the soil of the present Alamance County….
In the gathering eventide, the red man made a handsome figure. He was tall, erect, and well-proportioned, and had a lithesome and majestic stride. His face was beardless, for he continually plucked out the hairs by their roots. His tawny skin was darkened with bear’s grease, with which braves and squaws alike anointed themselves. His black eyes were streaked with red, a common characteristic of his race, and his teeth were yellowed with excessive use of smoking tobacco. About his waist he wore only a loin cloth, a pair of buckskin or bearskin moccasins on his feet, and perhaps a necklace of tiny shells or a bracelet on his arm or leg. His squaw wore an apron, about a half yard wide and two yards long which was made of dressed deerskin and fringed around the hem. A beaded or shell necklace, earrings, sometimes a pair of moccasins, and a few feathers in her hair completed her costume.
In cold weather, men and women wore a “match coat” or shawl of fur or cloth, or perhaps a cloth coat purchased from some white trader. The squaw never painted her face, and only during war time did the brave disguise himself with war paints, decorating his face with circles around his eyes and other artistic patterns.
The home of the red men was a small hut, often occupied by several relations, who slept on fur covered benches around the wall. These quonset-type hovels were frequently as heated as an oven, and in summer the family slept out of doors.
In the nearby forest the hunter found plenteous game, the beaver, the polecat, the wild panther and the bear as well as rabbits and squirrels, ‘possums, the great flocks of quail and turkies. There were also nuts and berries which he could mix with the vegetables that were grown in village gardens. Peas, potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips, radishes, parsnip, beets, lettuce and cabbage, asparagus, kidney beans, and many other vegetables were raised by the red man. And, of course, there was Indian maize or corn, which the squaws pounded into meal for bread, leaving the green stalks which could be pressed and boiled to make a sweet, intoxicating beer.
Life for the Indian was simple and happy. He frequently enjoyed banquets, at which fierce dances and contests were performed. With persimmon seeds or a handful of reeds, the red man played a type of dice game; and with a bat and ball, a game similar to modern baseball. Music for the festive occasions came from two old men who accompanied one another with a gourd rattle and a drum made of deer skin stretched over a clay pot.
All of these customs may not have been practiced by the tribes who inhabited Alamance County, but Lawson observed that “no Indians have greater plenty than these.”
Several Indian tribes were settled in the area that is now Alamance County, before the white man came. The largest of these tribes was probably the Sissipahaw or Saxapahaw but few facts about them are known.
The Sissipahaw were apparently a branch of the Sioux family which crossed the Mississippi River many generations ago. The first mention of the tribe is probably in the Spaniard Vandera’s account of the Juan Pardo expedition of 1567, in which the name is spelled SAUXPA or SAUAPA, and was located near the Santee River in the northeastern part of South Carolina.
Because the tribe gave its name to the Haw or Saxapahaw River, it is believed to have been a large and powerful tribe when it migrated to this section. In 1701, however, Lawson estimated that there were less than 1,000 Indians of several tribes in this area.
Jesse Miller, Mebane archeologist, has located within the past few years what he believes to be the site of twelve Indian villages which once flourished along Quaker Creek, Alamance Creek, Haw River and other streams in this county.
When the bloody Indians Wars came in 1711, the Sissipahaws must have fled these villages and joined their kinsman in the east. Colonel John Barnwell who led the English troops against the Tuscarora and other warring tribes in 1712, mentioned the Sissipahaws:
“I crossed the Neuse River the 28th of January at night, at the place the SAXAPAHAWS were lately settled, and 30 mile below the place appointed to meet Major Gale . . . The SAXAPAHAWS (called by some SHACIOES) were forced to desert their settlements in the beginning of this month by reason the Tuscaruros of this town fell upon them and killed 16 of them, because they refused to join with them against the English . . .
“They were just come among the Wattomas, when I came and were going to pay Tribute to your Honor the Governor and to beg your protection, but I . . .persuaded . . . them not to do it until our Return, and go with me, they seeming to be brave men and good. . . “* (* “Journal of John Barnwell,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, v. 5, No. 4, Richmond, 1898.)
Colonel Barnwell listed twenty-two Sissipahaw or Saxapahaw warriors among his troops, and reported that several of them were injured in battles against the rebellious tribes of eastern Carolina. Later in his journal, the crusty old Indian fighter remarked that scores of his native troops were deserting and that they were carrying t he loot from captured villages with them.
