We have to go to South Carolina to relieve the Indian itch that has kept me scratching so long. I am inexplicably drawn to Easley, as though it were a magnet uniquely and powerfully polarized with me. When I went there to check it out one time, I found my personal magnetic pole was in the parking lot of the Baptist Medical Center there. As soon as I study Logan's History, I'm going to take another run at finding out more about Easley's history. My sense is that it was a place of big suffering a long time ago.The junction of the Tugaloo and Keowee rivers is at Seneca, a site that always made my skin crawl when I passed it. It is significant as a memorial to the Iroquoian military hegemony that extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico in the 17th Century. This hegemony was broken by the allied Muskhogeans around the turn of the 18th Century, to the chagrin of the Iroquois and their colonial vassals, the Cherokees, only after it had destroyed the Eastern Siouans represented during Spanish colonial times in the area by the Chicoria Nation, as it was know to the Spaniards in the Carolinas.
The Seneca, South Carolina, area is a site commemorating the perfidy of the Iroquoian-European alliance that destroyed the Eastern Siouan people. The Iroquoians ultimately officially displaced all the Native Americans of the Southeast (which, in fact, never was completely accomplished, as the many groups now seeking tribal identity and status testify). Indian identity and tribal status is a complex thing, however, that can be very sensitive when you are dealing with poorly documented
demographics, that are not improved by archaeological musings.
The site of Cofachiqui was just below the second major junction with the Santee (Jordan on some old maps) River, according to the Pierre Mortimer map of 1696. According to the William Del'Isle (Guil. Del'Isle) map of 1718, Cofachiqui was the land in the neck between the Savannah (Chaouanos; also De Soto) and Santee rivers, with the major towns on the northeast side of the Santee River in 1718.
Cofachiqui was at the junction of the Saluda and Broad rivers. The site is identified as an old fort at the falls below this junction on the Santee River on the 1775 Mouzon Map. The old fort was known as the Saluda Factory, until it became what we know as Columbia. The disguise of Cofachqui is not complete, however, as the first syllable indicates. Our ancestors had some respect for the Indians, but not enough to stifle their greed. According to Spanish archives, quoted by C.D. Honeycutt and Roy Blalock, Jr., in The Pardo Expeditions (of 1566-1567), the Indians of Cofachiqui (also know as Canos and Canosi) had cattle.
On the Mercator-Hondius Map (1606) Cicola is the site of the center of the kingdom of Chicoria, on the south side of the Santee (Jordanis Flu). This is the map that confused Lederer (confirmed by Ogilvie); on which we see Mobile Bay of the Spring Hill area identified in Latin as a sweet water lake (Lacus aquae dulcis, etc.), confused by Lederer, who was familiar with the Mercator-Hondius Map, with the brackish fresh water he identified as "Ashley Lake." He was doubtless told by the natives that is was the "Ashley Hatchee," or "Ashley Hoochee," or some such thing, out of deference to their then mentors the British (West Country) pirates, who were the sources of information for the maps of the Lords Proprietors.
Dating of artifacts is the key to good archaeology. This is usually done by stratigraphy that is related to known geophysical phenomena, such as floods, volcanos, etc., or physical chemistry or nuclear techniques. Obviously a better way is to find an unquestioned dated graphic human artifact. Such a dated artifact exists relating to the Chicoran people, through their authenticated synonyms. It is a map reproduced by W. Stitt Robinson, in his The Southern Colonial Frontier, without comment other than the legend:
"Map of Indian tribes painted on a deerskin. A copy of a map painted on a deerskin by an Indian cacique and presented to Francis Nicholson as governor of South Carolina in 1725. The map sketches the trade routes from South Carolina and Virginia to the Catawba (Nasaw(Robinson's parentheses)) with connecting trails to other tribes. The left portion of the map includes the Indian's drawing of the streets of Charles Town."The map is easily oriented, since Williamsburg, Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina, are obviously and necessarily on the eastern edge. This map is in the Public Records Office in London. It is identified as Document C O 700/NAC/GGN64.
