Tuscarora War

Tuscarora War

The rapid encroachment of the whites on the lands of the Tuscarora and their Indian neighbors for a period of sixty years after the first settlements, although there was an air of peace and harmony between the two races, there were wrongs which dwarfed in comparison with the continued practice of kidnapping their young to be sold into slavery. This was the true cause of the so-called Tuscarora war in 1711-13. This phase of the question is overlooked or quite disregarded by most historians; but years before the massacre of 1711, Tuscarora Indians were brought into Pennsylvania and sold as … Read more

Native Uprisings Against the Carolinas (1711-17)

In 1957 University of Georgia archaeologists, under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Caldwell, were working on several archaeological sites on the tributaries of the Savannah River that were to be flooded by Lake Hartwell.  The best known of these town sites are Tugaloo and Chauga. Because they were last occupied by Lower Cherokees in the early 1700s, the archaeologists assumed that excavation of their mounds would prove that the Cherokees built all the mounds in the Southern Highlands. The archaeologists were shocked to find that the Cherokee occupation of both sites was very brief and much smaller than the ancestors … Read more

Machapunga Tribe

Machapunga Indians (‘bad dust’; from matchi ‘bad’, pungo ‘dust’ (Heckewelder), or perhaps ‘much dust,’ from massa ‘great’, in allusion to the sandy soil of the district). An Algonquian tribe formerly living in Hyde county, north east North Carolina. In 1701 they numbered only about 30 warriors, or perhaps 100 souls, and lived in a single village called Mattamuskeet. They took part in the Tuscarora War of 1711-12 and at its conclusion the remnant, together with the Coree, were settled on a tract on Mattamuskeet lake, where the two tribes occupied one village.