Also, the Chisca were also Yuchi and the Rickahockan were
proto-Cherokee.
For well over a century, the identity and ethnicity of the
people called the Westo by the English colonists of Carolina have been debated
by anthropologists and historians. These
Westo lived on the Savannah River from 1662 or 1663 until 1681, the end of the
war against them by Carolina and the Hathawekela band of Shawnee living on the
river since 1674. The name Westo derives
from the name given them by the Cusabo tribes living on the Carolina coast.
Following the opinions of Frank G. Speck (in his time the
best authority on the Yuchi; still so today to a large extent), supported by John
Swanton, the most preeminent expert on the ethnology and anthropology of Native
Americans to that date, the prevailing concensus for the first two-thirds of the
20th century held that the Westo were Yuchi.
From the last third of the century to the present day
(2018), opinion began to shift toward the hypothesis that the Westo were not
Yuchi, but rather one of the Iroquoian groups who fled the Beaver Wars in the
north, with the predominant opinion holding the Westo were former Erie, as
first suggested by Verner Crane, an idea later brought back by Marvin T. Smith.
The shift came after scholars studying French colonial records
realized that Richahecrian was a corruption of Riquehronnon, the designation
most often used for the Erie by French priests and colonial officials.
The resulting equation that if Rickahockan equals Westo and Rickahockan
equals Erie then Westo equals Erie is based on the almost universally accepted
and never really challenged opinion of Crane that the Westo were the same
people as the Rickahockans. Swanton rejected
outright the suggestion that the Westo were Erie, though he accepted Crane’s
idea that the Westo were Rickahockan.
Once that equation of Westo to Rickahockan was accepted and
supported by Swanton, resistance to the proposition was all but futile, at
least for several decades, even though this contradicted the testimony of James
Mooney. Crane differed from Swanton,
however, in rejecting the latter’s opinion that the Chisca were Yuchi and
therefore not of the same ethnic group as the Westo, while Swanton said that
they were.
Mooney, along with John Wesley Powell, had earlier
identified the Rickahockans as proto-Cherokee and equated them with the
Richahechrians of earlier Virginia records.
In part, he came to this conclusion from information derived from his
lengthy association with both the eastern and western Cherokee, but also
earlier records from such as Bishop George Henry Loskiel (1794), John Haywood
(1823), and the Moravian Spring Place Mission (1801-1833).
Mooney later came to the conclusion that the
Richahechrian-Rickahockan were refugee Erie.
To him and to his peers this necessarily conflicted with his earlier
opinion because despite evidence and precedent, he and they had come under the
mistaken assumption that the Cherokee had been on site in Cherokee Country for
at least a millennium, or at least were present in the Appalachian Summit at
the time of De Soto.
I contend that both of Mooney’s opinions are, in fact,
completely correct. The
Richahechrian-Rickahockan were indeed proto-Cherokee and that they were indeed
refugee Erie, or at least a refugee group from the Beaver Wars with the Erie at
their core.
Unfortunately for those who accept the assumption the Westo
and the Rickahockans are the same as fact, Crane’s equation of the Westo with
the Rickahockans stands on extremely shaky ground with as many holes as a
sieve. Those grounds will be covered
later; under other conflicting evidence, the hypothesis breaks down entirely.
The Westo were not Erie or any other Iroquoian-speaking
people. They were not the same as the
Rickahockans. They were almost
certainly, as Mooney originally judged, a band of Yuchi.
This is going to be an exploration of very diverse groups
across many centuries and many thousands of miles, and to those unfamiliar with
the history of speculation about the Westo, inclusion of parts may seem out of
place and incongruous. But going through
it all is the only way to demonstrate the above point, rather than leave out
inconvenient facts as all too many of those who have gone before have done.
I can state unequivocally and accurately that the group of
Native Americans known to the Cusabo and their English neighbors as the Westo
and to the Spanish as the Chichimeco were not refugee Erie. That bare fact is beyond question.
CONTENTS
The Yuchi homeland in the 16th century
Early Spanish contacts with the Yuchi
Hernando de
Soto and the Chisca, 1539-1542
Tristan de
Luna and the Napochi, 1560
Juan Pardo
and the Chisca/Uchi/Huchi, 1567-1568
Moyano’s
battles with the Chisca
Pardo’s
journey resumed
Spanish
forts in the interior
The Yuchi diaspora
Chisca
Euchee-Ochese
Chattahoochee
(Chata Uchee)
Tamahita
Chichicmeco-Westo
Hogolegee-Ogeechee
Tanase (Tennessee
River Yuchi)
Cisca-Tongoria
Chisca and Chichimeco in La Florida, 1618-1651
Iroquoians in Virginia
First
contact with the Tuscarora and others
The
Massawomeck
Brief
historical description
Identity
of the Masswomeck
The
Masswomeck on colonial maps
The
“Attiouandarons”
Edward
Bland, 1650
The lost nation of the Erie
The Beaver
Wars
The Erie
confederacy
Constituent
tribes of the confederacy
The
Erie-Iroquois war
Erie
survival
Mingo
Flats, Virginia
The Richahecrians, 1656
The Chichimeco return to La Florida, 1659
Birth of the Yamasee
The Rickahockans, 1670
Birth of the colony of Carolina, 1670
Birth of the Indian slave trade in the Southeast
Batts and Fallam Expedition, 1671
The Tomahitans, 1673-1674
Location of
the Tomahitan town
James
Meedham’s fate
Gabriel
Arthur’s adventures
The Westo, 1674-1682
Henry
Woodward and the Westo
The Westo
and the Tomahitan
The Westo
and the Chisca
The Westo
War
The Cisca of Robert La Salle, 1682
Carolina Indian Panic of 1693
The Cherokee
Early authorities on their northern origin and migrations
Early maps showing the proto-Cherokee
The Cherokee as one people on 18th
century maps
Derivation of those three names
The spread of the Cherokee, on maps
Summary and conclusions
The Yuchi homeland in the 16th century
The Yuchi as a whole and individual groups of Yuchi have
been known by many names throughout history since first contact: Chisca, Uchi,
Huchi, Cisca, Yuchi, Euchee, Hogologee, Ogeechee, Tahoglewi, Tahogale, Tongoria,
Ochee, Hogohegee, Taogoria, Tamahita, and many others, including, many contend,
Westo.
The territory of the Yuchi, or Chisca, as De Soto knew them, lay northwest of the concentric
spheres of influence of the chiefdom of Cauchi
and the paramount chiefdom of Joara
and north of the chiefdom (later paramount chiefdom) of Chiaha. Their territory
spread across Western North Carolina, Upper East Tennessee, and Southwestern
Virginia, roughly coextensive with the Late
Pisgah Phase. Their language, Yuchi,
is a linguistic isolate. In addition to
Chisca, the Yuchi were also called Uchi
and Huchi in some chronicles of
Pardo’s expeditions.
The towns of the Chisca/Uchi/Huchi Pardo himself visited were
Guasili and Canasoga in Upper East Tennessee, probably on the upper Nolichucky
River. Two others were Guapere on the Watauga River and Maniateque near Saltville,
Virginia. A fifth town of Yuchi was the only one subject to
outside control: Tanasqui, at the
confluence of the French Broad and Pigeon Rivers; at at the time of Pardo, it
was at least partially subject to the chiefdom of Chiaha.
Archaeologically speaking, the towns listed above and
related sites are identified as the Late
Pisgah Phase. Furthermore, that archaeology
demonstrates that people of these towns, the Yuchi, originally lived in the
Middle Cumberland Basin making up what is known as the Late Mississippian
period Thruston Phase, which
developed in situ from the Early Mississippian period Dowd Phase.
Since the Muscogee (Creek) have their genesis as a people in
the Creek confederacy that began forming in the 17th century, it is accurate to
state that the Yuchi gave their name to confederacy, the “Creek” in the name
being short for Ochese Creek, the English rendition of Uchis Creek, the name at
the time for the Ocmulgee River.
Comment
Credit for the location of the towns named above belongs to
Charles Hudson and his team, and to Jim Granville (for Maniateque).
Early Spanish encounters with the Yuchi
Spanish claims for La Florida extended from the Atlantic
Coast to the Mississippi River, and from the Gulf Coast to the Ohio River. La Florida was a province of the Viceroyalty
of Nueva España, Spain’s largest colonial dominion which included Mexico, Central
America, four-fifths of the United States west of the Mississippi, and
territories in the western Pacific of the Philippines, the Marianas (including
Guam), and the Carolines, and, for a short time, the northern section of
Formosa (Taiwan). La Florida later became a captaincy-general of Nueva España composed of several provinces, mostly named after majority tribes.
At the time of the Spanish entradas in the 16th century, the
people known collectively to anthropologists and historians as the Yuchi lived
in and dominated the Appalachian Summit region of East Tennessee, Southwest
Virginia, and Western North Carolina. The
western two-thirds of the very same area later known as the Cherokee Country
which romanticist historians (and later the State of North Carolina and the
University thereof) incorrectly claim has been inhabited by the Cherokee for a
millennium.
Hernando de Soto and the Chisca, 1539-1542
The first entrada to encounter the Yuchi was that of
Hernando de Soto in the year 1540. De Soto’s
local guides called them ‘Chisca’.
Contact was very limited.
As the Spanish paused in Chiaha, probably located at this
time on Zimmerman’s Island in the French Broad River near Dandridge, Tennessee,
De Soto sent out two Spanish soldiers along with a contingent of Chiaha
warriors to scout Chisca territory, rumored to mine copper and possibly
gold. The scouting party was attacked
and driven off, reporting back to the commander that the land was rough and
rocky and unfit to grow much food. That
was the extent of this entrada’s contact.
Tristan de Luna and the Napochi, 1560
In 1559, a Spanish party under Tristan de Luna established
Santa Maria de Ocuse on the Pensacola Bay.
When a hurricane destroyed most their ships and their supplies, the
colony relocated to the Alabama River, where they founded Santa Cruz de
Nanipacana.
With supplies running low, De Luna led an expedition to the paramount
chiefdom of Coosa in 1560. After giving
them many supplies, the paramount mico obliged the Spanish to accompany him and
his warriors in a revenge attack on the ‘Napochi’. These enemies lived in what is now the
Chattanooga area.
The combined force found the first of the Napochi towns
deserted hurriedly, so they burned it.
This was the town at the Audobon Acres site, referred to as Olitifar
(Opelika) later by the Chiaha talking to Juan Pardo.
The Coosa and the Spanish then proceeded to the Napochi town
at the Citico site on the Tennessee River, chased the fleeing inhabitants
across, then came to a stalemate in the face of the large war party from the
big Napochi town at the Hampton Place site.
This last encounter ended with both antagonists going their separate
ways after the Napochi agreed to submit and resume paying tribute. Another Napochi town lay on Williams Island.
The French trader Charles
Levasseur listed a town of ‘Napaches’ near the Alibamu among the Middle Creek in 1700, and
Opelika was an Upper Creek town on the Chattahoochee River in what is now Coosa County,
Alabama. The later city of Opelika on the Montgomery & West Point Railway (and later Western Railway of Alabama) in
Lee County, Alabama, is unrelated. The
Cherokee village in the vicinity of the burned Napochi town was called Opelika,
as was the first U.S. Post Office in the neighborhood that was later changed to
Graysville, Georgia.
Archaeologically
speaking, the Napochi were Late Dallas Phase.
The known sites of this phase in
the Chattanooga or upper Nickajack Reservoir area include the Audobon Acres
site, the David Davis site, the Citico site (later components), the Hampton
Place site on Moccasin Point, and Williams Island. According to her examinations at the David
Davis site, Lynn Sullivan found items demonstrating trade with Coosa but little
interaction with the surrounding Dallas Phase sites occupied at the same time.
The houses of the
Nickajack Reservoir sites (though not all Dallas Phase sites) were identical to
those of the Mouse Creek Phase in the Hiwassee Valley of the same time, but
that one feature does not signify same culture.
The sites in the Hiwassee Valley and Upper Hampton Place lacked the
shell-tempered pottery of the Dallas sites and, even more tellingly, the
burials there were extended rather than flexed as the Dallas Phase. The Mouse Creek sites were all abandoned
shortly after the De Soto entrada.
Lewis and Kneberg
incorrectly identified the people of the Mouse Creek Phase as Yuchi, but their
identification based on the information they had at the time. The Mouse Creek sites include Ledford
Island in the Hiwassee River (the largest), North Mouse Creek, South Mouse
Creek, the Rymer site on the south bank at Charleston Landing, the Ocoee site
on Ocoee River just above its confluence with the Hiwassee, the Sale Creek site
on the Tennessee, and the Upper Hampton site just north of Euchee Old Fields at
Rhea Springs.
Juan Pardo and the Chisca/Uchi/Huchi, 1567-1568
Between 1566 and 1587, the capital of Spanish La Florida was
not San Agustin (St. Augustine) in what is now the U.S. State of Florida but
Santa Elena, located on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina. Fuerte de San Salvador, soon replaced by
Fuerte de San Felipe, was its original fort.
The French previously had a fort on the site of Santa Elena known as
Charlesfort from 1562-1565 that was destroyed by the Spanish.
From 1566 through 1568, the Spanish adelantado (governor) of
Florida, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, sent Captain Juan Pardo on two expeditions
deep into the interior, reaching as far west as East Tennessee. As originally planned, the two separate
expeditions were supposed to be one, but that turned into two because Pardo got
word that the French were going attack Santa Elena and cut his first journey
short.
On these journeys, Pardo laid the foundations of what were
intended to be Spanish colonial settlements adjacent to major native towns,
each guarded by a stockade, with a few isolated stockades at other towns.
One of the first settlements and forts Pardo established was
Ciudad de Cuenca at the chief town of Joara, guarded by Fuerte de San Juan, in
which he billeted a detachment of thirty Spanish soldiers under Sergeant
Hernando Moyano, in January 1567. Then
he proceeded on his journey, he built Fuerte de Santiago at the chief town of
Guatari (subordinate to Joara at the time of De Soto), garrisoned by four men
(later increased to thirty) and a secular priest, Fr. Sebastian Montero, in
February 1567. It was around this time
that Pardo received word of the potential French attack.
Moyano’s battles with the Chisca
Early in the spring of 1567, Moyano took half his men to
accompany the paramount chief at Joara and a large party of his warriors on an
attack against the town of Mantiateque, near the later Saltville,
Virginia. The combined army burned the
town and killed many of its inhabitants, earning for the Spanish the enmity of
the Chisca. In his report to Pardo,
Moyano specifically referred to the enemy as Chisca.
Several weeks later, in April, the chief of the Chisca town
of Guapere on the Watauga River, probably at Watauga Old Fields, sent Moyano a
direct message threatening him and his men.
Moyano responded by taking twenty of his men and a support contingent of
Joara warriors to attack the mountain town. Even though the town was surrounded by a thick
palisade, they managed to sack and burn it, killing or dispersing its
inhabitants.