This precious document has been carefully ignored by the American ethnographic community. The map shows the Occannnechee Trail from Virginia to the Catawbas (not identified, as such). Then due east of the Catawbas are the "Succa" (Shakor of Sugau; or related other synonyms). As a small group immediately to the northwest, in what would be the Haw Old Fields, are the "Saxippaha"(Saxapahaw, Chicora synonym), logically, we presume, centered on the Haw River, though no rivers are shown. We are talking here about the early historical, not archaeological, occupants of the Heart of Carolinas.
By the time of the Emanuel Bowen Map (1747) the population center of the Chicoras had migrated to the north side of the Santee, identifiable as "Sugaus" on Bowen's map. In Bowen's time Cicola had become the English trading post at the falls of the Santee, known to Bowen as "Congaree an English Fact.(ory)", i.e. trading post. Congaree may have in its name paid some respect to descendants of Spanish African slaves of "Medano, Hispanis."(Mercator-Hondius) , who may have been sympathetic with British "factors" and influential in getting the English established there. Garcilaso de la Vega says that the female leader of the people of Cofachiqui was reported to have cohabited with a slave of the De Soto expedition, who escaped and eluded capture.
European trading factors who settled in America were frequently Welsh, and the Welsh are traditionally disposed to involvements with Blacks, Jews and Indians, anciently as pirates and legitimate Bristol merchants. Was there a difference in the early years of America's settlement? If so the records don't show it. The West Countrymen, Scots, and the Irish, who were the early factors, put ashore to open the way for trade, were notorious for becoming the leading Indian chiefs in dealings between the Indians and Europeans. Men with names like Adair, Hughes, Nairne, McGillivray, McIntosh, Lowery, Powell, Weatherford, quickly became the Indian nobility, and the list goes on as far as the reader may be inclined to follow.
As the descendants of the most powerful of the people's of the Chicoran nation, the Sugarees, or Sugaus, were driven northward up the Santee-Peedee neck, ultimately to the Sugau and Sugar creeks area of North Carolina by European settlers in South Carolina's Welsh Tract of the PeeDee-Yadkin Valley. This put them in the present Mecklenburg-Charlotte area. As political and economic refugees they were supported by the Catawbas (Katteras), who encouraged their settlement north of themselves, as a buffer between the Catawbas and the Europeans who were by then pouring down the great buffalo road that permitted wagon traffic from Pennsylvania.
In the context of these strategic moves, it is critical to understand the reason for Adair's deletion of the Chicora and all cognates from his History. If you are to understand the dynamic of the destruction of the Coree nation (see Gatschet, page 16, and N.C. Colonial Records), you have to understand this act by Adair that is generally sloughed over, if noticed at all, by historians. You also need to have some concept of the significance of the Huguenots in the history of the Carolinas. The earliest Huguenot activity centered in the Roanoke Vallley, but it is almost a null in the history books, until it reached South Carolina, where it still lacks many clear roots but is accorded respect as an exotic transplant in an English garden.
We pick up the trail of James Robert "Robin" Adair, in records of his dealings with the Gambles of the old "96" area. The Gambles are strongly identified in the Charleston area as Huguenots. They were also well-represented as settlers from Pennsylvania, in the mid-1700's, where they bought buffalo grazing lands from Adair for a dollar an acre. Adair did well on land deals. Best of all, he was dealing in the lands of officially non-existent Indians whose relatives, in league with Huguenots, were displaced from the site of Bath, North Carolina, and must have moved southwestward, following the Occoneechees, Tutelos and Saponis, of history and tradition.
It is interesting that within a radius of less than 20 miles of James Adair's South Carolina homestead there were two Scuffletowns, historical blank places, where Tories assembled and resorted. One was at Robin's Fork, near Laurens. The other was on Turkey Creek to the east, near where it drains into the Saluda River. You have to use the U.S. Coast Survey Map (1865) along with the Mouzon Map (1775) to make this connection. As Indians, it is not surprising that Adair's sons had Tory leanings, and sided with the British against the rebels.
