Their discontent reached its peak one wild and stormy night as the wind howled and the ocean raged. Both Fischer and his wife gave voice to their anger, until their fury was as great as that of the storm blowing outside.
Finally, in a fit of anger, Fischer’s wife gathered her precious gold and jewels and rushed out into the storm to hide them. A short time later, she came back to the cottage smug and defiant, unaware that her husband was waiting with their largest, sharpest butcher knife. Moments later, she was dead, her blood seeping into the wooden floor of the cottage.
This was long before the days of sophisticated forensics. No one was able to dispute Fischer’s insistent—though highly questionable—claim that his wife had committed suicide. It was only years later that the old light keeper told the truth. In a deathbed confession, he described how he had waited for his wife to reenter the cottage that stormy night and plunged the butcher knife into her breast.
Through the years, the grave of Fischer’s wife was tended by a succession of light keepers. These men grew used to the lingering presence pervading the Cape Romain Light. On calm nights, when there was no wind to howl down the lighthouse’s 195 steps, a keeper going about his duties in the lantern room might chance to hear footsteps near the head of the stairs. But opening the trapdoor and shining a lantern down the spiral steps always revealed the same thing: nothing.
August Fredrich Wichmann, the keeper of the Cape Romain Light for twenty-one years during the early 1900s, had this experience many times. His son, who was born at the lighthouse, believes the mysterious footsteps belong to Fischer’s wife, whose murder was never answered for and whose grave still lies in the place she wished to leave. He vividly recalls seeing the old bloodstains on the floor of the keeper’s cottage, a sight he witnessed as a child.
Unable to rest peacefully near the scene of her violent, unjust, and unavenged death, the spirit of the light keeper’s wife is a permanent presence in the darkened octagon of the Cape Romain Light.
Spirits of the Chicoras
_____________________Igmu Tanka Sutanaji is commonly known as Gene Martin, chief of the Chicora Indians of South Carolina. Chief Martin does not believe in ghosts. However, he does believe in spirits. In fact, the wisdom of the ancient Chicora spirits has been instrumental in guiding him in reestablishing the Chicoras as a tribe more than two centuries after their closely knit society was torn apart.
How the ancient Chicora tribe came to grief is a story of trust and betrayal. But due to the intervention of the spirits and the perseverance of Chief Martin, the Chicoras are flourishing as a tribe again.
Long before Europeans arrived, Indians roamed the low country. Of the seventeen tribes of the eastern Siouan family that lived in coastal South Carolina, six made their home in what is now Georgetown County. These were the Sewees, the Santees, the Sampits (or Sampas), the Winyahs, the Pee Dees, and the Waccamaws. They called their coastal haven Chicora. Their names are still visible in the rivers and the bay they lived along: the North and South Santee, the Pee Dee, the Waccamaw, and the Sampit Rivers and Winyah Bay.
Living in tribes allied to a chief and his council, families relied on fishing, hunting, and farming for their sustenance.
The Chicoras gathered shellfish and caught many kinds of delicious freshwater and saltwater fish, spearing them, shooting them with bow and arrow, or catching them with traps, nets, or bare hands. Fish not cooked and eaten immediately were smoked and stored.
They hunted deer with finely crafted bows and arrows. The bows were made of oak and strung with two-finger-wide thongs of skin cut from the back of a stag. Fired from these powerful bows were arrows tipped with carved and filed bone, stone, or shell. Among the game the Indians sought were wild turkeys and other birds, the smaller fowl being shot with specially crafted miniature arrow tips. Although deer were prolific, the Chicoras often had to follow them all day, since they hunted on foot. Stags were hunted for their meat and hides, but does were cultivated by the Chicoras. Fawns were kept in the village while their mothers were allowed to forage in the forest all day, returning in the evening to suckle their young and be milked by the Indians, who made cheese from the milk. The Chicoras also kept ducks and geese in their villages.