After exploring the vicinity, Moyano took his men to Chiaha
at Zimmerman’s Island on the French Broad River, next to which they build a
stockade to house themselves. This was
the same Chiaha from the De Soto Expedition.
At the time of De Soto, Chiaha had been subject to the
dominion of the paramount chiefdom of Coosa, the seat of which lay at the site
of Coosawattee, Georgia. In the
intervening years, however, it had broken away and established itself as an
independent power, though not extending its reach to anything comparable to
that previously enjoyed by its former overlord.
Pardo’s journey resumed
In September 1567, Pardo received word at Santa Elena that
Moyano and his men at Chiaha was being beseiged by the Chisca and in dire
straits. He therefore restarted his
expedition, now that the threat from the French had proven ephemeral, and
marched to Moyano’s relief.
Along the way, among several towns of different ethnic
groups, the expedition passed through the Chisca towns of Guasili and Canosoga
on the upper Nolichucky River and Tanasqui on the French Broad River above
Chiaha. Upon reaching Chiaha, Pardo
learned that the threat had been greatly exaggerated and Moyano and his men
were safe. They were not, as rumored,
besieged by the Chisca, but they were restricted to their fort by the mico at
Chiaha. The latter party then abandoned
their fort and joined the renewed expedition.
The united Spanish party stayed five days, then left Chiaha
intent on reaching the dominant paramount chiefdom of Coosa. However, after passing through Chalahume and
arriving at Satapo, they were warned of an ambush on the road ahead, with six
thousand warriors from various towns led by the paramount mico of Coosa and a
hundred other chiefs.
The six accounts of Pardo’s expeditions conflict slightly on
exactly which towns these antagonists were from, but three lists demonstrate
that the terms Chisca, Uchi, and Huchi referred to the same people. Pardo himself reported these enemies as Chisca,
Carrosa, Costehe, and Cosa. Juan Vandera,
chronicler of Pardo’s second expedition, reported them as these enemies as
(according to one translation) Uchi, Casque, Olameco, Cosa, and Satapo (Huchi, Cosaque,
Olamico, Cosa, and Satapo in another). The
chronicles give the names Chiaha and Olamico to the same town, in places
explicitly stating they are the same.
Note that in none of these three lists are the Chisca and Uchi/Huchi in
the same list.
After hearing warning of the ambush and news of its size, Pardo,
therefore, decided that the best course was to return to Santa Elena,
establishing forts and settlements along the way to secure Spanish claim to the
interior.
Comment
Some have claimed that the Uchi and the Chisca are listed as
separate parties in the list of enemies at Satapo, but this is clearly not the
case.
Spanish forts in the interior
After returning to Chiaha, Moyano’s fort was torn down and
Fuerte de San Pedro, garrisoned by twenty-six men, was built to replace it.
On the return journey, they built Fuerte de San Pablo at
Cauchi, garrisoned by eleven men.
Following a three-week stay at Joara, site of the formerly
established Ciudad de Cuenca and Fuerte de San Juan, the expedition departed,
leaving thirty men to garrison the fort.
At Guatari, they established Ciudad de Salamanca and left thirty men to
garrison Fuerte de Santiago. At
Cofitachequi, they established Ciudad de Toldeo and left men to garrison Fuerte
de Santo Tomas. At Orista, not far from
the Spanish capital of Santa Elena, they established Villa de Buena Esperanza,
guarded by Fuerte de Nuestra Señora.
They arrived back at Cuidad de Santa Elena and Fuerte de San
Felipe on 2 March 1568. That May, a
little over two months later, Pardo learned that every settlement and fort
established in the interior had been attacked and burned to the ground, with
the garrisons wiped out save for a lone survivor, a loss of over one hundred
twenty men. Fr. Montero, the missionary
priest at Guatari, was unmolested, and remained for six years.
With this setback, the Spanish abandoned plans to colonize
the interior of La Florida, and by the end of 1587, had abandoned Santa Elena
entirely.
Comments
This particular information, on the forts, does not bear at
all on the subject at hand, but I just find it fascinating that the Spanish had
so many settlements in the interior and that so damn few people know about
them.
Some of the towns ecountered by Pardo, either by visiting
them or meeting their micos an oratas—Chalaque, Tanasqui, Quetua, Xeneca,
Neguase, Estate, Tacoru, Chalahume, Satapo, Canashaqui, Utaca—have been
identified as Cherokee given their same or similar names to towns inhabited by
the Cherokee—Cherokee, Tanase, Kituwa, Seneca, Nikwasi, Estatoe, Tugaloo, Chilhowee,
Citico, Conasauga, Watauga—but none of these names are of Cherokee
origin. The Cherokee frequently adopted
the names of previous settlements in the areas they settled, such as Opelika
listed above. As for the town called
Chalaque in the chronicles, this was a Muskogean label for those who speak a
different language, counterpart to ‘Akwanake’
among the Wendat.
The Yuchi diaspora
The politics and demography of the Carolina Piedmont
remained remarkably stable from their configuration after the time of the 16th
century Spanish entradas to the advent of English colonization. Expeditions by Francisco Fernandez de Ecija
in 1605 and 1609 and by Pedro de Torres in 1627 and 1628 reported Cofitachequi,
Joara, and Guatari as the dominant towns in the region. The Virginian explorer James Lederer echoed
those assessments in 1670, with Wateree being the most powerful and most
Mississippian politically.
With the advent of slave-raiding by the Occaneechi of the Piedmont (somewhat) on behalf of
Virginia and by the Westo on the Savannah River (mostly), at first on behalf
Virginia and later on behalf of Carolina, these Mississippian remnants
collapsed.
The demographic landscape of the later Cherokee Country,
however, changed drastically after the Spanish abandoned Santa Elena and
Carolina in 1587, withdrawing south of the Savannah and shifting their capital
to San Agustin. Some of these changes
may have occurred as much as a decade prior to that benchmark. The Mississippian polities in the Tennessee
Valley migrated southwest and those on the Coosawattee River relocated
west. Those elsewhere who did not do so
at the time removed west shortly after the arrival of the Chichimeco (or Westo)
or to the outskirts of the Spanish missions in the province of Guale.
As for the Yuchi, they began moving out of the Appalachian
Summit area (Upper East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, Western North Carolina)
from the end of the 16th century through the early-to-mid-17th century. One group notably remained in the mountains
until the early 18th century. The bands,
groups, or tribes that emigrated out of the Yuchi homeland can be identified
from colonial records or from maps of the period, of which there are six,
possibly seven with an eighth group which separated from one of the earlier
bands.
The earliest to settle among the towns of the proto-Lower
Creek are those of the town generally known as Euchee, and possibly
Chattahoochee. But the group known as
Chisca, later known as Chiscatalofa, are the first to appear in historical
record, though they did not settle among the Creek until after the mid-18th
century.
By the time of the Red Stick War (1811-1813), the Yuchi,
except for the Chisca-talosa, had consolidated into a single large group in the
Upper Towns of the Confederacy. Here,
they took part in the war as Red Sticks.
After the war, they appear back among the Lower Towns on the Woodbine
map of 1814, with the accompanying text noting that they were war refugees from
the Upper Towns. They are noted on the
Tanner map of 1823 as ‘Euchees’.
1. Chisca
In 1625, they appear on the De Laet map on what is probably
meant to be the Choctawhatchee River, where they are noted by the Spanish governor
of La Florida in 1639.
After the De Laet map of 1625, the Chisca are found at the
same position on maps by Sanson (1650, 1657, 1705), Hofmann (1679), Berry
(1680), Morden & Berry (1690), Jaillot (1692, 1694), and the Van der Aa map
of 1707.
On the map of the Tawasa slave Lamatty in 1707, he notes the
Chisca near the Gulf Coast as the ‘Ogolaughoo’, a form of ‘Hogolegee’. He also identified the Chisca as the chief slavers of that region of La
Florida.
The Barnwell map of 1744 shows them among the Middle Towns of
the Creek Confederacy as the ‘Chiscalages’.
On the Bonar map of 1757, they show up Lower Towns of the
Creek as the ‘Chisca Talosa’, appearing in some form of that name at that
location on the maps of John Stuart in 1764 and 1766, the Romans maps of 1773
and 1775, and the Woodbine map of 1814.
A census of Lower Creek towns in 1761 refers to both ‘Chisketaloofa’
and ‘Choctawhatchee Euchees’, the latter almost certainly formerly belonging to
the former group who stayed behind when the rest moved to the Lower Towns from
their previous home.
Benjamin Hawkins, U.S. agent to the Creek Confederacy in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries, noted in his accounts of Creek migration
legends that they refer to the Savanna River as ‘Chiska Talofa Hatchee’, or
Chisca Town River. This band never lived
that far east in historic times, so either the legends refer to a time in the
very distant past or it is referring to another band of Yuchi as ‘Chisca’.
2. Euchee-Ochese
Other than (possibly) the Chattahoochee, these lived among
what were later known as the Lower Towns of the Creek earlier than any other
known groups.
In the 1700 journal
of his expedition into the interior of the Southeast on behalf of the
authorities of the new colony La Louisiane, French agent Charles
Levasseur calls this group “Outchialle”.
When the Lower Creek Towns moved east after the Westo War
(1680-1682), the Euchee settled on the Ocmulgee River, which the English called
Ochese Creek because of them. Their town
was the lowest down river, near the confluence of the Ocmulgee with the Oconee. The English called the people in this
collection of towns the ‘Ochese Creek Indians’, later shortened to Creek. The late 18th century Spanish name for this
collection of towns had been “Uchises” for some time, even when they were still
on the Chattahoochee River.
The Beresford map of 1715 depicts them at the above location
(as well as the Moll maps of 1720, 1728, 1732, and 1736, by which time the
information was out of date). Here they
remained until the outbreak of the Yamasee War (1715-1717), at which all the
Lower Creek returned west to their former homes on the Chattahoochee River.
In 1728, warriors from Euchee tooks the scalps of two
Yamasee on behalf of the Cusseta who were trying to curry favor with an English
trader from South Carolina. Yamasee
warriors had recently attacked the outskirts of that colony and killed a number
of people. Taking that action incurred
the wrath of the Coweta, rivals to the Cusseta among the Lower Creek, and after
a series of negotiations, all parties agreed the Euchee should remove
themselves from the territory of the Lower Towns.
The English of South Carolina invited the exiles to settle
on the Savannah River, which they did in several places, ultimately
concentrating on the lower river south of Augusta, as well as resettling
Ogeechee Old Town on the river of the same name. The Bowen map of 1744 shows the settlements on
the lower Savannah River as ‘UCHEE’; they are also be represented in the legend
‘Tohogalias’ on the 1732 Moll map of the West Indies.
By the mid to late 1740s, the Savannah River settlements, at
least, were deserted, and the town of Euchee was back on the Chattahoochee
River, noted on maps during the rest of the century as ‘Euchees’ or ‘Ocheses’.
John Stuart notes them on his maps of 1764 and 1766 as
‘Eutchies’.
3. Chattahoochee
These are probably the “nation” whom Levasseur called ‘Gatchouia’ in his journal.
The identification of this group as Yuchi is tentative,
based largely on the fact that the Tardieu map of 1802 depicts them as ‘Chata Uche’,
an anonymous map of Mississippi Territory (which then included Alabama) in 1814
depicts them even more explicitly as ‘Chata Uchee’ and the river upon which
their town sits as ‘Chata Uchee River’, and the Fielding map of that territory
in 1815 contains the same references as the 1814 map.
As ‘Chattahuces’, the Beresford map of 1715 places them on
the Chattahoochee River, noting that they have “40 men” (warriors). The Moll maps mentioned above place them
instead on the Flint River. The Le Maire
map of 1716 puts them on the Chattahoochee as ‘Tchattaoucchi’, which is how and
where they are shown on French maps the rest of the century. Other maps, giving other versions of the
name, also show them on the Chattahoochee River.
4. Tamahita
When encountered by Gabriel Arthur in 1673, this group,
called ‘Tomahittans’ in Abraham Woods’ account of Arthur’s “adventures”, was
most likely living on the upper reaches of the Chattahoochee River above the
towns of the later Lower Creek. I give
an explanation for that hypothesis below.
Swanton himself uses the form ‘Tamahita’ when he discusses
them in Early History of the Creek
Indians. In the latter half of that
discussion, he states that he has been given solid information that the
Tamahita were Yuchi, though he does not specify what that information is, and
in all his works thereafter he simply gives the name Tamahita as one of the
appellations of the Yuchi without any discussion of their individual history.
Swanton gives several examples of the Tomahitan being
pictured on maps or listed in colonial accounts among the Lower and Upper Towns
of the Creek Confederacy.
The ‘Tamaitaux’ appear on the De Crenay map of 1733 (which
I’ve seen a facsimile of) on the Chattahoochee River. The ‘Tamaita’ appear in an enumeration of
Lower Creek towns in 1750. In a 1761
list of Creek towns, the “Tomhetaws” are listed as belonging to a group of “27
Coosawtee” towns, now among the Upper Towns.
James Adair lists the ‘Ta-me-tah’ as one of the broken
tribes given refuge among the Creek in the Upper Towns, the others being Tae-keo-ge
(Tuskegee), Ok-chai (Okchai), Pak-kána (Pacana), Wee-tam-ka (Wetumpka);
a town of Sha-wa-no (Shawnee), a town
of the Nah-chee (Natchez), two towns
of the Koo-a-sâh-te (Koasati),
Oosécha (Osochee), Okone (Oconee), and Sawakola (Sawokli).
Note: Adair’s list
lumps the Middle Towns together with the Upper Towns, a mistake too many
authorities make discussing the Creek Confederacy. For example, in signing the Treaty of New
York with the United States in 1790, Alexander McGillivray and twenty-six other
Creek leaders did so on behalf of the “Upper, Middle, and Lower Creek and
Seminole composing the Creek nation of Indians”.
A brief account of the 1673 contacts between James Needham
and Gabriel Arthur with the ‘Tomahittans’ is given below.
5. Chichimeco-Westo
As the ‘Chichimecos’, the people whom the (possibly
Arawak-speaking) Cusabo tribes on the coast of (South) Carolina called the
Westo first appear in Spanish colonial records raiding the Georgia interior sometimes between 1618 and 1624, returning to the area in
1659. Two years later, they launched a
major assault against the towns of that area, and being repelled by the natives
with Spanish support, turned to the towns of the Oconee Basin in the Georgia
interior.
By 1662, they had settled at the mouth of a river from which
they could reach both the Cofitacheaqui and the Escamacu (the Spanish name for
the Cusabo). When Carolina agent Henry
Woodward visited their town, ‘Hickauhaugau’, they were at midpoint on the
Savannah River, midway between the mouths of two tributaries entering the river
from opposite sides, where they appear on the Thornton & Fischer map of
1680 and the Gascoyne map of 1682.
The Westo are almost certainly the ‘Oustack’ of Lederer, of
whom his Usheree informants complained, telling him their town lay south on the
other side of the fictional Lake Ushery.