We have tended to lose sight of the reality of the Revolutionary War as an American civil war, as was the Tuscarora War. Jethro Jackson was hired to go and fight the English in the place of my greatx4 paternal grandfather Isham Pate, to avoid the loyalty issue. Loyalty to the English was the undoing of many Indians during the Revolutionary War, individually and collectively, with the lands and the lives of those loyal to the English held hard forfeit. This is the significance of the Barna and David Jernigan hangings, that is a completely lost episode, indeed era, in Wayne County history--the motivation for Dobbs County record burning.
Robin Adair settled as a land speculator in the heart of Chicoria, with his Chicasaw(?) wife, Rebekkah. He settled at the head of Duncan's (also Dunkin, etc) Creek, at a site identified on the Mouzon Map (1775) as "Robin's Fork", which drains into the Enoree River, thence into the Broad-Congaree-Santee. For a fairly detailed discussion of Adairs' land affairs in South Carolina, see quotations from Logan's History by Laura Pulley in David A. Avant's Florida Pioneers (1974, copy in N.C. Archives). As a young man Adair sojourned in Green County, N.C., at his Fairfield plantation, on Contentnea Creek, where he ran a trading post and searched for the Coree Treasure, according to James Creech, in his History of Greene County, North Carolina (1979).
The Pullens of Halifax and Warren County may be a source of information relating to the Haliwa-Saponi situation, which has been muddied, or muddled, by the relatively recent influx of outsider Whites and Blacks with the logging industry, complicated by the social turmoil of the WWII era. Horace Pulley, Sr., (now deceased, of Nashville, N.C.) wrote an unpublished novel based on this, that should be studied and published by someone interested in a contemporary analysis of a socially and economically controversial subject.
I am not able to equate Pullen with the name Pulley. The latter is prominent and ancient in Warren County. It is my opinion that Pullen, and perhaps Pulley, is a corruption of the French name Poulain. Avant quotes Laura Pulley as saying:
"The Old Presbyterian Meeting House (near present Laurens, South Carolina) was Duncan Creek Church, established circa 1763, and the oldest church in Laurens County. The present stone edifice, built in 1842, stands on the site of an earlier log structure...from the earliest minutes of this church we learn that most of the congregation migrated to Laurens County from Pennsylvania. JOHN DUNCAN, ROBERT HANNAH, THOMAS LOGAN, JAMES POLLOCK, ROBERT LONG were all from Pennsylvania (I presume Scots-Irish, with knowledge of antecedents in North and South Carolina; parentheses by AP). The historian, John A. Logan, says in A History of the Upper County of South Carolina (1859), that when Joseph Duncan brought the first settlers to Laurens County, South Carolina, from Pennsylvania in 1752 and they began to erect their cabins on the fertile lands by that stream, they found its valley and hills abounding in buffaloes. Their deep worn trails, leading to favorite licks and ranges, marked the country in every direction. It is established that Joseph Duncan, who gave his name to the creek, lived and was buried in a settlement of Pennsylvania."You have to use the Mouzon Map (1775) to trace Duncan's Creek from Robin's Fork down to the river of the old Enos, historical and ethnological associates of the Chicora cognates, who also gave their name to a stream in the Raleigh area, on down from the Enorree to the Broad where the Saluda is joined at the site of Cofachiqui, chief town of the Chicorias in De Soto's time. See the U.S. Coast Survey Map (1865) to correlate with modern maps.
According to Paul Heinegg, in Free African Americans Of North Carolina And Virginia, published by Clearfield, Logans fought on both sides in the battle at King's Mountain. Knowing what I know about Indian slavery in North Carolina, I can't read the above title with a straight face. I can, however, believe the Logans were there; as I believe Pates were on both sides in the battle at Nooherooka in the Tuscorora War. We're talking about complicated matters, that were well understood by the participants, who frequently were conflicted in their interests.