Even though some historians have stated that the Sissipahaw Indians fought against the English during the Indian Wars, Colonel Barnwell’s story seems to disprove such claims. The Sissipahaw, apparently, remained friendly toward the white man and fought bravely against their warlike kinsmen.
The ultimate fate of the Sissipahaw tribe remains unknown. There seems to be no record of them following the close of the Indian Wars. Ethnologists aver that the remaining members of the tribe united with the Kewyauwee, Shakori, Eno and Cheraw tribes, and finally fused with the Catawba tribe. Some may have moved southward, uniting with the Indians of Lumber River in Roberson County, and others may have settled in the area between the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers.
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~mwellis/book/chapter2.html
“Along the Alamance were the Albrights, Holts, Shoffners, Mosers, Isleys, Kimes, Staleys, Halls, Trolingers, Whitsetts, Heltons, Hornadays, Reitzels, and other Germanic folk.
In the Hawfields region settled the Stayhorns, Craigs, Blackwoods, Kirklands, Freelands, Mebanes, Tates, Harts, Nelsons, Mitchells, Johnstons, Pattersons, Martins, Coxes, Watsons, Wests, Whites, Murpheys, Hunters, Stockards, Trousdales, Turners, Clendenins, Montgomerys, Steeles, Marats, Pegotts, and others.
The Williamsons, Whites, Lindleys, Woodys, Staffords, Cooks, Puryears, Newlins, Scotts, Ruffins, Pughs, Allens, Pikes, Stuarts, Marshalls, Dixons, Moons, Kimballs, Hadleys, Braxtons, Holadays, Wilsons, Nicholsons, and Hutchinsons appear in the earliest Quaker records.
In the year 1927, the Cane Creek Friends erected a monument to commemorate these pioneering days, and to honor one Alexander Stuart, one of the first immigrants to arrive here. The monument was placed in the Cane Creek church cemetery.
“In selecting one of the early settlers of the community to honor with a monument,” wrote a local newspaperman, “the Cane Creek Memorial Association picked out a man whose chief claim to immortality lies in the fact that he was an honest hard working farmer . . . the first time in the entire South that a monument has been erected to a farmer simply because he was a farmer.”*”
I’ve been looking around for a place to post this, and I think this is about as good as any that’s on the open forums.
Saturday we took out-of-town guests to see a “Maps” exhibit I had read about, at the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore. It’s open until June 8, 2008, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in maps as art, exploration, cartography, etc.
http://www.thewalters.org/maps/finding.html
There’s not so much in it about NDN issues — but one thing caught my eye that I’ve never seen, nor heard of. It’s a copy (made in 1722, and on loan I believe from the British Museum) of a map drawn on deerskin by a Catawba chieftain, to show the South Carolina English officials the relationship between Indian groups lying between Charleston, SC and Virginia (and far to the west of both).
The thing about it that should, I think, be of most interest to us in Saponitown is that the informant was Siouan. So the names, many of which are unfamiliar (or spelled in unfamiliar ways), may in several cases be what the Catawbas called these folks. The one that first caught my eye was Saxippaha. 1722 is pretty late for that name to show up — but it’s some of our folks, presumably on the Haw River (and with a slightly different spelling, it’s Linda’s nom de plume, in some of her writings). I’m inclined to think that several of our Eastern Siouan “tribal” names, as we know them now, are what Algonkian tribes called us — those being the people in closer contact with the English (in Virginia), who were keeping the bulk of the surviving, early records. So these names might be more like what we called ourselves, back in the day…
Be that as it may — here are the names on the map. The original is oriented with east at the bottom (like most European printed maps of coastal parts of America); but I’ll try to orient it in our usual way, with east at the right.
______________________________________________________________
Chickisa ooooooooooooooooooo ——————– Virginia
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Saxippaha
Cherrikies
ooooooooooooooooooooooooo Nasaw —————- Succa
Nustie
ooooooooooooooooooooooo Wiopie oooooooo Suttirie
Casuie
ooooooooooooooooooooooo Youchine
ooooooo Wasinisa ———- Charro
Waterie
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Charlestown
______________________________________________________________
I tried to put in lines that are on the original map (which also has a circle around each Indian name, and squared lines for the English settlements); but they didn’t show up right, once the forum software reformatted what I typed. So I’ve put in a bunch of oooooooooos to show spaces that the software disregards, and deleted all the vertical lines. Anyway, this Catawba map showed no roads or trails between Charlestown and any Indian settlements; Virginia was connected to most of them, but only via “Nasaw.” The Nustie, Cherokee and Chickisa were connected to each other, but not to the eastern tribes, nor to Virginia. The Casuie were the only group shown with no connection to anybody else.