After the Westo War (1680-1682), the Westo relocated to the
Chattahoochee River, then moved with the Lower Creek when they moved their
towns east around 1690. The Beresford
map of 1715 (and its Moll imitations in 1720, 1728, 1732, and 1736), shows them
as the uppermost of the towns on the Ocmulgee River.
A Spanish letter of 1702 report that the Euchee, Chisca,
Chichimeco, and Apalachicola made an attack against the Apalachee that year of
some consequence.
When the Lower Towns returned to the Chattahoochee River
during the Yamasee War (1715-1717), the Westo settled between the Coweta
upriver and the Cullooma (who may be the people Stuart calls ‘Fusahatchi’ on
his maps of 1764 and 1766) downriver. In
the mid-1740s, the Euchee, called Ochese on some maps, returned from the
Savannah River and settled between the Coweta and the Westo. Stuart calls them ‘Owutchies’ on his maps.
The Westo, as a group, are covered much more fully below.
6. Hogolegee-Ogeechee
These people, the last major Yuchi diaspora from their
homeland, arrived on the upper Savannah River about 1710, pushed out of the
mountains by the expanding Cherokee.
They settled Euchee Island on the Savannah and Ogeechee Town on the
upper Ogeechee River, which was named for them (also ‘Howgechee River’ and
‘Great Hogoheechee River’). Hawkins gives
the name of Ogeechee Town as ‘How-ge-chu’).
The Beresford map of 1715 (and its Moll imitations of 1720,
1728, 1732, and 1736) refers to this group as ‘Tohogalegas’. The Barnwell map of 1721 has the notation
“Hogolegees Deserted 1715” in this vicinity.
The Hogolegee removed west with the Lower Creek at the
outbreak of the Yamasee War, settling just below the confluence of
Chattahoochee River with Chatahospa River, where according to contemporary
cartography they remained as least as late as 1799. Stuart, on his maps of 1764 and 1766, calls
them ‘Hogalies’ and places them close to the Tallapoosa River.
7. Tanasee (or Tennessee River Yuchi)
This is my own name for the group of Yuchi whose progression
southwest is marked by the name of their town.
Sometime after Pardo, the Tanasqui moved to the Little Tennessee River,
leaving their name as ‘Tanasi’, the original seat of the Overhill
Cherokee. Their next stop was a location
between the Hiwasee River and the Ocoee River in Polk County known as
‘Tennessee Old Town’.
On some local maps (Southeast Tennessee) and various obscure
written sources is marked or otherwise noted a ‘Tennessee Old Town’ near
Savannah Ford across Hiwassee River opposite Hiwasse Old Town, site of the
former Cherokee town of Great Hiwassee.
This was not a Cherokee settlement, a fact that suggests this was in
fact Yuchi, a stop in their migration south and west. The in-house library at Red Clay State Park
has the best information about Tennessee Old Town.
Since they had clearly vacated by the time the Cherokee
arrived in the immediate vicinity, I believe these constitute the same group
later found on maps near the Tali (‘Taly’) beginning with the Loughvigny map of
1697, on which he refers to them as ‘Togales’.
Others map-makers call them ‘Tahogales’ and ‘Taogoria’.
The Beresford map of 1715 depicts their town as
‘Tohogalegas’ at the foot of an island opposite two towns of Koasati
(‘Cusatees’) with a “French Fort” (probably a fortified trading post) in the
center. This was probably
Long-Island-on-the-Tennessee near Bridgeport, Alabama, and South Pittsburg,
Tennessee. The Moll maps of 1720, 1728,
1732, and 1736 repeat this. The band was
noted with 150 men on the Tennessee River in 1730.
This group could be the ‘Euches’ depicted on the Bonar map
of 1757 among the Upper Creek towns, since it also depicts the the longer
established town of Euchee (‘Euches’), by this time the “mother town” of all
Yuchi in the Creek Confederacy, on the Chattahoochee River. The group in the Upper Towns is noted on John
Stuart’s maps of 1764 and 1766 as ‘Euschies’.
8. Cisca-Tongoria
This group does not represent a diaspora group from the
Yuchi homeland but rather a body of refugees from the Chisca of Choctawhatchee
River whom La Salle met in his exploration of the Mississippi Valley in
1682.
In his manuscript map of that year included in La Salle’s
account, Franquelin shows this group as ‘Cisca’ on the ‘Misscouccipi Riviere’. This stream (spelled ‘Misseouecipi’ on his
1684 version) enters the ‘Fleuve St. Louis ou Chucagoa ou Casquinapogamou’
below an island upon which is the town’“Caschinampo’. From the island town of Caschinampo a trail
goes southeast to San Agustin, with the caption, “The trail that the Kaskinampo
and the Shawnee use to trade with the Spanish”.
According to La Salle, these Cisca settled at Fort de Saint-Louis
des Illinois the same year in the multi-ethnic community that gathered in the
vicinity of the fort. If they did not
gravitate toward the trading post established by mutineer (Ft. Crevecoeur 1680)
Martin Chartier on Cumberland River about 1685 shortly after it was
established, they certainly did so after the non-Illinois confederation tribes
evacuated in 1689.
Chartier’s fortified trading post, later the “old fort”
reoccupied by Jean du Charleville in 1710, stood at what was later known as the
French Salt Lick, now Nashville, Tennessee.
With Chartier came at least part of the Piqua Shawnee. The Chispoko Shawnee returned (Franquelin’s
maps show them there in 1682), the Mekoche Shawnee coming with them, in 1689.
That trail ‘that the Kaskinampo and the Shawnee use to trade
with the Spanish’ was later known to the English and later Americans as the
Cisca and St. Augustine Trail, second in importance in only to the Great Indian
Warpath from Mobile Bay into Nova Scotia.
Its northern terminus was the French Salt Lick, which indicates the
presence there at one time of the band of Yuchi known by that name, which fits
the position on Vermale’s map (see below).
In 1692, the Piqua moved back to the Lenape and Chartier
went with them. His son, Petier, later
became the chief leader of the band.
Seeking other sources of trade, the Cisca relocated to the Tennessee
River and the region about its confluence with the Hiwassee River, on a major
trail which led to the English in Carolina.
From local sources, we know that there were at least two settlements,
the called ‘Chestowee’ in Carolina records a short distance above the mouth of
the Hiwassee on the left side of that river and another on the right side of
the Tennessee in Meigs County, at the place now known as Euchee Old Fields.
On several maps from 1717 to 1725, the Chisca are shown at
this location as ‘Tongoria’, and most of these show another settlement of this
name on a northern river. The ones that
do, with one exception, place the northern on the Ohio. The exception is the original, that of
Vermale in 1717, which places the northern Tongoria on the Cumberland. That is why I believe that the Tongoria on
the Hiwassee migrated from the Cumberland, which is what I think that its
inclusion on Vermale’s map was intended to relate. It could also be that the town on the
Hiwassee was a satellite of the town on the Cumberland.
By the time Vermale’s map was created published, however,
the ‘Tongoria’ on the Hiwassee were gone.
Having fallen into debt with Carolina traders Alexander Long and Eleazer
Wiggan, the Yuchi (Cisca) at Chestowee suffered victim to one of the most
notorious atrocities in Indian Country of the Southeast in the early 18th
century, occurring in May 1714.
In order to recoup the debt, Long and Wiggan instigated the
Cherokee at Great Hiwassee into wiping out the town of Chestowee, offering a
huge supply of trade goods in return for destroying the town, paying
Chestowee’s debt out of the plunder, and turning over the captives to be sold
at the slave market in Charlestown.
Once this had been carried out, the affair sent shock waves
throughout the Southeast, including both Indian Country and Carolina. Fortunately, Carolina authorities intervened
to prevent a repeat against the Yuchi on the Savannah River, which Long and
Wiggan had been encouraging.
Survivors of Chestowee, both those who had escaped and the former
captives, all of them, whom authorities had forced Long and Wiggan to return,
resettled with the Yuchi on Savannah River.
The Chestowee attack was one of the major irritants leading to the
Yamasee War (1715-1717) and the Second Cherokee-Creek War (1716-1755).
There is more on La Salle’s encounter with the Cisca below.
Chisca and Chichimeco in La Florida, 1618-1651
Sometime during the administration of governor Juan de
Salinas (the actual title by this time was captain-general) of La Florida,
1618-1624, he received reports of
‘Chiscas’ and ‘Chichimecos’ raiding the Christian Indians in the
provinces of Apalachee and Timucua. In
reponse, he sent a military force under Sergeant-Mayor Adrian de Canizares y
Osorio to the northern frontier to deal with the problem. The Chichimeco we do not hear of again until
1659.
As mentioned above, the Chisca settled on the Choctawhatchee
river by 1625, when they appear on the De Laet map of that year. In 1639, governor Damian de Vega, Castro, y
Pardo wrote complaining of their depredations.
In 1647, the Chisca instigated the natives of the Spanish province of
Apalachee (more groups than the nation by that name) into revolting against
Mission San Antonio de Bacuqua and the Spanish of the area.
About 1651 during the administration of governor Benito Ruiz
de Salazar Vallecilla, the Chisca again raided Timucua. Vallecilla sent out Ensign Juan Baptista
Terraza with a party of six to scout the situation and recruit native warriors
to retaliate. The Spanish and their native allies were successful, and the
Chisca survivors returned west.
Iroquoians in Virginia
The Spanish were not the first Europeans to encounter
Iroquoian-language speakers in North America.
The claims that they were are largely based on discredited
interpretations of the chronicles of the Spanish entradas to the Old Southwest,
what we now call the Southeast (of the United States). Actually, recalling the Vikings is enough to
shoot down that hypothesis (St. Lawrence River), but in truth neither were they
the first in the so-called Age of Discovery.
In two of his three voyages to what to Europeans then was
the New World, Jacques Cartier encountered some twenty-five villages of eight
to ten thousand people living along the St. Lawrence River. These voyages were in 1535-1536 and
1541-1542. When Samuel de Champlain
arrived in 1608, the river was deserted of permanent settlements. Archaeological studies demonstrate a gradual
desertion of the area ending in about 1580, which is roughly the same time that
the Mississippian societies as such disappeared from East Tennesee.
First contact with the Tuscarora and others
The first English to encounter Iroquoian-speakers settled
the colony on Roanoke Island in April of 1585, with most returning to England
with Francis Drake in June 1586. The
fifteen man detachment left behind had vanished by the time the second group of
colonists, led by John White, arrived in July 1587. The new group had trouble with the same local
group that the first had crossed, and White returned to England seeking
assistance.
When ships finally returned in August 1590 after having been
delayed by the upsurges in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604), they found the
settlement’s one hundred twenty inhabitants gone and its buildings carefully
dismantled, with the word ‘CROATOAN’ carved into one of the trees at the
site. This indicated to White that the
colonists, including his granddaughter Elizabeth Dare (first English person to
be born in the Americas), had settled with the Croatan Indians living on
Hatteras Island. However, the privateers
with whom he had hitched a ride were in no mood to mount a search party and left
after a couple of days.
A large part of the reason for the failure of the first
effort was that while the English got along with the nearby Chowanoke, Moratuc,
Weapmuc, Secotan, and Croatan, they massively bungled relations with the
Mangoak. The fact that the colonists
first made friends with the Chowanoke with whom the Mangoak frequently warred
probably did not help.
The term ‘Mangoak’ is southern Algonquian counterpart to
‘Mengwe’, the general term of northern Algonquian speakers for Iroquoians of
all nations and tribes. It means,
literally, “without penis”. Nearly all
authorities agree that these ‘Mangoak’ were the Tuscarora, perhaps with
Nottoway and Meherrin among them. This
is concrete evidence that the Tuscarora, and probably also the Nottoway and
Meherrin, were not refugees from the Beavers Wars, though they were likely
recent immigrants to the area, perhaps from the St. Lawrence River Valley.
The Coree (as ‘Cwarennoc’) and the Neusioc, who many suspect
were also Iroquoian, are also mentioned in reports of early explorations of the
area prior to the establishment of the first colony (1584).
The Massawomeck
The Massawomeck were an Iroquoian people first appearing in
records of the colony of Virginia as the Pocaughtawonauck, whom John Smith
wrote in 1608 were at war with the Piscataway confederacy and the Patawomeck,
the latter being partial members of the Powhatan confederacy. By the time Smith made a map of the colony
and nearby native groups, he named them the Massawomeck. Other sources call them the Massomack.
The Massawomeck lived beyond the Appalachian Mountains,
either on the headwaters of the Potomac River or on the Youghiogheny River, a
tributary of the Monongahela River. They
were known early in the 17th century for descending the Potomac in canoes to
prey upon their neighbors further downriver, especially the Andaste, the
Patawomeck, the Paxutet, and the Wiccomiss.
One informant described them as making war “on the whole world”.
By 1627, the methods of operation of the Massawomeck
shifted, trading for English goods through Anacostank, and sometimes their
rivals, the Piscataway. When encountered
by the Fleet brothers in 1632, they lived in four towns—Tonhoga, Usserahak, Shaunnetowa, Mosticum—that lay three days journey
from the ‘Herekenes’, i.e., the Erie (clearly mangled from some version of
Riquehronnon). Keep in mind this was a
few years before the inland move reported in the Jesuit Relations.
The last mention of
the Massawomeck as such are in Dutch records from 1656.
Identity of the
Massawomeck
The identity of the
Massawomeck is a mystery rivaling that of the Westo, and their fate even much
more so. That they spoke an Iroquoian
language but one different from the Erie, Huron, and Petun is well known, a fact
indicated as well as by the fact that the Virginians’ Algonquin-speaking
informants called them ‘Mangoaks’, which they interpeted as “cannibals”.
Some have tried to
identify the Massawomeck with the Monongahela culture and/or with the Antouhonorons
of Champlain’s writings. A strong case
can be made, indeed, that the Massawomeck of the early contact period were the
terminal phase of the Late Monongahela Culture.
But the second proposition falls apart on two, possibly three,
counts.
First, when Champlain
first mentions the Entouhonorons (spelled with an ‘A’ on his maps) in 1615
recounting their move of forty to fifty leagues, he says they have fifteen
villages. The Massawomeck are never
described as having but three or four.
Second, it becomes apparent
from reading enough of his writings that the peoples to whom Champlain referred
as Entouhonorons were the western Iroquois (Seneca, Cauyga, Onondaga), while
referring to the eastern Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida) as Iroquois (also as
Hiriquois and Yroquois). Careful study
of the Jesuit Relations and related writings makes clear that the two groups,
while often joining together for enterprises such as the destruction of the
Erie, most often fought separately from each other in two different theaters of
operation. The western Iroquois carried
out most of the campaigns in the western Great Lakes region while the eastern
Iroquois spent most of their effort against the tribes of New England and the
Atlantic region and its hinterlands, including the Andaste.
