The equation shifted with the appearance of another refugee group from the north, probably (like the Westo) driven south by the Beaver Wars between the Iroquois and northern Algonquians, although no one is sure of their origins. Known to the Carolinians as the Savannah, and to later generations as the Shawnee, these new people provided an excuse for James Moore and others to turn on their erstwhile allies, the Westo. With Savannah help, they killed or enslaved all but fifty of the Westo and made the Savannah their new middlemen. The surviving Westos sent an envoy to plead their case, but he was shipped off into slavery, too. His fate should have been a warning to the Savannah and any other Indian allies of the English: Carolinian goodwill was a limited commodity.
Spain officially outlawed Indian slavery, but in practice the mission-based repartimiento system was little different, especially when the Spaniards tried to ship some of the Yamasee to Caribbean plantations to work off their labor debt. Between that and the repeated Anglo-Indian raids, the Yamasee leaders eventually decided it would make sense to switch sides. Hundreds of Yamasees, joined by Guales and scraps of other decimated tribes, moved north to Port Royal Sound. Eventually, ten Yamasee towns, with more than thirteen hundred inhabitants, lived under the English umbrella. There the Yamasee turned wholeheartedly to slave raiding themselves, attacking Timucua missions under Spanish control in the late 1680s and early 1690s.
In the Yamasee, the Carolinians had finally found a partner whose zeal and expertise at catching slaves matched their own rapacity for selling them. Like the Westo before them, the Yamasee had English flintlocks, which meant that no group of mission Indians, armed only with bows and arrows, could hope to withstand their assaults. And as was increasingly the case across the frontier, political developments thousands of miles away in Europe drove events—in this case, in ways that made the Yamasee-English partnership especially successful for both parties.
During the Nine Years’ War of the 1690s (known as King William’s War in the northern colonies, the conflict during which young John Gyles was kidnapped by the Abenaki), Spain was an English ally against the French. Slave raids against the Florida missions were, at least on paper, an affront against an imperial partner. But when war erupted in 1702 over the disputed Spanish throne—the War of the Spanish Succession, which in the colonies was called Queen Anne’s War—Spain was aligned with France against England. The Goose Creek Men had the perfect geopolitical excuse to launch an all-out assault on Spanish and French holdings in the South.
With the Yamasee and Creek at their backs, the Carolinians went after what was left of the vulnerable Spanish mission network. Starting with Moore’s attack on Apalachee in 1704, the mission system all but crumbled over the following four years, leaving the Spanish essentially marooned in the fortress of St. Augustine, the rest of northern Florida all but deserted.
English successes against the missions alarmed France, which saw its own small presence in Louisiana at growing risk. They reached out to potential allies in the interior—the Choctaw, the Yazoo, and other tribes—and while they couldn’t match the quality or quantity of English goods, the French offered a more sophisticated understanding of Native customs and social ties, and a firm promise never to enslave their allies, all of which they played adroitly to maintain their Indian buffer.
The French also drew up plans for a massive Franco-Spanish thrust designed to drive the meddlesome English out of the Atlantic seaboard entirely—beginning in the Caribbean, advancing rapidly to Charles Town, and destroying coastal settlements all the way to New York. Instead, the coup de main became a farce. The joint fleet floundered through the Caribbean, arriving at Charles Town to find the Carolinians forewarned, armed, and contemptuous of demands for ransom—and able handily to repel the few sorties for slaves and booty.
The grand armada caused barely a hiccup in Carolina’s success. The Creek were raiding throughout the Gulf of Mexico drainages, and the Yamasee continued to range at will. “We have been intirely kniving all the Indian towns in Florida wch. were subject to the Spanish,” wrote Thomas Nairne, the Scottish-born Indian agent for the colony. A few years later, in 1708, he noted that the Yamasee and other Carolina Indians “are now obliged to goe down as farr on the point of Florida as the firm land will permitt,” having “drove the Floridians to the Islands of the Cape.” No longer safe even among the mangrove islands of the Keys, some of the Florida Indians gambled on the only avenue still open to them—the ninety-mile voyage to Cuba, if they could gain Spanish permission. There, at least, the Yamasee could not reach them.