There are several cases in which the old style “s” (that looks like an “f” to us) was used. These include Wafinisa, Cafuie, Nuftie, and Nafaw. Nustie might also be read as Nuffie or Nussie (but, I don’t think so). And I may have an a or an o confused, in one or two spots (Wiapie? Chickiso?). The guards at the exhibit didn’t especially approve of my trying to copy this map… oh well. Whatever. Enjoy.
PS — I found a photo of the Catawba map on the web — from a few months ago, when this exhibit was still at the Field Museum in Chicago — so you can see what the lines I couldn’t “draw” here originally looked like. (I don’t think you can read the names, though.) Anyway, it’s cool — check it out (and scroll down — it’s sort of brown, with a lot of big circles):
http://anicedayinseoul.blogspot.com/2008/01/map-love.html
The map is also mentioned in some scholarly literature about Trading Paths that I can’t access for free — maybe Techteach or somebody with a university address can read this:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v027/27.3st_jean.html
PappyDick wrote: I’ve been looking around for a place to post this, and I think this is about as good as any that’s on the open forums.
Saturday we took out-of-town guests to see a “Maps” exhibit I had read about, at the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore. It’s open until June 8, 2008, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in maps as art, exploration, cartography, etc.
http://www.thewalters.org/maps/finding.html
There’s not so much in it about NDN issues — but one thing caught my eye that I’ve never seen, nor heard of. It’s a copy (made in 1722, and on loan I believe from the British Museum) of a map drawn on deerskin by a Catawba chieftain, to show the South Carolina English officials the relationship between Indian groups lying between Charleston, SC and Virginia (and far to the west of both).
The thing about it that should, I think, be of most interest to us in Saponitown is that the informant was Siouan. So the names, many of which are unfamiliar (or spelled in unfamiliar ways), may in several cases be what the Catawbas called these folks. The one that first caught my eye was Saxippaha. 1722 is pretty late for that name to show up — but it’s some of our folks, presumably on the Haw River (and with a slightly different spelling, it’s Linda’s nom de plume, in some of her writings). I’m inclined to think that several of our Eastern Siouan “tribal” names, as we know them now, are what Algonkian tribes called us — those being the people in closer contact with the English (in Virginia), who were keeping the bulk of the surviving, early records. So these names might be more like what we called ourselves, back in the day…
Be that as it may — here are the names on the map. The original is oriented with east at the bottom (like most European printed maps of coastal parts of America); but I’ll try to orient it in our usual way, with east at the right.
______________________________________________________________
Chickisa ooooooooooooooooooo ——————– Virginia
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Saxippaha
Cherrikies
ooooooooooooooooooooooooo Nasaw —————- Succa
Nustie
ooooooooooooooooooooooo Wiopie oooooooo Suttirie
Casuie
ooooooooooooooooooooooo Youchine
ooooooo Wasinisa ———- Charro
Waterie
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Charlestown
______________________________________________________________
I tried to put in lines that are on the original map (which also has a circle around each Indian name, and squared lines for the English settlements); but they didn’t show up right, once the forum software reformatted what I typed. So I’ve put in a bunch of oooooooooos to show spaces that the software disregards, and deleted all the vertical lines. Anyway, this Catawba map showed no roads or trails between Charlestown and any Indian settlements; Virginia was connected to most of them, but only via “Nasaw.” The Nustie, Cherokee and Chickisa were connected to each other, but not to the eastern tribes, nor to Virginia. The Casuie were the only group shown with no connection to anybody else.
There are several cases in which the old style “s” (that looks like an “f” to us) was used. These include Wafinisa, Cafuie, Nuftie, and Nafaw. Nustie might also be read as Nuffie or Nussie (but, I don’t think so). And I may have an a or an o confused, in one or two spots (Wiapie? Chickiso?). The guards at the exhibit didn’t especially approve of my trying to copy this map… oh well. Whatever. Enjoy.