Third, recall the Du
Val map of 1677 mentioned above showing the ‘Nation du Chat qui cultiver la
terre’ far inland, perhaps on the upper Allegheny River; it shows the
‘Antouhronons’ to the north of of the other.
The latter are mislocated, shown south of Lake Erie rather than south of
Lake Ontario as they are on the maps of Champlain and Bisseau; of course on the
maps of those two Lake Erie does not appear at all.
The Massawomeck on
colonial maps
The Massawomeck
first appear on the Smith map of 1612 of Virginia in the upper right corner on
the southern shore of an enormous lake, separated from the rest of the map by
the banner proclaiming “Virginia”. They
appear there on the later editions of 1620 and 1624, as well as those of Blaeu
(1640, 1642) and of Hondius (1642, 1644) which copy him. On the Dudley map of 1647, in which north is
at the top, the Massawomecks are shown at an indistinct location in the upper
left hand corner.
On the Jansson maps
of North America in 1636, 1641, and 1660, the ‘Massowomecs’ appear just east of
the Appalachian Mountains near the headwaters of Chesapeake Bay tributaries.
The Farrer maps of
1651, 1665, and 1667, oriented with west on top, the ‘Massawomeckes’ appear
inside the Appalachian Mountains in the upper right corner. The Hondius-Visscher map of 1669, while still
basically a copy of Smith’s maps, follows Farrer in the detail of placing the ‘Massawomecks’
in the mountains.
The Lederer map of
Carolina in 1672 bears the legend “The Messamomecks dwelt heretofore beyond these
Mountains” on the right side of the chart, which, given the map’s orientation,
is some distance to the north of ‘The Rickohockans’.
The “Attiouandarons”
The term
‘Attiouandaron’ (anglicized as ‘Attiwandaron’) was the French rendition of the
Huron word for speakers of an Iroquoian language different from their own. The Huron words for those who spoke a
completely different language, such as the Algonquin-speaking Ottawa, was ‘Akwanake’. The people for whom French chroniclers of
various sources most often used the term were the Chonnonton, or ‘Nation
Neutre’.
The word
Attiouandaron began to appear on French charts with the Bourdon map of
“Nouvelle France” in 1641, where it appears on two places, neither of them the Chonnonton,
who are designated ‘Nation Neutre’. One
group of Attiouandaron is placed in southern Lower Michigan, south of
the Winnebago (‘Aoventsiovaenronon’) and west of the Fox (‘Oskovararonon’), to the
eastern shores of Lake Michigan. Nothing
at all is known as this group. The other
is placed in the mountains west of ‘La Virginie’, and these can only be the
people known to Virginians as the Massawomeck, by virtue of being the only
Iroquoians in that vicinity.
Sanson, who clearly used the Bourdon map as one of his
sources, places the Attiouandaron just over the Appalachian Mountains west of
‘Virginie’, south of the “Eriechronons ou Nation du Chat” and southeast of the
“Ontarronons” (Kickapoo), on his map of “La Canada ou Nouvelle France” in
1656. They are placed thus again on his
1657 edition of that map and on his map of “La Floride” of that same year, on
the Sanson map of “La Nouveau Mexico et La Floride” in 1679, on a Dutch copy of
his New France map in 1683, the Sanson map of La Canada ou Nouvelle France in
1692, and a Dutch copy of his map of Florida in 1705.
The Dutch cartographer Van der Aa published a map in 1707
illustrating De Soto’s route through Florida (which then meant the entire
American Southeast) based on Sanson’s version, but with slight graphic
alterations. The information, however,
was the same, so the ‘Attiouadarons’ lie in the same place where Sanson
originally put them.
Though based on Sanson’s, Jaillot’s maps of “Amerique
Septentrionale” in 1692 and 1694 place the ‘Attiouandarons’ east of the
Appalachians, but close enough to that range that it can be interpreted to mean
that the group lived in the mountains.
The Homann map of “Virginia, Marylandia, et Carolina” in
1715, probably the last to show the group, places the “Attiouandarons” among
the mountains west of Virginia.
Comments
I find it interesting that the Massawomeck disappear from
colonial records about the same time that the Jesuits report the Wenro shift
from Oil Springs to the Niagara Frontier and that the Erie were forced inland
due to trouble with enemies from the west.
Also, that the Wenro had four villages or towns just like the
Massawomeck.
Edward Bland, 1650
In 1650, Bland
accompanied Abraham Wood and a few others on an exploration of the Virginia
interior. Writing a pamphlet recounting
their travels called The Discovery of New Brittaine, Bland recounted their meetings with the
Occaneechi, the first time that name appears in Virginia records, and with the
Tuscarora, Nottoway, and Meherrin.
Comment
The Occaneechi play a part in a couple of sections below. English explorers scouting the area in
preparation for the Roanoke colony encountered those three groups earlier in
1584 along with the Coree and the Neusic (probable Iroquoians) in addition to
others. The members of the first colony
ran into trouble with them, and that trouble played not only a part in the fall
of that colony but of the second Roanoke colony as well
The lost nation of the Erie
An Iroquoian people
with a language, and probably culture, identical to the Huron and the Petun,
the Erie at the time of contact lived along the southern shores at the east end
of Lake Erie. By the time of the Beaver
Wars, they three of the tribes in the confederacy had relocated to the Allgheny
and upper Ohio Rivers, while two of the tribes remained at their
archaologically terminal sites.
The Beaver Wars
The Beaver Wars were a series of conflicts fought in the
seventeenth century across the entire Great Lakes region, forever changing the
cultural and ethnic face of its people.
Many of the most powerful confederacies of the time were broken up
and/or destroyed.
Often cast as war for control of the beaver trade with
Europeans, hence the name, on the part of the League of Five Nations, also
known as the Iroquois, it was also war to absorb all the other
Iroquoian-speaking peoples and bring them together under the roof of one
longhouse. The most relevant part of the
conflicts for the purposes here is the destruction of the Erie, or Nation du
Chat (also Nations des Chats), as they were usually called by the French.
One often ignored major part of the Beaver Wars, while not
relevant here, is the war waged by the tribes of the Chonnonton (Neutral)
confederacy against the Asistagueronon
(the Sauk, Fox, Mascouten, and
Potamotami collectively) that lasted from 1635 until the Chonnonton were
broken up and dispersed by the Iroquois.
The Erie confederacy
At the time of the French entree, the Erie tribes lived
further west than their terminal sites later in the century. In the year 1635, they were forced to move
east under pressure from the Kickapoo pushing on their west. It was the same year that the Wenro moved
northwest to the Niagara Frontier from their home around Oil Springs due to
conflict with the Seneca and that the Massowomeck on the northwest frontier of
Virginia disappear from that colony’s records.
The Erieronon, to use the Huron suffix, or Eriehaga, to use
the Mohawk suffix, are called by a variety of names in the Jesuit Relations of
1610-1791 and related documents of New France from the period, including
maps. Other variations include
Enrielhonan, Rhiierrhonnon, Enrie, Erieckrenois,
and Eriegoneckkak, as well as Rigueronnon and Riquehronnon, the latter two also
versions of the name of the leading tribe of the confederacy. The Virginian trader among the Massomack
(Massawomeck), Henry Fleet, mangled the name into ‘Hereckeenes’.
The French usually
called them ‘Nation du Chat’ or ‘Nation des Chats’, a translation into French
of the meaning of their name in Huron and other languages, ‘people of the
long-tails’, about which there is a debate over whether this refers to raccoons
or cougars, with solid evidence on both sides.
The Huron referred to them as the Yenresh (Yenreshronon with
the suffix), meaning ‘long-tailed’ or ‘long-tailed people’. The Tuscarora name was Kenyrak. The Seneca called them Gwageoneh, which later morphed into Kahkwa. The
Onondaga name was Onnontioga. The
Mohawk called them the Arrigahaga, ‘people of Arrigha’, their chief town. As a whole, the Five Nations also referred to
the tribes of the confederacy as the ‘Otkons’, or ‘evil spirits’.
The Dutch referred to them as the Black Minqua, derived from
‘Mengwe’, the name by which they and most Algonquian-speakers called the
Iroquoian-speakers, meaning literally ‘without penis’, which the English
rendered as Black Mingo. The Lenape
called them ‘Alligew’i or ‘Talligewi’.
Their nearer Algonquian neighbors the Ottawa called them the ‘Olighi’n.
Other names or versions of names for the Erie are Erigas, Erighek, Achawi, Kauneastekaroneah, Squakihaw, Tchoueregak,
and Kahgwageono. The Tuscarora artist
David Cusik is the source for the name Squakihaw, while Mohawk historian John
Norton is the first literary source for the name Kahkwa. Norton also called them the Rad-irakeai-ka,
and wrote that they lived in the town of Kaghkwague.
The Erie probably
shared the same autonym as the Huron and the Petun: Wendat.
Both the Black Robes (Jesuits) and Champlain wrote that the Erie language
was identical to Huron.
Constituent tribes of the Erie confederacy
The Erieronnon, as they are first referred to in the Jesuit
Relations, were a loose confederacy of five tribes. These there were the five: (1) Arrigahaga (Riquehronnon);
(2) Kentaientonga (Gentaguetehronnon); (3) Oniasontke (Honniasontkeronnon); (4)
Atrakwaeronon (Akhrakvaetonon);
(5) Takoulguehronnon (possibly “Casa’
of the Franquelin maps).
Archaeologically speaking, the Erie are equated with the Ripley
Focus of the Iroquois Aspect of the Northeastern Phase of the Woodland Pattern. Anthropologists Marian White and William
Enghlebert have identified five terminal sites of the Ripley Focus: (1) Bead Hill Site in East Aurora, NY; (2) Kleis
Site in Hamburg, NY; (3) Silverheels-Highbanks
Site near Irving on the Cattaraugus Creek Reservation; (4) Ripley Site in
Ripley, NY; and (5) East 28th Street Site in Erie, PA.
Extrapolating from period maps and contemporary accounts, we
can connect the individual tribes with the five archaeological sites thus, from
east to west: (1) the Atrakwaeronon were in East Aurora, NY; (2) the Arrigahaga
were in Hamburg, NY; (3) the Kentaientonga were near Irving, NY; (4) the
Oniasontke were in Ripley, NY; and (5) the Takoulguehronnon were in Erie, PN.
I should note that
with the exception of the groups at the Hamburg site (the Arrigahaga, as
Rakouagega), as well as the Bead Hill Site (which it doesn’t show at all), the
map of Franquelin from 1684 shows the tribes considerably inland from the
terminal sites of the Ripley Focus.
Rather than at those, Franquelin shows the Kentaientonga, the
Oniasontke, and, perhaps, the Takoulguehronnon (as Casa) on the Allegheny-Upper
Ohio River. This fits with the report in
the Jesuit Relations that the Erie had been forced inland by trouble with their
enemies to the west in about the year 1635.
Those above occupation
sites were the palisaded fortress towns of each tribe; in the cases of at least
the Arrigahaga and the Kentaientonga we know from period accounts and/or
contemporary maps, if not from archaeology, that these had satellite villages,
hamlets, and isolated farmsteads attached to them. The Franquelin map of 1688, for example,
shows nineteen villages of the Kentaientonga destroyed, while Seneca accounts
of the conquest of the Arrigahaga in the Jesuit Relations mentions smaller
settlements being abandoned in the retreat toward refuge in the town of Rique, or
Arriga.
The Erie-Iroquois war
(and the fall of the Erie confederacy)
While warfare between the Huron and the Iroquois had been
carried out for decades, the Iroquois began a war of conquest and assimilation
and the other confederacy in the year 1647.
Two years later, in 1649, their attacks became so relentless that the
Huron remaining burned their own towns and dispersed, seeking refuge with the
Petun, the Chonnonton, and the Erie.
Later that year, they destroyed the chief town of the
Petun. The next year the Petun, with the
Huron and Wenro refugees among them, headed west to Mackinac Island along with
the Otawa.
In the fall of 1650, the Iroquois began another war of
conquest and assimilation, this time against the formerly more powerful
Chonnonton confederacy, composed of ten tribes.
The Chonnonton were weakened because their leader, the Tsouharissen, had
died without a successor in 1646, and because they had been carrying out an
active war against the Asistagueronon (the
Sauk, the Fox, the Mascouten, and the Potamotami collectively)
to their west since 1635.
In the spring of
1651, the Iroquois destroyed the prominent Chonnonton town of Kandoucho and the
seat of the confederacy, Andachkhroh, and the confederacy collapses. Some fled west while some surrendered, but a
large body remained free and allies with the Andaste (Susquehannock) to
continue fighting. The Antouaronon tribe
of confederacy, meanwhile, relocated to the southern shores of Lake Erie just
west of the eponymous confederacy. The
others, the ones who continued fighting, eventually surrendered to the League.
The war between the Erie and the Iroquois did not start in
1653, when the Erie attacked the Seneca, but in 1651, when the western
Iroquois (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga) attacked Atrakwae that winter. The
attempt to capture the town of the Atrakwaeronon, ended in a significant defeat
for the would-be conquerors. When they tried again in the summer of 1652
with the eastern Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida) with them, they were successful,
destroying the town and claiming to take a thousand prisoners.
Why the rest of the Erie attacked the Seneca in 1653 when
they were reportedly already at war with the Andaste may have been as simple as
realizing they were the next conquest after the fall of the Huron, the Petun,
and the Chonnonton. The Seneca sent
their women, their old, and their young to live with the Onondaga in the center
of the League.
Besides their poison-tipped arrows, which the Erie archers
could fire at a rate of eight to ten compared to time it took for a single shot
of the Iroquois with the Dutch supplied arquebuses. The Erie had these too, but not as much
access to shot and powder as their antagonists from the east.
That the Erie were a large people adept at war is proven by
the fact that the Onondaga, the central tribe geographically and politically,
representing all the Five Nations, sought an audience with the French asking
their assistance in the war against the Erie, which was apparently not going
very well in early 1654.
The central town of the Riquehronnon and seat of the Erie
confederacy, Arrigha or Rique, fell, along with all the tribe’s satellite
villages, later in 1654. The Iroquois
destroyed Gentaienton, the central town of the Kentaientonga, in
1655.
In the midst of all this, according to military engineer for
New Sweden Peter Lindestrom, a force of two to three hundred English attacked
one of the towns of the “Black Minquas” and suffered a devastating defeat
which saw fifteen men taken prisoner and tortured to death horribly. Of
course, since his journal was not published until 1691, he could be erroneously
recounting the Battle of Bloody Run in 1656. But the fact the Lindestrom
refers to the invaders as Black Minqua helps confirm the identity and origin of
the “Richahecrians”.
The Erie-Iroquois War did not end in 1656, despite the
commentary of some of the Jesuits in letters and in Relations (a “relation” was
an annual report to the head of the Jesuit Society’s missions in New France
back in Paris).