It was well understood by the settlers of the Cowpens area that the buffalo was critical and key to the survival of the Siouan peoples of the Piedmont of North and South Carolina. It is not just a coincidence that the last buffalo herd east of the Mississippi was led to Pennsylvania by an old bull named Logan. Nor is it a coincidence that this herd was ruthlessly wiped out on the great buffalo road, the Shenandoah Trail that led from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas, that was the grand highway of organized displacement of the Siouan peoples of the Carolinas by wagon loads of "Germans" and "Scotch-Irish".
I believe that Capt. Polk of Sugar Creek was a knowing force in the extermination of the buffalo, and its memory, in the Southeast, as he participated in development of the great American cattle industry that began in America's Southeastern Piedmont of the Carolinas. He was a contemporary of men like Daniel Boone and Christopher Gist (ancestor of Sequoyah?), who made it their business to rid the land of the bufffalo from the Haw River to the Missisippi. Greed goaded it. Fear fueled it. Vanity sustained it.
Christopher Gist was one of the frontiersmen who made the "Heart of Carolina" hospitable to the peace-loving Moravians and Quakers. He was one of the Welsh Baptists and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who suffered no religious qualms about clearing the Promised Land of the Canaanites. They followed many a twisting trail with Arthur Dobbs' Ohio Company, before they crossed the Roanoke River on the Skipwith Ferry at Old Occoneechee, near Buffalo Springs (see Map. No. 6, Va. collection, and others), to clear Wachovia of its native and mixed-blood inhabitants. In such a war, economic or military, nothing happens until somebody moves some materiel.
A lot of preparatory planning and work went into the displacement of the natives and unauthorized squatters, who knew the value of neighborliness, when the time came to make a major developmental move in the Granville Grant. The first Pates came to America with the Skipwiths in the mid-1600's. Some of them got lost in the Southside of Virginia and the Saponi country of Warren County, as Peetes (pronounced pay-ets), but they were good ferrymen. A historical Pate ran the ferry at Yorktown during the Revolutionary War. His house is still there. I have a picture of it. They moved the movers and the shakers on their way southwestward; and I'm not talking about any pietist sect.
Virginians made powerful moves to get the Wachovia trade. The geography was all stacked against them. Too many rivers to cross, between old Wachaw and Williamsburg, or even to the cowpens at Petersburg. The Yadkin-Peedee had the old buffalo roads, with a minimum of major crossings, until the big barges were built. Anybody will tell you; with real estate, the three most important things are location, location and location. The Moravians ultimately built Myrtle Beach. They had vision.
Gist was a principal conspirator in negotiations with the Iroquois for the acquisition of all lands not claimed by the Cherokee in the Carolinas in the mid-1700's. This led to the French and Indian War, and ultimately to the official removal of Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi. The immediate purpose, however, was to provide reliably grateful German and Scotch Irish settlers for the Carteret lands of the immense Granville Grant, which had for years been unprofitably held as a gift from the King, and which was officially unsettled, at the time. Of this Henderson says, Vol. I, p. 173:
"In 1752, while still in the employ of the Ohio Company, Gist made one of the first English settlements west of the Alleghenies, in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania. It was at the point of intersection of two noted war and hunting routes, one of them being the Catawba Trail, leading southward into the Carolinas. So far as it possessed the characteristics of a 'settlement' it justified the western Indians in the suspicion that the purpose of this advance by the English was not entirely for trade...."Pres. James Polk got from his Sugar Creek ancestors the orientation and value set that enabled him to coolly wreak political and military havoc with Indians from the Eastern Piedmont all the way down into Mexico. He was Jacksonian in bringing Horse-Shoe-Bend-like destinies to Indians where ever they were found. The Indian was an obstruction to a national manifest destiny that was bought into by Polk without qualm or reservation. Under Polk, the good Indian was a dead Indian. This was nothing but a continuation of the policies of Lord Howe, The Hair Buyer, of Revolutionary days, that prompted Francis Marion to write in 1761:
"We proceeded, by Colonel Grant's orders, to burn the Indians' cabins. Some of the men seemed to enjoy this cruel work, laughing heartily at the flames, but to me it appeared a shocking sight. Poor creatures, thought I, we surely need not grudge you such miserable habitations. But when we came, according to orders, to cut down the fields of corn, I could scarcely refrain from tears. Who, without grief, could see the stately stalks with broad green leaves and tasseled shocks, the staff of life, sink under our swords with all their precious load, to wither and rot untasted in their mourning fields."I saw everywhere around the footsteps of the little Indian children, where they had lately played under the shade of their rustling corn. When we are gone, thought I, they will return, and peeping through the weeds with tearful eyes, will mark the ghastly ruin where they had so often played.
