Catawba Indians of South Carolina

Perhaps, after the Catawbas have become extinct, some one might ask who was responsible. Let us not wait until then to place the responsibility where it belongs. If it is South Carolina’s duty to cherish and guard with a fostering care the last vestige of her aboriginal inhabitants; if she owes anything to her earliest benefactors; if she owes anything to a disinterested people who have fought her battles a people who were courted when they were strong, but are now scorned because they are weak; if she owes anything to a people whose territory she has absorbed without due … Read more

The reservation of the Catawba Indians was at one time in the remotest backwoods of South Carolina, but within the last twenty years the signs of civilization have been rapidly creeping toward it. Since the South began to draw Northern capital a few years ago, the development of this section of Carolina has been phenomenal. The nearest town of consequence to the reservation is Rock Hill, nine miles distant. Fifteen years ago there were scarcely half a dozen farm houses in the town today, Rock Hill is an important city with a number of cotton factories and a population of … Read more

A recent publication of the Smithsonian Institution (” Siouan Tribes of the East,” by James Mooney) asserts that the origin and meaning of the word Catawba are unknown. In 1881, the Bureau of Ethnology collected a vocabulary of 10,000 words from the tribe of Indians bearing this name, and, after critical examination by experts, their language was pronounced unmistakably of Siouan stock. The home of the Sioux family is believed to have been at one time in the upper Ohio valley, from whence one branch migrated east and the other west, and Mr. Mooney says that linguistic evidence indicates that … Read more

Scarcely more than one hundred years ago the hoof prints of the buffalo became scarce in South Carolina, and it would, perhaps, have been well for the Catawba Indian had he followed him to the distant West; for the exterminating greed of the white man has almost driven him, too, from the boundless regions in which he used to roam, cruel legislation has allowed his lands to be sold and his money squandered, and, after all, he is in not much better condition morally, socially, or financially than when he was a savage in the woods, with God-given ability to … Read more