One of the few things that can be said with any certainty of John Lawson, before his sudden appearance in Carolina, is this: the man was not shy about taking a chance.
In the spring of 1700, about to embark from London on a trip to Rome, Lawson impetuously changed his mind—and his life—after a casual conversation with an unnamed gentleman, who “assur’d me that Carolina was the best country I could go to.” Without an apparent second thought, Lawson booked immediate passage for New York and thence to Charles Town. He seems to have been well schooled—he later disparaged most of the travelers to America as “the meaner sort, and generally of a very slender education”—and he proved to be a skilled naturalist. But when he was born and where he was raised and educated—perhaps the north of England, perhaps in London itself—no one really knows; he appears on the historical stage in Carolina as a blank slate.
Although he apparently lacked any backwoods experience, within a few months he managed to talk himself into an appointment to explore the hinterlands, a rugged trip with five other Englishmen and four Indian guides that inscribed an immense, five-hundred- to six-hundred-mile arc from the Santee River in the south, far up into the mountains where few English explorers had penetrated, and down the Tar River to the coast. It took almost two months, beginning in the dead of winter and proceeding across rivers in dangerous flood, through swamps in which they had to swim naked, and to dozens of Indians towns on which Lawson cast a sharp and observant eye. They shot passenger pigeons, “which are so numerous in these Parts, that you might see many Millions in a Flock,” and encountered bears, wolves, bison, and panthers. When their canoes finally reached Pamlico Sound, John Lawson knew he had found his place in the world.
For the next eight years, Lawson traveled through the Carolina backcountry, observing the wildlife, and especially the Indians, and learning the art of surveying from Edward Moseley, the surveyor general of the colony. Lawson built a house along the lower Neuse River, not far from the Neusiok town of Chattooka, and he speculated in land. In 1705, he cofounded Bath, northern Carolina’s first town, and laid out its 70 one-acre plots. When he returned to England in 1708, it was to publish the first version of A New Voyage to Carolina, his brisk and (except for a few chamber-of-commerce flourishes) reasonably accurate assessment of the land, people, and natural bounty of the region. Named by the lords proprietors to be the new surveyor general, Lawson returned to Carolina to map out the northern border with Virginia.
This new job brought him into even closer contact with the Indians of Carolina, especially the “Tuskeraroo.” Like Lawson, the Tuscarora are of mysterious origins. A people speaking an Iroquoian tongue, they probably moved south into Carolina around a.d. 600, based on current archaeological evidence. It’s ironic that we have Lawson to thank for the clearest picture of Tuscarora life—just before it was irreparably ripped apart.
Lawson described a network of about fifteen Tuscarora villages, with a total of about twelve hundred men of fighting age, suggesting a population of about five thousand to six thousand people. There were two divisions, the southern Tuscarora along the Neuse River and Contentnea Creek, and the northern Tuscarora, along the Tar and Roanoke rivers. Each village, Lawson said, had its own teethha, or chief, and took care of its own affairs. Although Tuscarora communities were described as towns, they didn’t always appear so to English eyes, especially the widely separated farmsteads of the southern Tuscarora. “Tho’ this be ca
lled a town, it is only a plantation here and there scattered about the Country,” one observer wrote, “no where 5 houses together, and then 1/4 a mile such another and so on for several miles.” Northern villages, on the other hand, were more centralized, and some were palisaded, given their proximity to the once powerful Tsenacommacah confederacy in Virginia.
Lawson’s long, detailed account describes Tuscarora life, customs, and social structures in the early years of contact. Few explorers wrote with such evident admiration, although he found their treatment of captives “a natural Failing,” especially one horrific method of torture, in which they “split the Pitch-Pine into Splinters, and stick them into the Prisoner’s Body yet alive. Thus they light them, which burn like so many torches; and in this manner they make him dance around a great fire, every one buffeting and deriding him, till he expires.”