PS — I found a photo of the Catawba map on the web — from a few months ago, when this exhibit was still at the Field Museum in Chicago — so you can see what the lines I couldn’t “draw” here originally looked like. (I don’t think you can read the names, though.) Anyway, it’s cool — check it out (and scroll down — it’s sort of brown, with a lot of big circles):
http://anicedayinseoul.blogspot.com/2008/01/map-love.html
The map is also mentioned in some scholarly literature about Trading Paths that I can’t access for free — maybe Techteach or somebody with a university address can read this:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v027/27.3st_jean.html
Thanks Pappy for the map link. Do you know if the map’s home is Chicago? Or was it brought in from somewhere else as part of the exhibit? I would like to be able to take a closer look:)
Shirley
It looks as if it was a temporary exhibit. I was there on my birthday and saw no map in the NA section nor a map exhibit.
Also, I do not seem to find this online source available to me, at least not at first search.
Techteach
Sammaroq, the map lives in London someplace — British Museum, or British Library. I didn’t copy the credit line. Anyway, at the moment it’s in Baltimore, and in January it was in Chicago.
Techteach, here’s the article that cites this map. It’s available online through Project MUSE, but of course there are also paper copies in libraries that get this journal:
St. Jean, Wendy. Trading Paths: Mapping Chickasaw History in the Eighteenth Century. The American Indian Quarterly – Volume 27, Number 3 & 4, Summer/Fall 2003, pp. 758-780.
My wife got me the catalog of this map exhibit, but it’s supposed to be a birthday present, so I may not get to see it until the end of July. Probably I’ll have more precise info, then. I was mistaken, e.g., in saying there weren’t roads directly from the English colonies to the NDN settlements. Actually, there was one from “Charlestown” (Charleston SC) to Nasaw; and another (with a big detour to the southwest) from Charlestown to the Cherrikies.
Thanks for sharing Pappydick.
I’ve often wondered what information may still be available in Europe about our ancestors. You’ve got to figure that the “HQ” was in England at that time, not in the U.S.
I’d really like to look up any info the Brits may have on the Loyalist Indians and those associated with them (i.e. William Riddle, Nichols, Goss, Reeves, etc.).
I found a better link, but not a better photo of the 1722 Catawba map:
http://www.newberry.org/smith/slidesets/ss31.html
And in the footnotes to that, I found cited James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: U of NC Press, 1989)… a book that I have, but haven’t studied enough. This map is reproduced on p. 93. Its original normally resides in the Public Record Office, London (but is in Baltimore, at the moment). And by “original,” I mean the manuscript copy made in 1722 — not the original deerskin from which the copy was made.
Anyway, the names on it differ from those we usually see; and I believe our take on that fact would be different from that of the Newberry Library website cited here. And perhaps also different from Merrell’s, since he doesn’t even list most of the names. (But the point he was making didn’t require that.)
OK, I downloaded the article. We did have the journal. I don’t have time to look at it for a few days though. Do you want me to email it to you Pappydick?
Techteach
Techteach — If you still have an email address for me, that doesn’t end in cox dot net, sure. (I cancelled that one last summer.) Otherwise, PM, I guess.
I stayed up too late last night reading Merrell’s book about the Catawbas (cited in my last post), which is great; but it’s tediously slow going, because the endnotes (a very informative part of this book) in some cases exceed what they are annotating, by a good bit, and in smaller type. I read a paragraph — see endnote 4 — find it, at the back of the book — and it turns out to be about three more pages. Guess that’s why I put this book down soon after it arrived, and neglected to pick it up again for, lessee… 22 months. I bought it in June, 2006; we were discussing something in it at the time (maybe our ESDA symbol, on the shell gorget?), and I probably just looked up whatever that thread was about. It’s well indexed, so that’s easy enough to do. But the book actually has a narrative thread (not just a “thesis”), and deserves to be read as literature. I’m working on it.
The 1722 Catawba map is much reduced in size and visible detail (and is cropped) as printed in the book. The original — what I saw in Baltimore — is two or three feet wide; the names of the tribes are in large letters, and the circles for NDN settlements are the size of saucers — not silver dollars.
Is this the same map? If so, there is a printable pdf version:
http://www.newberry.org/K12maps/module_02/6-8.html
Yep… and if you print it, you can actually read the names of the tribes. I missed Wasmisa (saw it as Wasinisa), and Charra (not Charro) — which by the way is the same as Cheraw, or Saura. Not only are we dealing with several languages, but they don’t all hear the same name the same way (in those cases in which they do actually use the same name).
All of the online photos are of the version of the map copied (I don’t know with what technology) and published by Hulbert in 1873; whereas the one I saw in Baltimore is the 1722 manuscript copy — so there may also be some differences caused by the typesetter in 1873. I mean, it could, I suppose, actually have said Wasinisa…
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