Eight hundred ‘Honniasont’ took up residence with
the Andaste in 1662 to aid them in their war with the western Iroquois and
their allies. Swanton is the source for the designation of this group as
Honniasont; his sources are probably from Pennsylvania. Willhelmus Beekman,
governor of the Colony of Swedes (Delaware) for New Netherlands (which
conquered New Sweden in 1655), in reporting the same information refers to them
as ‘Black Minquas’.
The Jesuit Relation of 1664 describes the report from the
Iroquois of the supposed “final defeat” of the Erie that year.
When La Salle journeyed down the Ohio River in 1669, the
Seneca warned he and his party about the dangers from the Shawnee and
the ‘Honniasontkeronons’.
The map of Virginia published in 1673 by Augustine Hermann
contains a notation in the upper right corner about the ‘Black Mincquas’
having been destroyed by the Andaste and the Seneca.
In the Relation of 1682, the Jesuits recount that a group
of ‘Nation des Chats’ numbering some six hundred persons surrender to the
Iroquois near Virginia. A report to the governor of Maryland about this
in 1681 apparently referring to the same group calls them ‘Black Mingoes’, and
says they were being pursued and attacked by ‘Southern Indians’, possibly Yuchi.
Erie survival
Some of the Erie taken captive were adopted and assimilated
(except for those tortured, burned, and eaten), but the majority of those who
surrendered lived in communities with other surrenderees like those in the town
of Gandougarae in Seneca territory.
Those not assimilated or adopted either fled to the Wyandot, moved next
to the Andaste, or fled south to the “country of the Muscogui” (according to
John Norton).
In 1662, some 800 ‘Honniasont’
(from the Oniasontke tribe of the Erie) took up residence among the Andaste on
the right bank of the Susquehannah River to aid them in their own war with the
Iroquois. Swanton is the source for the
designation of this group as ‘Honniasont’; his sources are probably from
Pennsylvania. Willhelmus Beekman,
governor of the Colony of Swedes (Delaware) for New Netherlands (which
conquered New Sweden in 1655), reporting the same information refers to them as
‘Black Minquas’.
In 1664, the Iroquois informed the French of their final
defeat of the Erie. The end of the
latter is even then greatly exaggerated, though they had deserted their former
homeland.
In 1669, Robert de La Salle financed an exploration of the
Ohio River accompanied by Abbe Gallinee, among others. Gallinee writes that Seneca informed them
that after the distance of one month’s march they would encounter the the
villages of the Honniasontkeronon and the Chiouanon before reaching the Falls
of the Ohio (at the later Louisville, Kentucky). The latter were the Shawnee, while the name of
the first tribe was a clearly a version of Oniasontke. The Kentaientonga (Gentaguetehronnon), whose
former home was depicted on the Franquelin map of 1684 upriver of these, were
long gone by then.
The map of Virginia published in 1673 by Augustine Hermann
contains a notation in the upper right corner about the ‘Black Mincquas’
having been destroyed by the Andaste and the Seneca.
The expedition party of Marquette and Joliet down the Ohio
River in the summer of 1673 encountered a group of Wendat-speaking Iroquoians
below the Shawnee and past the Wabash River. Marquette spoke with them in
the language he called Huron, but Wendat was the common language of the Huron,
Petun, and Erie. These people were most likely Oniasontke given their
location, though some distance farther west than they had previously been
recorded.
In the Relation of 1682, the Jesuits recount that a group
of ‘Nation des Chats’ numbering some six hundred persons surrender to the
Iroquois near Virginia. A report to the governor of Maryland about this
in 1681 apparently referring to the same group calls them ‘Black Mingoes’, and
says they were being pursued and attacked by ‘Southern Indians’, possibly Yuchi. These were the group noted as
‘Tionontatecaga’ on maps of the early 18th century who gave their name to the
Guyandotte Valley and its river. Their
descendants may have been the people of the town discovered in 1754 at Mingo
Flats (modern Mingo, West Virginia) in Tygarts Valley.
Mingo Flats,
Virginia
In 1753, Robert
Files, David Tygart, and their families settled Tygart’s Valley in what became
Randolph County, West Virginia. The
Files settled in the later Beverly area, the Tygart family three miles up the
valley. One day while out hunting in the
fall of 1754, the two men discovered a ‘Mingo’ town about thirty miles up the
valley and decided to relocate. The name
“Mingo” was the general name at the time frontiersmen, hunters, trappers, and
pioneers of the northern and western frontier used for any group of natives
whose origin they did not know.
Before the two
familes could finish preparations and move, seven members of the Files family,
except for one boy who fled to the Tygart home, were killed by a native war
party, most likely Shawnee or Lenape since the French and Indian War
(1754-1763) had already broken out. The
Tygart family would have been the target had the attack come from the native
town up the valley. Shortly after the
Files boy arrived, the Tygart family fled with him in tow.
By the time a group
of nine families settled in the valley in 1772, the town Files and Tygart had
discovered was abandoned. But its
history gave the name Mingo Flats to that area of Tygart’s Valley. It is now officially named simply as Mingo
but is still known locally as Mingo Flats, especially since the road to get
there is named Mingo Flats Road.
Comments
Although, I am very sure there is no relationship, I still
must point out the notion that the Westo were refugee Erie is currently the
most popular fad among ethnologists studying Native American groups of the
colonial Southeast. It is an idea taken
as gospel in the same way that the stories of Saddam Hussein’s massive WMD
programs were taken as gospel in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Repeat a falsehood enough times with enough
fervor and it becomes accepted as fact, no matter the logical contortions one
must make.
The Richahecrians
Swedish sources, specifically Peter Lindestrom, relate a
battle between English soldiers from Virginia and the ‘Black Minquas” in which
fifteen Virginians were taken captive then tortured and burned to death. This took place in the year 1654 or 1655. Lindestrom was the chief military engineer
for New Sweden in those years, and he wrote a journal of his time there. However, since this was not published until
1691, the account could be an embellishment based on stories of the matter about
to be discussed.
In March 1656, the Virginia House of Burgesses ordered Col.
Edward Hill to gather a hundred colonial rangers and a hundred native warriors
from the Pamunkey and Chickahominy nations under Wyanoke (Eno) leader Totopotomy (a weromance of the
Powhatan confederacy) to deal with a group of six to seven hundred ‘northern
Indians’, later identified as ‘Richahecrians’, who had settled near the Falls
of the James (Richmond).
The site where the Richahecrian had settled was downriver from
the towns of the Monacan and had formerly been the site of the town named Shocquohocan (also called Powhatan),
seat of Parahunt, werowance of the Powhatan tribe and son of Wahunseneca,
paramount chief of the whole Powhatan Confederacy (better known as Powhatan). Virginia’s Fort Charles later stood there from
1645 to about 1649.
Upon arrival at the site of the newcomers’ settlement, the
force from Virginia found them inside a well-built fort. Five of their leaders came out to parlay
under a flag of truce only to be murdered, which resulted in the Battle of Bloody Run, a serious
defeat for the Virginians, who lost Totopotomy
and nearly all their native allies and many colonial rangers.
In December of that
year, Col. Hill was cashiered and ordered to pay the costs of making peace with
the Richahecrian. The latter, however,
had by then vacated the region.
Strangely, though, the governor also ordered that Hill be paid for his
expenses of the failed expedition.
James Lederer later identified the enemy as Nahyssan and
Manahoac (‘Mahocks’) and placed the battle at the confluence of Pamunkey River
and Totopotomoy Creek, but this clearly conflicts with colonial records at the
time of the battle.
Comments
Due to the timing
of their arrival and the close similarity of the names Richahecrian and
Riquehronnon, as well as the near certainty that they spoke a variation of an
Iroquoian language, it is fairly certain that the new arrivals in Virginia were
refugee Erie, or perhaps a composite group led by refugee Erie. As to where they went after the battle, they
later appear as the Rickahockan of Lederer’s accounts, covered below.
The Chichimeco return to La
Florida, 1659
The people whom the
Spanish knew as the Chichimeco retrned to the Georgia interior, which was then
part of Spanish La Florida, in 1659, this time to stay.
In 1661, the
Chichimeco raided the Guale, both the name of the tribe and of the Spanish
province on the Southeast coast of Georgia.
Spanish accounts claim they had English among them. They came by the Altamaha River, reportedly
more than two thousand of them in two hundred canoes.
Heading into the
interior, the Chichimeco ravaged the lands of the Altamaha and the Catufa, and
continued into the lands of the Apalachicola, where the Spanish pursuit, led
by Captain Juan Sanchez de Uriza, caught up with them. A battle then ensued. Later, the Spanish captured four of the
Chichimeco in the province of Apalachicola.
Of important note
is the fact that in order to interpet talks with the prisoners, Captain Sanchez
sent for interpreters from the Chisca settlements on the Choctawhatchee
River. These Chisca, being Yuchi, spoke
Yuchi, a language isolate unrelated to any other known language. The only plausible reason for bringing
interpreters from so far away would be that the members of the two groups,
Chisca and Chichimeco, spoke the same language.
Sanchez learned
that before arriving in La Florida the Chichimeco had come down from Ajacan,
the Spanish name for Virginia. To the
Spanish, Ajacan included not only Virginia (the original Virginia, including
West Virginia) but also North Carolina and the adjacent sections of the
Appalachian Mountains. The captives told
the Spanish of the settlement of white men in Ajacan, meaning Jamestown, and
warned their captors that the English were pushing ever further south.
As to the current
whereabouts of their compatriots, the captives informed Sanchez they were then
settled in the provinces of Tama (Altamaha, along the middle Oconee River) and
Catufa (also Fatufas, Patofa, and Tatofa; Waynesboro, Georgia, and its
environs).
Comments
There is virtually
no credible argument that these Chichimeco and the Westo were not one and the
same people. The fact that Captain
Sanchez sent a party from his location to retrieve an interpreter from a people
living 150 miles away in the region of the Choctawhatchee River speaks
volumes.
As to claims these
Chisca used sign language or talked to the Chichmeco prisoners through other
persons, there is nothing like that in the accounts. It is made up. Nor is there any indication whatsoever in the
Spanish reports that the Chisca only talked to the Chichimeco through
interpreters, as some others have wishfully suggested. See John Worth’s The Struggle for the
Georgia Coast, and Swanton’s Yuchi section in Early History of the Creek
Indians and Their Neighbors.
Birth of the Yamasee
By some time in
1662, the Chichimeco had so thoroughly ravaged the tribes of the interior that they
evacuated the region to safer environs next to the Spanish missions. These were the Altamaha (who may have
included the Catufa), the Ichisi, the Ocute, and the Toa, who became the
nucleus of the Yamasee, the name by which they are referred to as early as 1663
and more commonly after 1675. A band of
the Chiaha (Chehaw; formerly of the chiefdom on Zimmerland’s Island on the
French Broad River) joined them at a later date.
After the Spanish
tried to deport them to the Caribbean in 1687, the Guale, the Mocama, and their
smaller dependent tribes crossed into Carolina and joined the Yamasee. These spoke Muskogean languages very
different from the Hitchiti languages spoken by those from the interior as well
as from the Muskogean-speaking tribes in the west along the Chattahoochee River
and in Alabama. Those tribes along the
Chattahoochee formerly lived farther north and had relocated specifically
because of the depradations of the Chichimeco.
The Chichimeco,
meanwhile, relocated possibly as early as October 1662 to a location described
by the Spanish friars of Guale as being at the mouth of a river from which they
could reach the Cofitachequi (Cusseta or Kahsita) at Camden, South Carolina, or
the Escamacu (Cusabo), immediately north of the Guale across the Savannah
River.
The Rickahockans
In 1669 and 1670,
Gov. William Berkley of Virginia commissioned physician and explorer Johann
(John) Lederer to make three expeditions into the interior with the goal of
discovering a passage to the Californias.
It is the second of these which is most relevant.
Leaving Fort
Charles (Richmond) in May 1670, Lederer and his party, led by Andaste guides,
visited the following towns or tribes, in this order: Monacan, Nahyssan,
Occaneechi, Wyanoke (Eno), Shakori, Wataree, Sara (Cheraw; Xualla and Joara of
the Spanish), Waxhaw, Usherey (Uchiri of Pardo’s chronicles), Katearas town of
the Tuscarora, Cowinchahawkon town of the Meherrin, Menchaerinck town
of the Meherrin, Nottoway, and Appamattoc,
ending their journey at Fort Henry (Petersburg) on Appomattox River back in
Virginia.
This particular of Lederer’s
journeys is germaine to the purpose here for two reasons.
First, at the town
of Occaneechi, Lederer met a delegation of Rickahockan, whom he heard dwelt
beyond the Appalachian Mountains, led by an ambassador who had come to treat
with the Occaneechi, presumably related to the trade monopoly of the latter
with Virginia. Their hosts slaughtered
them at the height of a festival presumably in their honor that evening. The overwhelming concensus of opinion is that
the Rickahockan and the Rechahecrian are one and the same people.
Second, upon his
arrival at their town, the people of Ushery (Usheree) warned Lederer of
dangerous and warlike people called the ‘Oustack’ on the other side of the
‘Lake of Ushery’, who could only be the Westo.
Of further note,
Lederer describes what can only be a remnant Mississippian culture in the
regions he visited in Carolina. The paramount
chiefdom of the Wateree (Guatari) had long surpassed that of the Cusseta (Cofitachequi) to become the dominant power in the Carolina region, while that
of the Cheraw (Sara, Xualla, Joara) also remained, all of them more or less in
place where De Soto and Pardo first encountered them.
In 1672, after
settling down in Maryland, Lederer published an account of his journeys accompanied
by a map of the locations. The map is
oriented with west on top, and if you turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, the
Rickahockan appear to be located in the New River Valley.
The Rickahockan on colonial
maps
The first map to
show the Rickohockan was not that of John Lederer, but by John Ogilby, though
it was based on his information. He drew
it in 1671 for Charles II’s hydrographer, Joseph Moxon, to engrave for his book
published that year, America : being the latest, and most accurate
description of the New World. The
artistic copy was not ready until 1673, when Ogilby published a new
edition. These maps were oriented with
the southwest at the top, and in the upper right corner just beyond the
Appalachian Mountains is the legend “The Rickohockans”.
To illustrate his
account of his journeys, written in Latin, Lederer drew a map based on Ogilby’s
design but with some graphic changes.
His friend William Talbot translated the Latin account into English and
published it, with a copy of Lederer’s map, as The Discoveries of John
Lederer in 1672. ‘The Rickohockans’
occupy the same space on Lederer’s map as they do on Ogilby’s.
The Basset &
Chiswell map of 1676 and the Speed map of that same year follow Ogilby’s design
more exactly.
The Morden map of
1688 puts north at the top and places ‘ye Rickohockans’ just east and next to the Appalachian Mountains.
On the Morden & Berry map of the world in 1690, ‘The Rickahoekans’ are one of the few native peoples depicted in North America. The map shows them prominently in and west of the Appalachian Mountains, with their name in much larger letters than those of the six peoples to the south: Acoste (Koasati), Apalach (Apalachee), Chisca, Fascalesa (unknown, possibly Choctaw), Usheri (Usheree), and Vatuche (unknown). Besides these, only the “Assistaerooms”, probably the Asistagueronon of the Jesuit Relations (the Sauk, the Fox, the Mascouten, and the Potamotami collectively), are shown.