The kind of natural delights and fertile landscapes Lawson described in his book attracted more and more settlers to Carolina, and by the first years of the eighteenth century, the immigrants were coming from new areas of Europe. One group that would make an enormous mark on the frontier—and whose fortunes would collide with those of the Tuscarora—were the Palatines, named for the fertile but war-scarred land along the Rhine in what is now southwestern Germany.
Lying on the French border, the Palatinate had been torn by competing armies for generations and laid particular waste in the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century, one of the most destructive periods in European history. Even with the end of that conflict, warfare continued to roll across the region, and even in neutral countries such as Switzerland, floods of refugees and growing religious persecution against controversial pietist sects such as the Mennonites and Amish prompted an exodus. An estimated thirteen thousand Palatines fled to London, so straining the city’s ability to house them that Queen Anne and her advisers offered to pay for their resettlement in the colonies.
Most of these Palatine immigrants wound up in New York and Pennsylvania, but one group sailed for Carolina under the hand of the Swiss baron Christoph von Graffenried, who’d been planning a New World settlement for years and who found in John Lawson the man who could make it happen. With title to more than seventeen thousand acres near Lawson’s home on the Neuse and Trent rivers, Graffenried dispatched the English surveyor and more than 650 Palatines in January 1710, following himself with another hundred Swiss settlers some months later.
Initially, the undertaking was a disaster. Crammed belowdecks with poor food and water, and riddled with disease, almost half the Palatines died on the sea voyage or shortly after their arrival in North Carolina. (The political divisions between northern and southern Carolina had become so great that the colony was by then splitting in two, and the lords proprietors had named one of their own, Edward Hyde, as governor of the newly independent north.) Graffenried later accused Lawson of settling the Palatines on hot, unhealthy land on the Trent River that Lawson himself owned and wanted cleared, instead of in a better location on the Neuse. But whatever the initial hurdles, the industrious Germans and Swiss soon put their affairs in order, and the town of New Bern began to thrive. “Inside of 18 months these people were so well settled . . . that in this short time they had made more advancement than the English inhabitants in four years,” Graffenried bragged.
Those who were working the ground had, perhaps, a more levelheaded view of the colony. “The land is good, but the beginning is hard, the journey dangerous,” one Swiss settler wrote to his relatives back home. “This country is praised too highly in Europe and condemned too much . . . Of vermin, snakes, and such like, there is not so much as they tell in Europe. I have seen crocodiles by the water, but they soon fled. One should not trust to supporting himself with game, for there are no wild oxen or swine. Stags and deer, ducks and geese and turkeys are numerous.”
Another, more serious complaint Graffenried leveled against Lawson was that, the surveyor’s assurances to the contrary, the land around New Bern was already inhabited by several tribes, including the Neusiok and Coree, whom the Swiss had to pay to relinquish their land. Graffenried sensed the Indians’ increasing frustration with colonial encroachments, of which the Germans and Swiss were only the latest and most egregious example. More and more of the tidewater villages were being forced inland, gathering near the Tuscarora, higher up the Neuse and Trent rivers.
Things were getting so bad that some Tuscaroras wanted out of Carolina completely. Slaving raids snatched Tuscarora women and children at will, and plantations gobbled up much of the best lowland hunting ground. The year before, the Tuscarora had sent an extraordinary mission north to Pennsylvania, which had a few years earlier become the first English colony to ban the importation and sale of Indian slaves. On June 8, 1710, they met with two commissioners from Pennsylvania, asking permission to relocate to the Susquehanna Valley, which was becoming a magnet for Native refugees. In fact, the Tuscaroras were hosted by leaders of the Conestoga and Shawnee, the latter the former Savannah, who were themselves recent migrants to Pennsylvania.