Their gardens yielded potatoes, pumpkins, onions, beans, squash, and herbs. A staple of the Chicoras’ diet, corn (maize) was grown in fields tended by both men and women. They used large conch shells attached to wooden handles for hoes. Guards were posted day and night to protect the precious maturing corn against consumption by wild animals. Every effort was taken to make the corn supply last until the next year’s harvest. Stored free from dampness in great wooden cribs with ventilated floors resting on stilts, it was meted out to the tribe by the chief. Villagers ate their corn parched or pounded it into cornmeal for mush or cornbread. The Chicoras placed great emphasis on the planting and gathering of corn, holding a great festival at planting time as well as at harvesttime. The Indians also gathered wild honey, berries, plums, acorns, and other nuts to supplement their diets.
The Indians of Chicora lived in harmony with the low country for hundreds of years. But the moment European explorers set foot on the shores of their homeland, the Indians’ way of life began to change. Known as fierce fighters in their struggles with other Indian tribes, the Chicoras were friendly and helpful to the Europeans, a well-intentioned attitude that hastened their devastation.
In 1521, Spanish explorer Francisco Gordillo was studying the lower Atlantic coast of North America, his expedition financed by Luis Vasquez de Ayllon, a Spaniard who had come to Hispaniola two decades earlier and grown wealthy in sugar cultivation and gold mining. Although the Spaniards by then controlled the Indies—as they referred to Hispaniola and other nearby Caribbean islands—they remained as interested in exploration as they had been decades earlier when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World.
Driven by a fierce storm to what is now Pawleys Island, Gordillo and his men anchored their two caravels and rowed ashore. The members of a small coastal tribe of Indians came to the ocean’s edge to greet them. Upon contact with the newcomers, the natives rushed away into the forest, but not before the Spaniards captured a man and a woman and took them aboard one of their vessels. After being dressed in European clothing, lavished with gifts, and returned to their tribe, the two Indians assured the others that the strangers were friendly and generous.
The Indians then welcomed the Spaniards to Chicora, treating them as honored guests and giving them the finest fruits of their land: pearls, beautifully tanned animal skins, silver, and food. Some 140 Indians subsequently accepted an invitation to be entertained aboard the anchored caravels. Sadly, the Indians’ intuitive wariness of the strangers had been well founded. According to prior plans, Gordillo and his men weighed anchor. As soon as the Indians were secured, the vessels sailed south for Hispaniola, where the Indians were to be made slaves in the mines and on the sugar plantations.
Ayllon was furious when Gordillo arrived. Although he owned many slaves on Hispaniola, Ayllon had forbidden Gordillo to bring back captives from his explorations. The governor general of the Indies, Diego Columbus, son of Christopher Columbus, was consulted. He and his council declared that the Indians were free people and must be returned to their home.
In the meantime, one of the Indians converted to Christianity and became proficient in the Spanish tongue. Ayllon gave him a European Christian name—Francisco—but chose the surname Chicora, since that was the way the Indians referred to their coastal homeland. This man, Francisco Chicora, journeyed to Spain with Ayllon and so impressed the Spanish king and court with descriptions of Chicora that the king agreed to finance an expedition to start a colony there.
This settlement—the first by Europeans in North America—was begun in 1526. Ayllon brought six ships containing seven dozen horses and an estimated six hundred people, including black slaves, Indians, Spanish women and children, and several Dominican friars. Some of the Indians kidnapped with F
rancisco Chicora served as interpreters. Long used to speaking the dialects of several tribes, they had quickly become fluent in Spanish.
The settlement was planned for a location somewhere between Winyah Bay and the mouth of the Santee River. But sixteenth-century navigation being what it was, the party landed over a hundred miles north of its destination, near the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Here, the largest of the six ships was lost, an early casualty of the treacherous Cape Fear shoals. The remaining ships, which were smaller, easily sailed into the Cape Fear River, where the horses and many of the men went ashore. Finding themselves in the vicinity of their home for the first time in five years, Francisco Chicora and the other Indians wisely took the opportunity to leave their captors.