On the Morden & Berry map of the world in 1690, ‘The Rickahoekans’ are one of the few native peoples depicted in North America. The map shows them prominently in and west of the Appalachian Mountains, with their name in much larger letters than those of the six peoples to the south: Acoste (Koasati), Apalach (Apalachee), Chisca, Fascalesa (unknown, possibly Choctaw), Usheri (Usheree), and Vatuche (unknown). Besides these, only the “Assistaerooms”, probably the Asistagueronon of the Jesuit Relations (the Sauk, the Fox, the Mascouten, and the Potamotami collectively), are shown.
On an anonymous
French map based on based on Morden & Berry’s design of “Caroline du Nord et Caroline du Sud” that
also shows ‘Virginie’, ‘Nouvelle Georgie’, and northern ‘Floride’ published in
1733 or 1734 (no date, but ‘Nouvelle Georgia’ gives a timeframe), ‘Les
Rickonoquans nation’ appear west of the Appalachians at roughly the same parallel
they appear on the English maps.
Comments
The Rickahockan of
Lederer in 1670 are almost beyond doubt the same group of people as the Rechahecrian
of Virginia in 1656. And their very
location reported in 1670 by Lederer argues against the prospect of the
Rickahockan being Westo in the face of Spanish reports that the Chichimeco
settled in the eastern Georgia-western South Carolina region as early as 1662. The manuscript description of their location
and depiction on Lederer’s map does, however, line up with early testimony
regarding the migrations of the proto-Cherokee from the north.
Birth of the colony of Carolina, 1670
The eight Lords Proprietor in England who owned the royal
charter to the lands of Carolina, then defined as extending from the current
southern boundary of Virginia well into Florida to take in the site of the Spanish
capital of San Agustin, sent one hundred fifty colonists to establish a
permanent presence and foothold in the territory. Most of them were planters from Bermuda, who
named their new settlement Charles Town.
Another group of planters from Barbados settled along Goose Creek. The rivalry between these two groups
dominated the politics and economy of the new colony into the third decade of
the 18th century.
The colony, originally chartered in 1663, was divided into
three counties: Albemarle, roughly today’s North Carolina; Clarendon, roughly
South Carolina; and Craven, roughly Georgia and northern Florida, including the
Spanish capital of San Agustin.
In letters and reports, the French usually referred to all
of it as English Florida, excepting those parts actually held by the Spanish,
though their maps always call the area “Le Caroline ou La Floride Francois”.
In 1562, the French had established the colony of Caroline
with strongholds at Charlesfort (Parris Island, South Carolina) and Fort
Caroline in or near Jacksonville, Florida.
French Caroline was named for their king at the time, Charles IX. The English version of Carolina was named for
Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
The new colony’s seat lay among the nineteen tribes known
collectively as Cusabo: Escamacu, Kussoe, Edisto, Kiawah, Etiwan, the Ashepoo,
Bohicket, Combahee (Coosaw), Hoya, Kussah, Mayon, Sampa, Santee, Sewee,
Stalame, Stono, Toupa, Wando, Wimbee, and Witcheaugh. The lands inhabited by these tribes were
claimed by the Spanish as the province of Escamacu.
The tribes greeted the newcomers as saviors, beseeching them
to protect them from the ravages of the people they called the Westo, the very
same people the Spanish called the Chichimeco.
Birth of the Indian slave trade in the Southeast
One of the first enterprises the colonists engaged in was
trade in Native American slaves. The
Spanish in La Florida had long employed systems of forced labor, but this
system was different, involving commerce in native slaves captured by rival
tribes and traded or sold to the merchants of Carolina. Some of these unfortunates were put to work
on plantations in the colony, but the vast majority were shipped to Barbados
and other British colonies in the Caribbean as well as to New England. In the first years, the slave merchants in
Carolina worked with the Westo, the Cusabo, the Cussetas, and other nations as
suppliers of slaves.
The colony of Virginia had already been long involved in the
slave trade, their primary partners being the Occaneechi. The primary partners of the colony of
Maryland were the Andaste. Part of the
trade driving the Beaver Wars in the north in the later years was taking
captives for the slave trade. Other
colonies involved were Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts,
Nevis, Bermuda, and New England. The
Iroquois began raiding south for slaves in 1680, targeting the Catawba; this
touched off a war between the two that lasted until 1759.
The trade brought about the final destruction of the remnant
Mississippian culture in the region and the end of its three remaining chiefdoms. The Cusseta (also Kahsita, formerly known as
Cofitachequi) departed for the safer environs of the Chattahoochee River, to
become one of the founding tribes of the Creek confederacy, while the Wateree (Guatari)
and the Cheraw (Joara) ultimately coalesced with other Siouan-speakers such as
the Esaw (Yssa), Catawba (Catapa), Waxhaw (Gueca), Ushery (Uchiri), and Sugaree
(Suhere), all mentioned as minor chiefdoms in Pardo’s chronicles, as the
Catawba Nation in the 18th century.
Although the Occaneechi did skirt the region, the party most
responsible to the collapse of remnant Mississippian society in the Carolina
Piedmont was the Westo, especially with the jump in demand beginning in 1670. In addition to the mission Indians of the La
Florida provinces of Guale and Mocama and the settlement Indians of Virginia,
the Westo harvested captives from the Cusseta, the Coweta, Chickasaw visiting
for trade with Carolina, the Cherokee newcomers to the region, and even the
Chisca, their fellow Yuchi living in La Florida.
Batts and Fallam Expedition, 1671
Led by Thomas Batts and chronicled by Robert Fallam, who
accompanied him, this was the first expedition sent out by the colony of
Virginia to across the Allegheny Mountains.
It was they who “discovered” New River, naming it after their sponsor
and boss, Abraham Wood, after they had passed through the mountains at Wood’s
Gap.
Much like its counterpart in the north (Allegheny-Ohio River), writers in the past
spoke of the New-Kanawha River as one river, under many names. In colonial and even early post-colonial
times, the names Woods River, Kanawha River, or New River could refer to
everything from the headwaters of the New River (in current terms) to the mouth
of the Kanawha River at its confluence with Ohio River.
Likewise, for decades, and really until the 20th century,
the Allegheny River was considered the upper Ohio River, even when retaining
its separate name, while sometimes either name, Ohio or Allegheny, was used for
the length of the whole. So, when
writers describe the Erie as living on the Upper Ohio River, they mean the
Allegheny River named for them, Allegheny being a variation of the name for
them among the Ottawa and other northern Algonquins: Olighin.
At one point, they spied a field of cornstalks on the left
bank of the river, apparently the remains of a recently deserted
settlement. The explorers supposed the
inhabitants to have been some of the ‘Mohecans’ (‘Mohetons”’in other
copies). A little later, Batts (writer
of the journal) refers to the same people as ‘Moketons’. Both references are to the group more
commonly known as Monyton (Moneton), who actually inhabited the Kanahwa Valley
on the other side of New River Gorge, near Malden, West Virginia.
The party met some Tutelo shortly afterward who informed
them that next town south lay on a plain that produced a great amount of
salt, similar to what the Chisca of Maniateque were said to be famous for in
the time of Pardo. Saltville, the modern
city at that approximate location, lies on the North Fork of the Holston. In the context, however, the Tutelo speaker seems to be referring to upper New River Valley.
The informant told the Virginians he had no more information
to give them about that town because “there was a great company of Indians that
lived upon the great water [i.e., New or Woods River]”. In commentary on this account a century later,
cartographer John Mitchell describes this “great company of Indians” being
reported as “numerous and warlike”.
Comment
This account and that of the Richahecrians in Virginia match
up with the reports of early authorities regarding the northern origins and migrations
of the proto-Cherokee, which are summarized below.
The Tomahitans
In a lengthy letter entitled “The Travels of James Needham
and Gabriel Arthur, 1673-1674”,
Abraham Wood recounted to his superiors in London how he
contracted Needham and Arthur to find
passage over the Appalachian Mountains and contact the tribes on the other
side. His chief goal had been to be able
to bypass the Occaneechi middlemen who had a monopoly on Virginia trade with
the southern Indians.
The two left Fort Henry, Wood’s headquarters, on 17 May, accompanied
by eight Appamattoc natives. On the way
to the Occaneechi, the party met another of fifty-one Tomahitan, with whom
Needham, Arthur, and one of the Appamattoc journeyed to their town across the
Appalachians.
According to Wood’s report to London, the party
traveled nine days from Occaneechi to
the town of Sitteree (Sugaree), then headed west over the mountains. After passing five rivers flowing northwest,
the party came to one flowing more directly west fifteen days out from
Sitteree, and it was upon this river that the town of the Tomahitan lay.
Location of the Tomahitan town
Given that the only region in the neighborhood with that
many rivers flowing northwest, their route could only have taken them southwest
through East Tennessee into North Georgia.
The first mostly westward river they would have come to on this route
would have been the Coosawattee River, the river formerly of the Coosa, later
known to the Cherokee as Kusawatiyi, or ‘Old Coosa Place’.
The town of the Coosa lay at the confluence of that river
with Talking Rock Creek. Known to
archaeologists as the Little Egypt site, it is now submerged beneath the waters
of Reregulation Reservoir. Since the
Coosa had vacated nearly a century prior, moving far down stream to the Coosa
River, the site would have been open for resettlement. However, Wood describes the river upon which
the town of the Tomahitans sit as being well-populated, so that leaves out the
Coosawattee River, which was then all but deserted.
Wood relates that the Tomahitan told Needham and Arthur that
eight days journey downriver from their town were settlements of men with
beards living in buildings made of brick.
This leaves out the Etowah River, the next mostly westward flowing river
south, because it joins the Oostanaula River just above Rome, Georgia, to
become the Coosa River, which later merges with the Tallapoosa River to become
the Alabama River, which in turn merges with the Tombigbee River to become the
Mobile River, which empties into Mobile Bay.
No European lived there, on Mobile Bay, until 1702, when the French
built Fort Louise de la Louisiane.
The upper Chattahoochee River flows more west than south. After making a sharp southward turn, it flows
toward the Gulf of Mexico, joining Flint River to become Apalachicola River,
which empties into Apalachicola Bay.
This last river is named for the people through whose
territory they flowed, the Apalachicola, one of the nations which become part
of the Lower Creek. In fact, the Spanish
often referred to all the Lower Creek collectively by that name (they later used
the term Uchises). Hence, most likely
friendly territory for those from other Lower Creek towns. Or at least not hostile. And only sixty-four miles from Apalachicola
Bay to Apalachee Bay and the river which feeds it, St. Mark’s River, formerly
known as Apalachee River and home to the westernmost missions of the Catholic
Church.
Given all these facts, I suggest that the town of the
Tomahitan lay on the upper Chattahoochee River, perhaps the easternmost and most
upriver of its towns at the time.
James Needham’s fate
Needham returned to Fort Henry with the Appamatoc warrior
and a party of twelve Tomahitan to report to Wood, leaving Arthur in the town
of the Tomahitan to learn their language.
One of the Tomahitan who accompanied Needham on his return
had been held as a prisoner at what can only have been a mission. He described how its inhabitants rang a
six-foot bell in the morning and in the evening, at which time everyone would
gather together and talk about things he had no idea about. Which might be how a 17th century native
unfamiliar with religious rites of the Catholic Church might describe the daily
offices.
Upon their journey back to the town of the Tomahitan, the
party was stopped by the Occaneechi, who did not want them to pass
through. A trader named Henry Hatcher
intervened, and they agreed to let the party pass, provided they accepted an
Occaneechi escort. In the course of
their travel, one of the Occaneechi killed Needham, after which he and his
compatriots returned to their town and the Tomahitan continued on their way
home.
Gabriel Arthur’s adventures
After being rescued from being burned at the stake by the
returning Tomahitan, who were about to do so at the behest of their Occaneechi
allies, Arthur went on a series of raids with his hosts, ranging across a wide
swath of the Southeast.
The first raid was against the Spanish mission in which the
Tomahitan who had been a prisoner of the Spanish was held. The raid amounted to an ambush of a single
Spaniard some distance from the mission and a black man on the outskirts of a
maroon settlement (maroons were escaped slaves) six miles outside the mission
grounds. The mission in question was
most likely either Mission San Antonio de Bacuqua or Mission San Damian de
Cupaica, the two most western of the Spanish missions in the “province” of
Apalachee, the one at Bacuqua being the more northern of the two.
The second raid was against a town of “settlement Indians” a
day and a half east of the mouth of the “Port Royal river” (probably the
Coosawhatchie). They traveled down the
river from its head, which they had reached from the Tomahitan town in six
days. From the description of the target
town’s location, it was most likely one of the Combahee (also known as Coosaw,
not the same as the Coosa formerly of Coosawattee). This raid was more warfare than robbery, and
according to Wood the Tomahitan war party killed many native inhabitants and
burned the town. The return journey by
foot took fourteen days.
The third raid occurred during a diplomatic mission of the
Tomahitan to the Monyton on the Kanawha River, a journey which took ten
days. The Monyton told Arthur that all
the nations who lived on the Ohio River were at war with the Tomahitan. At the end of their meeting with the Monyton,
the Tomahitan launched as assault against one of the tribes on the river,
probably the Shawnee or else the Oniasontke, those two tribes then being the
most accessible from the Kanawha Valley.
Arthur was shot in the legs with two arrows, but since he was not
Tomahitan but English, his captors returned him to the Tomahitan.
There were a couple more adventures, including Arthur’s near
capture by a group of Occaneechi in the town of the Sara (same people as
Joara/Xualla), but Arthur eventually arrived back at Fort Henry on 18 June 1674.
Were it not for the information supplied by Swanton (and
checked by myself) about the separate existence of this group, it would be
tempting to identify the Tomahitan as the Westo before they settled on the
Savannah River.
Comments
Several authorities have attempted to identify the Tomahitan
with the Westo, but other than their propensity to not play well with others
and probably being Yuchi, there is no relation.
James Mooney wanted to equate them with the Rickahockan and the Cherokee,
but later came to the opinion that the Rickahockan were refugee Erie, which for
him precluded their being Cherokee, despite his belief that they too were or northern
origin.
Mooney remained convinced that the Tomahitan were Cherokee,
however. That this was not the case is
shown by William Green in The Search for Altamaha: The Archaeology and
Ethnohistory of an Early 18th Century Yamasee Indian Town (1992).
In his account therein of the peace conference held in Charlestown in
January 1727 between the Cherokee on one side and the Abhika for the Upper
Creek and the Coweta for the Lower Creek on the other, Green includes the
statement of the Cherokee that the Tomahitan were the enemies of their allies
the Yamasee.