As was the custom, the Tuscaroras presented their request in the form of eight long wampum belts. The designs, speaking in the ancient, beaded language of Indian diplomacy, echoed what the orators said. One belt represented the wishes of “elder women and mothers . . . so they might fetch wood and water without risk. By the second, the children born and those about to be born, implored for room to sport and play without the fear of death and slavery.” Old men asked for forest paths as safe as forts; the chiefs sought a stable government; and all the Tuscarora asked for an end to murder and slavery. With each petition, the Tuscarora speakers held up the corresponding wampum, elaborating on their meaning, until they reached the eighth and final belt, perhaps the most important—one that asked the Pennsylvanians to show them the way to bring this vision of peace to pass.
The colonial officials were willing to consider the Tuscarora request, but they asked for an impossibility—a letter from the North Carolina government attesting to the Tuscarora’s “past carriage toward the English” and good behavior. The Carolinians, unwilling to lose a source of slaves, refused to provide such a letter, and the Tuscarora felt the screws tighten further.
In the reckless approach North Carolina took toward its Indian neighbors, Alexander Spotswood, the governor of Virginia, saw trouble ahead for all English colonies. “I am credibly informed the Indians have more reason to complain of injustice from the people of Carolina, who are daily trespassing upon them,” he warned Hyde in 1711, “and if they do sometimes retaliate it is more excusable because your people have been the first aggressors.”
Spotswood went on to say he’d learned that some Carolinians intended “to fall upon the Indians, and to compell them by force to yield to their unreasonable pretensions.” Such a move, he warned, would be followed by “a Train of ill consequences, by involving both Governments in a War with the Indians, for tho’ [the Carolinians] may perhaps surprize one Nation, they ought to consider that there are a great many others that will take the alarm when they find the English have broke faith with them.” Such an uprising, Spotswood said, would be “a just reproach on us.”
In September 1711, a year after Graffenried arrived in North Carolina, Lawson came to New Bern and asked the baron to join him in a trip up the Neuse River, “saying there was a quantity of good wild grapes, that we could enjoy ourselves a little with them.” The weather was sweet, and Lawson, who relished his time in the boondocks, was obviously looking for an excuse to get into the woods.
Graffenried scoffed at the idea; he had better things to do. But Lawson kept after him. What if, instead of just chasing wild grapes, they also investigated how far upriver the Neuse was navigable? What if they determined how far a journey it was to the Appalachians and whether there might be a shorter, easier route to Virginia? Here he hit the mark, because Graffenried had been curious about those questions himself. Maybe he didn’t need much convincing; the weather was “fine and apparently s
ettled,” so they quickly packed two weeks’ supplies, gathered two black slaves to paddle their canoe and two local Indians to act as guides, and set off. When Graffenried asked if they should worry about Indians, Lawson replied that “this was of no consequence . . . that he knew of no wild Indians on this arm of the river.”
Less than three days into the trip, however, they ran into trouble—not from “wild Indians,” but from the Tuscarora Lawson knew so well. Already alarmed by the rumors of English treachery, and angry at the growing intrusions on their land, they were upset to find the surveyor general sniffing around. Charged with trespassing, Lawson, Graffenried, and the two slaves were seized and taken to the southern Tuscarora village of Catechna, where, to great excitement, the Swiss baron was initially mistaken for Governor Hyde.
There followed an extraordinary series of what Graffenried characterized as “trials,” argued before elders, including the Tuscarora teethha known as Hancock. “There came . . . a general complaint, that they, the Indians, had been very badly treated,” Graffenried said, and Lawson was singled out for his actions. Hancock was initially satisfied by their answers, though, and agreed to free them the next morning. Their departure was delayed just long enough for the chiefs from some neighboring villages to arrive, including those from the Neusiok village of Chattooka, still smarting from their eviction by the Palatine colonists. Lawson, who seemed to have trouble keeping his mouth shut even when his life depended on it, got into a roaring argument with Coree Tom, the chief of Chattooka, in which Lawson threatened to exact a horrible revenge on them all. “This spoiled everything for us,” Graffenried said, with considerable understatement.
Tempers rose on all sides. The furious chiefs grabbed the Europeans, hauled them back to the council grounds, and bound them, throwing their hats and wigs into the fire, while some of the younger men rifled their pockets and the elders debated. To their shock, the captives were this time sentenced to death.
The First Frontier Page 28