31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 10/16)

The carolinas

In this century the English began referring to the great land south of the James River as "Carolina". Going south from the James, one had to go 500 miles to encounter another European settlement and that would be the Franciscan mission at Port Royal Sound. Mississippian style villages with council houses or rotundas, plazas and fields of maize were still present throughout that area. Lord Ashley (John Colleton, a Barbadian planter) received a Charter for the Carolinas in 1963, but there was no settlement there until 1670, when Charleston was founded. Even then little was accomplished until the Huguenots came in 1680. Those French formed, eventually, the aristocratic South Carolina while North Carolina was settled by poor whites moving in from Virginia. The two Carolinas were not separated in this 17th century, however.

The aborigines surrounding Charleston already had guns, which they had obtained from the Spaniards and even from some Virginia traders. Some tribes, such as the Westos, were well armed, using more European weapons than bows and arrows and they terrified their less well-armed neighbors at the time. They lived on the Savannah or Westo River near present day Augusta, in part of the kingdom of the Cofitachique. Whether there was any connection between the two tribes in uncertain. The Westos have now become extinct, apparently having been destroyed by the Shawnees (Savannahs) who subsequently migrated westward again into Alabama, then northward into Kentucky and the Ohio country and eventually to Oklahoma. Among a few others, the pack trains of Abraham Wood, working out of Charleston, helped to supply the Westos with guns. He knew a great deal about the southern Indians, most of which were tribes that were remnants of the Cusabo chiefdom. None were strong enough to protect themselves and they looked to the English, the Spaniards or the Westos for protection. But Woodward felt that the Westos depended too much on Virginia and, changing his alliances, he and other Carolinians resolved to exterminate the Westos and install the Shawnees in their stead. (Ref. 267 )

A group of Indian fighters called the "Goose Creek men" then emerged and assumed more power in the colony. Most of them were originally from Barbados, and at the end of the century one of them, James Moore, even became governor. These men soon brought most of the southern aborigines into their commercial orbit, at the expense of Spain, Virginia and later France. The Creeks, Shawnees (Savannahs), Cherokees and Yamasees usually could get cheaper guns, hardware and clothing from Carolinians than from anyone else. Incited by the Goose Creek men, the natives overran Spanish missions, burned chapels and sometimes the padres and carried off booty. First to fall were the Guale missions and some of those in Timucua. Timucuan, Guale and Yamasee Indians lived in those missions which in 1670 had stretched north from St. Augustine to the Savannah River. Yamasees from both the coastal missions and the Chattahoochee, for protection, began moving in large numbers closer to Charleston. Then the Goose Creek men began to use the Yamasees to demolish missions in Guale and Timucua. The booty included silver plate, ornaments, peltry, and especially slaves, all of which the Carolinians exchanged for guns, powder, hardware and textiles. Af ter white contact, the Indians relied less on agriculture and hunted more, with young ones ranging hundreds of miles, some even crossing the Mississippi River and covering more than 1,000 miles before returning home. (Ref. 267 )