Realizing he had landed too far north, Ayllon headed south, the five ships sailing along the coast and the soldiers and horses following an Indian trail. Upon reaching their destination in late summer, Ayllon and his party settled just across Winyah Bay from Georgetown, at the mouth of the Waccamaw River. They named their colony San Miguel.
By the fall, many of the colonists succumbed to malaria, depleting the San Miguel colony. Among those who perished was Ayllon, who died on October 18.
Lulled by the semitropical summer and the mild fall, the surviving settlers were not prepared for the icy Atlantic winds that brutalized their settlement that winter. Thoroughly defeated, the colonists exhumed Ayllon’s body and set sail for Hispaniola. Seven men froze to death during the voyage, and Ayllon’s body was swept overboard in heavy seas. Only 150 of the original 600 settlers lived to make landfall on Hispaniola in early 1527.
Although left with a strong sense of distrust and at least one heretofore unknown disease, the Chicoras continued to flourish for a century and a half. It was in the late 1600s and early 1700s that their relationship with the British became their undoing.
In 1665, eight British noblemen known as the Lords Proprietors were granted the coastal region from Virginia to the St. Marys River in southern Georgia. Winyah Bay and the land that is now Georgetown County lay precisely in the center of this grant. Settlers soon began to arrive, and trading for furs and deerskins with the Indians kept them coming.
The Chicoras initially enjoyed the lucrative fur trade and interacted easily with the newcomers. But dissension soon arose. Determined to realize a profit from every aspect of their Crown grants, the Lords Proprietors gave the settlers permission to sell Indians captured in battle. A duty of twenty shillings was placed on every Indian slave exported to the West Indies. When an Indian was to be sold, no one could prove whether he had been taken in battle or simply kidnapped from his tribe. Many Chicoras were sold into slavery in Carolina, other colonies, and the Caribbean islands. The old slave market in Charles Town, later infamous for the tremendous number of African slaves sold there, was built for the Indian slave trade. South Carolina began exporting more Indian slaves than any other colony.
Fear for their families drove many Indians into slavery. One cruel ploy of slave traders was to approach an Indian village, seize a child from a group playing outside the lodge, and cut the child’s arm off or set him or her on fire. When the adults in the village rushed to the child’s rescue, the slave traders threatened that unless selected members of the tribe came with them peacefully, other village children would suffer the same fate.
Contact with English settlers brought new ailments like measles, typhus, and smallpox. In their effort to eradicate certain villages, the Lords Proprietors’ men went so far as to take blankets from Indians prostrated by smallpox and give them as gifts to people in other villages. Soon, the Indians in these villages, too, lay dying.
There were a few notable exceptions to the poor treatment of the Chicoras by European settlers. A prime example was the colony of approximately 180 French Huguenot families that settled in the region of the North and South Santee Rivers. Protestant refugees fleeing the violently enforced Catholicism of their homeland, the Huguenots had immense respect for the Indians and no desire to compromise their freedom. After purchasing, rather than claiming, land from the Santee Indians, the Huguenots lived in harmony and friendship with them. The Santees were considered by some to be warlike, but the Huguenots would never have known it. Indeed, the area soon became known as French Santee.
Between enslavement, battles with settlers, relocation, and disease, over 80 percent of the 1,000,000 Southern Indians died. Entire tribes were eradicated. The Indian census of 1715 revealed that only 57 Sewee Indians were left and that the Winyah Indians had 106 tribe members in their lone remaining village. The census also found that the Santee Indians had only 43 warriors remaining; some of those 43 were killed in a battle with settlers two years later, and others were sold as slaves to the West Indies. The Sampit Indians all but disappeared. The Pee Dees are not mentioned in local records after 1753. It is believed that many of their number may have, for the sake of survival, joined the Catawba tribe of northwestern South Carolina.
Warring between tribes also exacted a toll on the coastal Indians. Many of the tribes were old enemies, and the intercession of settlers often increased this animosity. In 1711 and 1712, Colonel John Barnwell led South Carolina settlers and Winyah and Pee Dee Indians against the Tuscaroras of the Cape Fear River region. In this and other documented cases, the conquering Indians sold members of the defeated tribes into slavery.