"'Who did this,' they will ask their mothers, and the reply will be, 'The white people did it,--the Christians did it!'
"Thus, for cursed mammon's sake, the followers of Christ have sowed the selfish tares of hate in the bosoms of even Pagan children."
Note that to the east of the "Kitabas", on the Del'Isle Map (1718), is the "Grande Savane", the buffalo pastures of the Eastern Sioux, northeast of the hills of Cofachiqui. This land was irresistible to our cattle herding ancestors, so lovingly studied and described by Dr. Jim Peacock, DVM, and former mayor of Claremont, Florida. The old cow herders were typified by the likes of Alexander Pate, who, John Bennet Pate said "followed the best grazing lands." Alexander, at the age of seventy, with double inguinal hernias, used to ride at breakneck speed, yelling at the top of his voice out of sheer exuberance.
In such an environment I've felt the same exuberant impulse. Pretty little Indian women enhanced the exuberance, and the need to "show off.". The Chicora Indian land was malignantly described by John Lederer, who was smart enough to see a future for it, that culminated at Cowpens, South Carolina, with cattle that replaced the buffalo. We need a good government-sanctioned study of the cattle industry that began at Cowpens, to understand better where we're coming from, as a bunch of cowboys who lost their ponies in the traffic jams. It'll be a cold day in a hot place, before that happens, however.
The Native American can anticipate a tightening of government largess, particularly under the Republicans. Loch Faircloth won't even admit he is a Coharee; even though he calls his big agricultural operations Coharie Farms, and Faircloth is a recognized Coharie name. Loch is not above accepting a government subsidy for his pigs, however. It is my opinion that John Lederer was significant in the development of the Sand Hills cattle industry, from some comfortable site far from it, maybe as far away as Germany.
Researching the origins of the Ritter or Autrey family might be a good place for starting such a study. Speculation along these lines will prove little from my vantage point. Tom Pate, of Wilburton, Oklahoma, can provide more insights into this than I can, if he can "foller the dollar" that brought cattle to Oklahoma, followed, as surely as day follows night, by the railroads and the buffalo hunters. You can't imagine my contempt for H. Trawick Ward regarding the matter of the buffalo in the Carolinas, and his study of it that concluded the buffalo was unimportant to the Indians of North Carolina.
The time line is the key. The buffaloes quickly became unimportant, as they were systematically exterminated. If you study Merriwether Lewis' discussion of the Indian trade, you have to conclude that the Native American was co-author of his own undoing. The more progressive Indians neatly fitted themselves into the White Man's plan. The story of Will Rogers' ancestors would provide volumes in this context. My father married into the Rogers family, which was anciently pious, smart, tough, and, above all, avaricious.
America is moving into a new age. We are being brought into a "New World Order," in which kindness and generosity will be the new virtues. Certainly, we have about exhausted the moral content of a world order characterized by ruthless competition. Knowledge and information will be the wealth under the new world order. If this new order works, ignorance will be fixed, where it can be (that's a double entendre). And stupidity will be given good strong guidance, if we can find the intelligence to administer it. Somehow this doesn't really seem new.