This testimony by the Cherokee might seem to indicate that
the Tomahitan and the Westo were the same people given their antagonism toward
their neighbors. But the description of
the location of the town of the Tomahitan in Woods’ account plus the description
of the Chichimeco town’s location in Spanish records combined with the evidence
from Swanton are sufficient to strike down that proposition. And, as Eric Browne points out in The
Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South (2005), in the 18th century (at least by its
midpoint), the Tamahita lived among the Upper Towns of the Creek Confederacy while
the Westo lived among the Lower Towns.
Some of the
Tomahitan’s relations with other tribes and nations as related by Wood should
be taken note of. They were friends with
the Monyton and the Occaneechi but enemies of all the tribes on the Ohio River,
as well as the Yamasee (according to the Cherokee in 1727). The first points to strong northern
connections, ones which they would have coming from the Appalachian Summit
region.
The Westo,
1674-1682
A brief account of
the Chichimeco-Westo from their meeting with Woodward through the end of the
Westo War.
Henry Woodward and the Westo
In 1673, the Westo began a war against the colony of
Carolina and the Cusabo tribes who lived adjacent to the English settlements as
well as among them. The leaders of
Charlestown brought in the Esaw from the Piedmont region of Albemarle County
(now North Carolina) to assist them in their defense.
Dr. Henry Woodward was the person in the colony in charge of
virtually all relations with any Indian tribe, Carolina’s counterpart to
Abraham Wood. But Woodward went beyond
mere trade, even living for a brief time with several tribes, learning their
languages. Because of this, he was well
known and respected throughout Indian country in that part of the
continent. So when the Westo decided it
would be better to trade than to raid, they appeared at Woodward’s plantation,
seeking an audience in October 1674.
Both parties agreed that to continue negotiations, Woodward
needed to visit the main Westo town, which turned out to be on the Savannah
River. In his description of the town, which
he names as “Hickauhaugau”, Woodward mentions that the Westo are at continual
war with the Cherokee (‘Chorake’) and Coweta (‘Cowatoe’). This is the first appearance of the name
Cherokee (or any version thereof) in English colonial records.
Two days before Woodward’s departure homebound, two Shawnee
arrived, most likely from the Hathawekela band then settled among the
Creek. The two brought warning of an
impending attack by the “Cussetaws, Checsaws, & Chiokees”, which other
versions of the story give as “Cussetaws, Cheasaws, and Chiskers” and
“Cussetaws, Cheesaws, and Chiskews”. The
first nation is clearly the Cusseta. The
second is almost certainly the Chicasaw; their name is spelled ‘Chiasaw’ in
some documents. The third are probably
Chisca.
The conclusion of the negotiations was Carolina recognizing
the Westo as their sole middlemen for trade with the interior tribes going out
and Indian slaves and deerskins coming in.
The agreement was ratified by the Carolina assembly, which was dominated
by the clique from Bermuda, and by the Lords Proprietor in England, whose
blessings the Bermuda group had.
The Westo and the Tomahitan
Given that the Westo began targeting the Cusabo in 1673 and
that the Cusabo tribe called Coosaw or Combahee were the target of Gabriel
Arthur’s expedition with the Tomahitan, one might think without further
examination that this is proof of the Westo and the Tomahitan being the same
group. But the location of the Tomahitan
town in my hypothesis or in any other precludes that. However, the raid recounted by Arthur to Wood
and related by Wood to his superiors against the ‘settlement Indians’ near Port
Royal may be what provoked the First Westo War (1673-1674), especially if the
Tomahitan were mistaken for the Westo because the raiders looked and sounded
like them. Which could easily happen if
they were both Yuchi.
Furthermore, Woods’ descriptions of the Tomahitan town’s
location and how long it took Arthur to get various to destinations from there work
against the hypothesis of the Westo and the Tomahitan being the same group. In particular, the description of the river
on which the town of the Tomahitan sat as being thickly populated. The Chichimeco’s or Westo’s depredations had
cleared not only the Savannah River but the entire regions of eastern Georgia
and western South Carolina on either side.
And then there’s the evidence of separate towns in the 18th century.
The Westo and the Chisca
Crane’s opinion that the third group threatening the Westo were
the Chisca (“Westo and Chisca”, American
Anthropologist, 1919) does seem likely, especially since one of the groups the
Westo are reported to have targeted for slave raids was the Chisca. His contention, however, that since the
Chisca were Yuchi they would not go to war with the Westo if they were also
Yuchi stands on very thin ground and would seemingly collapse of its own lack
of foundation in the face of the the example of the Tuscarora War (1711-1715).
At the time of the war’s outbreak, the Tuscarora lived in
North Carolina divided into two groups, the northern on the Roanoke River and
the southern south of the Pamplico River.
The Southern Tuscarora allied with the Pamplico, the Coree, the
Machapunga, the Cothechney, and the Mattamuskeet to drive out the English from North
Carolina. The colony sought back up from
South Carolina, and the Northern Tuscarora allied with the Carolinas along with
the Cherokee, Yamasee, Apalachee, and Catawba.
Another example in American history is the French and Indian
War (1754-1763) in which the Wyandot of Fort Detroit fought on the side of the
French while the Wyandot of Ohio Country fought on the side of the British.
An even better example is the bloody and chaotic Choctaw
Civil War of 1747-1750 between its Eastern Division and the Western Division
(the Six Towns or Southern Division remained neutral), which left over a
thousand Choctaw dead and dozens of towns destroyed.
The Westo War
In the spring of 1680, Spanish colonial authorities reported
a huge raid by the ‘Chichimecos’, the ‘Chiluques’, and the ‘Uchises’, these
being the Westo, the Cusabo, and the Lower Creek.
‘Chiluques’ was how the Guale and the Mocama referred to the
the tribes of the Cusabo across the Savannah River. The Guale and the Mocama spoke a version of
Muskogean unlike their near neighbors, possibly in their own subdivision.
Not long after this, the Shawnee of the Hathawekela band
which had settled upriver began attacking Hickaukaugau, with support from a party
of the English. These English were from
and/or employed by the Barbados-origin Goose Creek Men. The Westo, naturally, did not make the distinction
between the two factions and counter-attacked generally.
Once the Westo had lost their chief allies against the
surrounding nations and tribes, the feeding frenzy began, and by the end of the
year, the Westo had been dethroned.
Fighting continued, however, at least on a small scale, into 1682.
The primary beneficiaries of this outcome were the Goose
Creek Men and the Hathawekela Shawnee, who took over the monopoly formerly held
by the Westo. The primary losers were
the Westo, of course, and Henry Woodward, who up to the time of the war had a
monopoly within the colony on the Westo trade, along with the Bermuda faction
in Charlestown.
The remaining Westo relocated to a place among the Lower
Creek on the Chattahoochee River just downstream from a town labelled ‘Euchees’
(Yuchi) on maps of the 18th century and upstream from the “Culloomas”.
The Cisca of Robert La Salle
In recounting part of his trip exploring the Mississippi
River Valley in 1682, La Salle encountered the ‘Cisca’on a river which “flows
from east to west” and empties into the ‘Chucagoa’ (Ohio) River. He also talks about a people of ‘English
Florida’ (the province of Carolina) called the ‘Apalachites’ (Lower Creek) who
were at war with the Cisca and the ‘Tchatake’ (Choctaw).
Mooney attempted to identify the Tchatake as Cherokee due to
the slight similarity of the names and because he did that with nearly every
group not positively identified as another.
The Cisca whom La Salle meets on the tributary of the Ohio,
clearly either Duck River or possibly the Cumberland (going from the text and
Franquelin’s map), have relocated from their former homes further east because
the Apalachites, supported by the English, burned their one of their towns, so
they evacuated all their homes for safer ground. This band of refugees could only have come from
the Chisca on the Choctawhatchee River.
A force of Spanish Indians from the La Florida province of
Apalachee (Apalachee, Timucua, Chatot, Chine, Tomole) attacked and destroyed a
town of the Chisca in October 1677, the full official report of which Swanton
included in the Yuchi section of Early
Creek Indians and Their Neighbors.
The destruction was in retaliation for their raiding of the other
nations and tribes in the vicinity. The
Spanish Indians killed many of the population and burned the town to the
ground. The survivors fled. The Cisca whom La Salle met could be these
survivors, changing the origin of the enemies to curry favor and sympathy from
the French, or they could be telling the truth and these are two separate
incidents entirely.
A little later in his report, La Salle recounts that the
Cisca and the Chaouenon (Shawnee) were the first nations to settle at Fort
Sainte-Louis du Roucher (St. Louis of the Rock) on the Illinois River. They were later followed by all the nations
of the Illini Confederacy. Not only does
this strongly suggest that they were at least amicable if not allies, it
indicates they may have been living adjacent to or at least near each other at
the time of La Salle’s 1682 exploration.
Comments
Some, trying to prove the same point I am trying to make,
have speculated that these Cisca were refugees from the Westo town of
Hickauhaugau. But the native actors in
the two stories are different, this one placing the Cisca much farther to the
west by virtue of their being at war with the Choctaw.
Carolina Indian Panic of 1693
As recounted by Crane in the essay “An Historical Note on the Westo Indians” for American Anthropologist (1909), the
governor and deputies of Carolina notified the colony’s Commons House of
Assembly of word they had received about “northern Indians” settling among the
friendly Coweta and Cusseta on Ocmulgee River (then called Ochese Creek).
The Commons sent back word the next day advising the
governor to prevent by any means necessary the settlement of such among “...our
friends, especially the Rickohogos or Westos...” with whom they had so recently
been at war.
Comments
Therein lies Crane’s sole proof for identifying the Westo
with the Rickahockan, the alternate name ‘Rickohogo’. He states that Woodward must have made a mistake
when spelling the name ‘Hickauhaugau’.
Crane would have us believe that a group of rich planters
whose only forays away from their plantations and estates were to the comforts
of Charlestown knew more about the Westo than the highly experienced explorer
who learned many local native languages and was respected enough throughout
Carolina’s Indian country that when the Westo desired to make peace in 1674
they sought Woodward out personally. He
then not only visited the town of the Westo, but probably learned a good bit of
their language. The men in the Commons of
Carolina were of the same class as those in the House of Burgesses of Virginia who
mangled Riquehronnon into Rechahecrian.
As I said previously, very thin ground indeed.
Crane’s error multiplies exponentially as he not only
equates the Erie with the Rickahockan, a fact upon which nearly everyone now
agrees, but continues with his narrative of the Commons’ communication saying
that they noted that, “...the Mohawks are a numerous, warlike nation of
Indians, and strictly allied to the Westos” (modern spelling). And still maintains that the Westo were the
same as the Rickahockan who were the Erie.
As if the Erie would be “strictly allied” to one of the Five Nations who
had destroyed their confederacy and driven its tribes from their homes in the
Opper Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region.
This is a problem with the Rickahockan-Westo identification
that Swanton pointed out long ago in his article “Identity of the Westo” for American Anthropologist (Vol. 21, No. 2,
1919).
The statement about the Mohawk being ‘strictly allied’ to
the Westo alone should be enough to discredit the equation of the Westo to the Rechahecrian-Rickohackan-Erie
entirely, as much as if the idea were shot in the head, decapitated,
dismembered, and buried in a grave after its body had been burned and salt
poured over its bones so that it can never rise again.
Early authorities on the northern
origin and migrations of the Cherokee
John Ettwein (1788), bishop of all Moravians in North
America, states that the original home of the Cherokee was the Upper Ohio
River, and gives the year that the last of them were driven out of there as
around 1700*. He also said that the
Lenape called the west country “Alligewinengk” and the Ohio River “Alligewi
Sipu”, or ‘river of the Alligewi’.
*In the late 1680s or early 1690s, the Cherokee made an
effort to reestablish (or establish) themselves in the Upper Ohio Valley, their
chief settlement being the town of Allegheny at the confluence of the Kiskiminetas
and Allegheny Rivers (now Schenley, Pennsylvania). This provoked the Iroquois into granting some
of their subject tribes lands in western Pennsylvania which had previously been
prohibited to them. The first of these
to make that move was the Lenape, who moved into the designated area in the
year 1698 and proceeded with a campaign to drive out the Cherokee that
concluded in 1708.
George Henry Loskiel (1794), presiding bishop of the
northern province of the Moravian Brethren, states that the Cherokee language
is a mix of Iroquois, Huron, Shawnee, and other northern Native American
languages. All of these languages,
particularly in combination, strongly indicate a northern origin for the
Cherokee.
John Heckwelder (1819), Moravian missionary to the Indians
of western Pennsylvania, relates the Lenape legends about the Talligewi, about
they were driven out of the north by the Lenape in alliance with the Iroquois
(whom he calls the ‘Mengwe’ in his account).
Ethnologist Cyrus Thomas later equated these Talligewi with the
Cherokee, and he traced their route from the Upper Ohio River to the Little
Tennessee River through the Great Kanawha Valley.
The Great Kanawha Valley is composed of three sections: its
lowest part, which converges with the Ohio River, is the Kanawha River Valley;
above that is the New River Gorge; the uppermost part is the New River Valley.
John Haywood (1823), “the father of Tennessee history”, is
best known for The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee and The
Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee, both published in 1823. For the first of these, Haywood did in-depth
interviews with a number of Cherokee elders and leaders, including Charles
Hicks, then Assistant Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and in his day the
foremost historian of the Cherokee.
Based on their
information, Haywood ascribes a northern origin for the Cherokee, and that from
there they had settled on the Appamattox River in Virginia. This river, a tributary of the James River,
converges with the latter just above the Falls of the James at Richmond.
He goes on to
recount that because of trouble with the English colonists, they removed from
that location west to the New River Valley and the headwaters of the Holston
River. However, due to the “enmity of
northern Indians”, according to him, the Cherokee were compelled to move
further west, to the Little Tennessee Valley, some time before 1690.
Expanding on what
Loskiel indicated about the multi-ethnic composite nature of the Cherokee, which
he reitarates, Haywood names the last people to join them as the “Ketawauga”,
giving their former home as the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina, which,
if accurate (hint: it’s not), would make them one of the Cusabo tribes.
Archaeologist David
Brinton (1885) was the first authority of note to equate the Cherokee with the
Talligewi of Lenape oral tradition and the Talega of the Walum Olam.
Archaeologist Cyrus
Thomas (1890) supported Brinton’s hypothesis and traced their emigration from
the Upper Ohio Valley as the Talligewi to the Appalachian Summit region through
the Great Kanahwa Valley.
Ethnologist James
Mooney (1900) provides the most lengthy
analysis of the Walum Olam of all, reaffirming the Talligewi of the Walum Olam
were the Cherokee, including information from Wyandot legends that seem (from
Mooney’s relation of the accounts) to specifically name the Cherokee as the
enemy against whom they were allied with the Lenape. It can be found in the section “Historical
Sketch of the Cherokee” in his Myths of the Cherokee.
John R. Swanton and
Roland B. Dixon (1914) accept the findings of the above sources in their
article for American Anthropologist, “Primitive American History”.