The Waccamaws—the most numerous of the Georgetown-area tribes, with six villages and 610 people on Waccamaw Neck—declined sharply in 1720. A great number of their warriors were killed that year in a war in which the Winyahs sided with the settlers against the Waccamaws. Many surviving Waccamaw warriors were sold to the West Indies.
By 1720, the diverse coastal tribes were beginning to lose their separate identities. One of the last recorded activities of the coastal Indians occurred when Chief Eno Jemmy Warrior and a number of his men met with the Catawba tribe in 1743 as the government attempted to relocate coastal Indians northwest. By 1755, the tribes had all but disappeared.
Indians who acquiesced to the rules of the colonial government were considered free. Children of Indian slaves were considered slaves, too. Indians still living on their ancestral lands were forced to either leave the area or become “settlement Indians,” meaning that they were expected to worship in the European Christian manner and work for the settlers, doing their gardening, hunting, and fishing. Many remaining Indians led quiet existences in the swampy areas of their homeland, living peacefully and humbly but not quite blending into the fringes of white society.
Vanished from their ancestral homeland were the Waccamaws, the Pee Dees, the Winyahs, the Sewees, the Santees, and the Sampits—or so it appeared.
The disappearance of the Chicora tribes would be too sad to relate were it not for one fact: the loving spirits of these native people never left. The proud spirits of the Chicoras still flourish, roaming and fishing along the rivers, hunting game in the primeval forests, and reveling in the comforts of their unspoiled villages.
These spirits are only a whisper of wind in the pines—except to those who can see them.
Gene Martin, chief of the Chicora tribe of South Carolina, spoke with me in reference to ghosts. He does not believe in them. He does, however, believe in spirits, for spirits are with him daily. One example is the cougar. Chief Martin’s Indian name, Igmu Tanka Sutanaji, means “Great Cougar Stands Strong.” “The cougar is with me constantly,” Chief Martin said. This cougar was never a living creature. “He has always been a spirit,” according to Chief Martin.
Through their constant presence, their wisdom, and their guidance, the ancient Chicora spirits have been crucial in Chief Martin’s work. Reestablishing the tribe and gaining governmental recognition are goals Chief Martin was heading toward even before he was sure of his destiny. Years ago, the spirits of the Chicoras began to bring about his work for the tribe.
“From childhood to the present day,” said Chief Martin, “I have, in my sleep, spoken a language which no one
has ever understood. I have been asked by my wife, ‘What kind of language are you speaking?’ This is when the chief would come and visit me and we would be speaking in the native language. The chief was a living person at one time.
“When I first started experiencing spirits about me, it was kind of frightening to me, but after several visions of a chief, I learned to listen closely to what they were saying to me. The spirits walk with me, they talk with me, they lead me, they guide me on a daily basis. Every place I go, the spirits go with me. Some people might call them guardian angels. They comfort me,” Chief Martin said.
“Sometimes, I can be riding down a highway or waterway or byway and I can see an entire village prior to European contact, with children running and playing, still living in the dwellings as we did five hundred years ago.” These villages are tranquil and their inhabitants happy, according to Chief Martin. He says the spirits are not ghosts, but rather the vital essences of the Chicoras who once peopled the land.
“I believe that when the spirit leaves the body, we simply walk into a third dimension here on earth,” Chief Martin said. “The spirits of all our people live here in a third dimension. You walk through an invisible wall, then you are with your ancestors, I believe.”
Since 1987, Chief Martin has worked tirelessly to reestablish his tribe in its ancestral homeland. Elected chief of the tribe by the Council of Native Americans of South Carolina, he was later elected by his own people—and chosen by the spirits—as the lifetime spiritual leader of the Chicoras. All members of the growing Chicora tribe can trace their lineage back to 1850, the prerequisite to being a tribal member.
More Ghosts of Georgetown Page 12