The Native American Heritage Association of Franklin County, established by Sheila "Firehair" Spencer Stover is an organization with a conservative orientation that will give those who identify themselves as Indian a new-old piety, smartness, toughness and generosity. It will meet a real need for many to mesh their inner person with the world they find around them, and the books that purport to describe it, in the process of its development, which is the ultimate expression of biological development. The children deserve a world that makes sense, in which they can feel good about themselves and those from whom they descend.
Life is hard. No matter who you are, life is going to give you some knocks--and some lumps--or you're not standing close enough to it to operate it. I'm blessed that my people gave good things to those around them, out of good hearts and clear consciences, in the hardest of times, the way Sheila Stover does. We all need to know that we will be judged for what we give to the world. I have given what I could. There is much for which I can be brought to account, but I don't feel badly about my historical musings.
My seeking of the Native American was in preconceptions about who, or what, I was to find. Now I know. We are all different. We are all the same. Color and circumstances may vary; we are all the same. My grandfather told me. I was an old man before I understood. "The languages vary; the meaning's the same. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you."
"Walk the walk, and talk the talk, of Christian gentlefolk," my grandfather used to say. The unscrupulous used it against the Native American--to their own condemnation. What we say matters little, if the things we do make it lies. Economics inspires it. Religion justifies it. We have a problem grasping the social forces that clear lands for development.
The campaigns of Waddell, Montgomery, Forbes, and Grant have to be seen as the hammers that welded any Siouans who didn't adhere to the Catawbas into the originally Iroquoian Cherokee league, on an anvil that was the entire continent--with a fire that is not dead yet. I recently ordered Logan's History of the Upper Country of South Carolina, and Indian Communities on the North Carolina Piedmont, A.D. 1000 to 1700, by Ward and Davis. They will, doubtlessly, give me more grist for my story mill.
The historical and cultural obliteration of the Coree Nation was almost surgical, in it's removal of an offensively flourishing Native tumor from the European North Carolina body economic. The officially promulgated historical records suggest that only a handful of people were oppressed-or annihilated-by it. Evidences suggest that a true Nation, small but proud, possessed of a unique heritage is still oppressed by it.
What, or who, was the Coree Nation? The record is clear, if officially ignored. By the time of the Palatine settlement, lead by the Baron De Graffenried, it was a "racially mixed" group of people, who were scattered as independent farmers in deep woods clearings from Winyaw Bay to the Bay (or Bear) River--where claim to their homes was officially denied them by land policies made in England.
The Coree control of the Albemarle-Tidewater had been first broken by the Algonquian Powhatan Confederation (an odd political creature, with ties to Muskhogean Mexico), followed almost immediately by a Tuscaroran takeover by the Iroquois Confederation, which was already a tool of European economic interests. The Tuscarora broke the Coree Nation into scattered bands, and pitted these bands against each other, in conflicts that continue today. Many of the Tuscarora saw the injustice, and sided with the Siouan tribes against it, in what became a Tuscaroran civil war.
The destruction of the Coree was physical and cultural, but not complete. The reasons for the conflicts are long forgotten here, just as they are in Ireland. Ulster became a Scotch-Irish Protestant enclave, for the same reasons the West Countrymen became the aristocrats of Native American society, in all the Indian nations. The strategies and tactics used by the Europeans in their conflicts in the struggle against the Native American are interesting, and not entirely ruthless, when not too violently or irrationally resisted, as any "reasonable" Irishman can tell you.
Family traditions say that Pates were always friendly with the Indians. I believe that. I also know that early Pates were active in the development of Carolina Beach, identified by James Sprunt as part of the homeland of the Cape Fear Corees. And that's just part of the story. The Chicoras, Coharies, or Corees, and the Lumbees, et al, are really the same people, in spite of differences and divisions among them.
So, Jordan, as you can see, the above will not go down well with many of your site visitors. If Lee, and others with professional credentials can tell the story of the Chicorias (known as Chicolas to Johannes Blaeu, the great 17th century cartographer) I'll have done what I hoped to do.