Cherokee historian
Emmet Starr (1922) ascribes an ultimately Mexican origin for the Cherokee, as
he does for the Muskogee, but ascribes to them a northern home in the Great
Lakes area as their first stop in the later United States. Starr goes on to recount how the Cherokee
were expelled from the north to the southern Appalachian Mountains by the
Iroquois.
Comments
The “Ketwauga” of Haywood are not, in fact, Cusabo from the
area of Charlestown. The word derives
from the Shawnee and Lenape name for the Cherokee, Katowagi.
These various reports indicate that the proto-Cherokee are
the real identity of the Riquehronnon-Richahecrian-Rickahockan given their near
identical reported migrations, being a composite people made up up northern
refugees from the Erie, the Huron, and the Chonnonton, perhaps others, plus
Shawnee and Powhatan, and maybe Nahyssan and Manahoac. Not to mention the remnant Muskogean and
Siouan groups living in the Applachian Summit and Ridge and Valley regions
absorbed by the Cherokee once they had settled.
If the New River Valley was indeed one of the locations at
which the Rickahockan/Cherokee stopped after leaving the settlement above the
Falls of the James, then the abandoned settlement on the south side of New
River that the party of Batt and Fallam found could have been theirs.
The “northern Indians” referenced by Haywood whose enmity
caused the Cherokee to remove from the New River Valley may have been the
Iroquois. But given the time frame of
the abandoned settlement seen by Batts and Fallam on the south side of New
River may indicate that the actual cause may have been the murder of their
diplomatic delegation the previous year by the Occaneechi.
Again, if the New River Valley was one of the stops of the
migration of the proto-Cherokee, the “great company of Indians” who were
“numerous and warlike” may have been they, though New River Valley borders on
the edge of the Yuchi homeland, the upper Holston Valley, which, of course,
Haywood indicated they had settled at about the same time.
Early maps showing the proto-Cherokee
With two exceptions, these are all from Franquelin. His “Carte de La Louisiane” in 1682 created to
accompany La Salle’s account of his exploration of the Ohio River shows three
towns on what can only be the Upper Tennessee River: ‘Tehalaka’, ‘Cacouqui’, and ‘Tallgui’, going
upriver.
His 1684 version of that map gives ‘Tchalaka’, ‘Cattougi’,
and ‘Taligui’. His map of “Amerique
Septentrion” in 1685 gives ‘Tchalake’, ‘Talighi’, and ‘Kattoughi’, as does his
version of the same in 1686.
His “Carte de l’Amerique Septentrion” of 1788 gives ‘Tchalake’,
‘Talighi’, and ‘Cattoughi’ again, while his “Carte de l’Amerique Septentrionale
contenant Les Pays de Canada ou Nouvelle France, La Louisiane, La Floride,
Virginie, Nouvelle Suede, Nouvelle Yorc, Nouvelle Angleterre, Acadie, Isle de
Terre-Neuve, & c.” of that same year gives the names as ‘Tchalake’, ‘Tamghi’,
and ‘Cattoughi’.
Franquelin’s map of “La Nouvelle France” in 1699 gives the
three names as ‘Tchalaque’, ‘Talighi’, and ‘Cattoughi’.
His “Carte de la Nouvelle France ou eft compris La Nouvelle
Angleterre, Nouvelle Yorc, Nouvelle Albanie, Nouvelle Suede, La Penislvanie, La
Virginie, La Floride, & c.” in 1708 gives the names of the three towns,
tribes, or groups on the Upper Tennessee River as ‘Tchalaquey’, ‘Talighi’, and ‘Cattoughi’,
and makes it clear with the legend ‘TCHALAQUEY’ spread across the chart under
all three that these are all part of one people. Which also indicates both the leading of the
three groups and what the preferred or dominant name is for the collective
whole.
Minet’s “Carte de La Louisiane” in 1685 only depicts two of
these groups on the Upper Tennessee River, giving their names as ‘Kacatouqui’
and ‘Tchata’.
The De Fer map of “Le Canada our Nouvelle France” in 1705,
the design of which is based on the early Coronelli maps of North America,
places Tchalak, Tatighi, and Katoughi on the Upper Tennessee River.
Derivation of those three names
The name ‘Taligui’ as one of the names of the Cherokee
definitively identifies them as the Talligewi of the Lenape legends. Especially since, according to Mooney, it is
an alternate name the Lenape use for the Cherokee.
The name ‘Cattoughi’ derives from the Shawnee name for the
Cherokee, Katowagi. This, in turn, derives
from the name of the Mohawk for the Huron, Quatoghi. In fact, the British mostly used the name
‘Quatoghi’ for the Huron during the colonial period, and the Americans followed
them throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century.
The name ‘Tchalaka’ is a bit more problematic. Especially in the form ‘Tchalaque’, it
suggests close affinity with the ‘Chalaque’ of Spanish usage borrowed from the
Muskogean informants for people of a different language. One town of the Upper Creek had that
designation. And being an exonym, it
would fit the pattern of the other two.
The universal use of forms of the name using ‘r’ in place of
‘l’ suggests a possible different origin, however, especially in the French
forms Tcheraqui, Cheraqui, Cheraquier, and especially Cheraquois. Samuel de Champlain originally referred to
the Huron as ‘Ochateguin’, but from 1613 to 1633, he called them ‘Charioquois’
in his writings and on maps, with alternate spellings of ‘Charioquet’,
‘Charokay’, and ‘Chariocay’, in the later years of that period gradually
shifting to the names ‘Huron’, ‘Hurons
les bons Iroquois’, ‘Allegonantes’.
The Cherokee as one people on 18th century maps
Maps after the first few years of the 18th century depict
the Cherokee in the traditional Cherokee Country with wide variations of
spelling: Cherakee, Tarachis, Cherecie,
Charakeys, Tcheraqui, Cheraqui, Charokees, Cheraquier, Cheraquis, Cherakis, Cheraquois,
Cherokee Nation, and, finally, Cherokees.
A precursor to many maps of the 18th century was the “Carte
de la Fleuvie Missisipi” by French cartographer Louvigny in 1697. It is a precursor to those later maps because
it is the first to show what Swanton calls the “small tribes” on the Tennessee
River, which on this map is “R des Tasquinampous”.
Going downriver, a ‘V des Togales’ lies on the Upper
Tennessee close to the text town, ‘V des Taly”.
Somewhat further down, at about the point where the Upper Tennessee
becomes the Middle Tennessee, is the town ‘V des Tasquinampous’. On the Lower Tennessee is the ‘V des Cochati’. On the Cumberland River lie ‘Six Villages des
Chauanons’.
These peoples are the Tanase or Tennessee River Yuchi, the
Tali of De Soto and Pardo, the Kaskinampo, the Koasati, and the Shawnee,
respectively.
The first two maps to show the Cherokee as one people rather
than two or three came out in the same year, 1702. Daniel Coxe’s “A Map of Carolana and of the
River Meschababe” that year shows several towns of ‘Cherakee’ on the Upper
Tennessee. In his written account, he
gives the form ‘Cheraquee’. It also
shows towns of the ‘Chaoanons’ on the Middle Ohio and Upper Cumberland
Rivers. On the Middle Tennessee, it
shows the “small tribes” grouped together:
Taly, Cochaly, Kasich, and Tahogale.
The other 1702 map is the “Carte du Canada et du Mississipi”
by Guillaume de l’Isle. This map depicts
numerous towns of ‘Nation des Tarachis’ on the Upper Tennessee. Below that, in close order, are a ‘Village
des Chaouenons’ on the left side of the river, a ‘Village des Caskigi’ and a ‘Village
des Caskinampo’ on opposite ends of an island, a ‘Village des Tali’ on another
island, a ‘Village des Taogoria’ on the left side of the river, then some
distance down a ‘Village des Chicachas’.
This last does not represent all the Chickasaw; to the southwest De
l’Isle depicts the the main body of the ‘Nation des Chicachas’.
The map also shows ‘les Tionontatecaga’ who inhabited
Guyandotte Valley, ‘les Calicuas’ (probably the Monyton who inhabited Kanahwa
Valley), and north of them “’es Oniasontke’.
Strangely, De l’Isle leaves out the Cherokee entirely on all his later
maps and instead shows five towns of ‘Chaouenons’
(as opposed to just one) on the Upper Tennessee rather than just one. That is especially odd since his maps
continue to depict all these other nations and tribes as this map does.
The spread of the Cherokee, on maps
Viewing the colonial maps of the 18th century in successive
order, and taking into account that many of them of repeat past and sometimes
badly outdated information, you can watch the spread of the Cherokee from their
mountain home further into Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, into
northwestern South Carolina, and into a surprising section of North Georgia.
This last could only have come after the removal of the
Lower Creek towns to the Chattahoochee River upon the outbreak of the Yamasee
War (1715-1717). Especially galling to
the Upper Creek, particularly the Abheika and the Coosa, was the Cherokee
occupation of Coosawattee, the former site of Coosa when it was the paramount
chiefdome.
The Mitchell map of 1755 contains the legend “Deserted
Cherokee Settlements” across the upper Chattahoochee and Oconee Rivers and the
entire Broad River of Georgia, which it names ‘Cherakeehaw or Broad
River’. The D’Anville map of that year
names it the ‘Cherakishas ou Broad River’.
Even as late as 1764 and 1766, John Stuart’s maps call it the ‘Cherakee
Hatchee or Broad River’.
As I just mentioned, the Mitchell map demonstrates that by
the time it was drafted, the Cherokee had pulled back significantly from their incursion into North Georgia. This could
either mean that the Battle of Taliwa in 1755 was less successful than stories
of the Cherokee make it out to be or that the territory was ceded back as part
of the peace between the Cherokee and the Creek negotiated by the British that
year.
The year 1755 also saw the first cartographical use of the
terms ‘Upper Cherokees’, Middle Cherokees’, and ‘Lower Cherokees’ for the
nation’s three traditional divisions (Mitchell). The French versions, shown on Vaugondy’s map
of that year, were ‘Haut Cherakees’, ‘Cherakees de Milieu’, and ‘Bas Cherakees’.
The first to depict the three divisions, though without
names, was the highly informational Barnwell map of 1721. Though he does not name the three divisions,
Barnwell provides valuable information about the Cherokee population of the
time. The largest division in numbers
was the Middle Cherokee, with 30 towns and a population of 5900, 2500 of whom
were warriors. The next in size were the
Upper Cherokee, with 19 towns and a population of 3100, 900 of whom were
warriors. Last were the Lower Cherokee,
with 11 towns and a populaton of 2100, 600 of whom were warriors.
On Crisp’s map of 1711, the ‘Cherecie’ had 3000 warriors,
and a ten-year jump of a thousand warriors is quite an increase. Sadly, Barnwell’s figures would be halved by
the smallpox epidemic that swept throughout the Southeast in 1738.
Summary and conclusions
At the time of the Spanish entradas of the 16th century, the
Appalachian Summit area of East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and
Southwestern Virginia—the traditional “Cherokee Country”—was not occupied
by the Cherokee but by the Yuchi. We know this from Hudson’s analyses of
the routes of De Soto and Pardo and from archaeology.
The fact that the Chichimeco were reported in Spanish sources as raiding Apalachee and Timucua between 1618 and 1624 should be enough in itself to demolish the pretence that the Westo were Erie. But there’s far more.
The calculations of the paths of De Soto’s and Pardo’s
entradas through East Tennessee and identification of the location of the towns
therein by Charles Hudson and his team rule out occupation by the Cherokee at
the time of the Spanish entradas in the 16th century. Furthermore, the archaeology of the Late
Pisgah Phase sites ties their inhabitants of the Middle Cumberland during the
Thruston Phase. The same follows for the
towns of the Carolina Piedmont and the eastern section of the Appalachian
Summit.
The accounts of Pardo being warned of an ambush while he and
his party were at Satapo do not give the names Chisca and either Uchi or Huchi
in the same list. Instead, three
versions of the same list use one of those three in place of the other two.
The analysis of the several waves of the Yuchi diaspora from
their Appalachian homeland demonstrates that while these groups all shared a
common language isolate and material culture, they were not politically
homogenous, at least not until the late 18th or early 19th century.
The accounts, primarily written reports of the officer in
charge of the Spanish expedition to curtail the activities of the Chichimeco
show no indication that the Chisca retrieved from the Choctawhatchee River to
talk to the prisoners at Apalachicola talked through interpreters or by use of
signs. Therefore, the only conclusion
can be that both parties spoke an identical language recognized but not known
by other natives. That is the very
definition of a language isolate, such as Yuchi.
That the Chisca were Yuchi is demonstrated by the inclusion
of both Chiske Taloofa and the Choctawhatchee Euchees in the census of 1761,
the Choctawhatchee River being the former home of those in Chisca Talosa who
moved to the Chattahoochee River by 1757.
The fact that the Chisca were Yuchi retrieved from their
home 150 miles away to talk to the Chichimeco prisoners at Apalachicola
strongly indicates that only they could speak the same language. This can only mean that the Chichimeco, known
to the English as Westo, were themselves Yuchi, which precludes their being
refugee Erie.
Furthermore, while the timing of the Richahecrian arrival at
the Falls of the James does not rule out the Westo being they, the location of
the Rickahockan, universally recognized as the same group, west of the
Appalachian Mountains in or in the vicinity of the New River Valley in 1670
does. Lederer informs us of this, and
numerous maps, most connected to his accounts but others not, all places them
at that location.
Since the Westo-Chichimeco are known to have been by that
time at on, or in the vicinity of, the Savannah River (Lederer himself locates
the ‘Oustack’ in the same general vicinity), to maintain that the Westo are the
Rickohockan is absurd.
The statement of the Carolina assembly 1693 that the Westo were “strictly allied” to the Mohawk rules out the idea that the Westo were Erie.
The statement of the Carolina assembly 1693 that the Westo were “strictly allied” to the Mohawk rules out the idea that the Westo were Erie.
The only possible conclusion given the evidence cited herein
is that the real identity of the Richahecrian-Rickahockan Erie-Huron-Chonnonton
refugees is that they were proto-Cherokee.
There is no other alternative that makes any sense, and substantial
indication that is the case. Not beyond
a shadow of doubt, perhaps, but definitely beyond any reasonable doubt.
The Westo were not Erie, they were Yuchi.
The Chisca were also Yuchi.
The Richahecrian-Rickahockan were not Westo, they were
proto-Cherokee.
SOURCES
In addition to the following written sources, I have studied
nearly seven hundred period maps of the regions in question and viewed
countless websites covering the material.
I have also made liberal (but cautious) use of Wikipedia and of Google
Maps.
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2 comments:
The Ocmulgee River and the Flint River do not form a confluence. The Ocmulgee and Oconee form a confluence which becomes the Altamaha River which drains into the Atlantic. The Chattahoochee and the Flint form a confluence which become the Apalachicola River which drains into Gulf.
Thanks. Missed that one when I was proofing.
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