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Show HOOKEY] FIRST TREATY WITH SOUTH CAROLINA 1684 31 village on Dan river, about the present Clarksville, Virginia, a delegation of Rickahockan, which had come on tribal business, was barbarously murdered at a dance prepared on the night of their arrival by their treacherous hosts. On reaching the Catawba country he heard of white men to the southward, and incidentally mentions that the neighboring mountains were called the Suala mountains by the Spaniards. 1 In the next year, 1671, a party from Virginia under Thomas Batts explored the northern branch of Roanoke river and crossed over the Blue ridge to the headwaters of New river, where they found traces of occupancy, but no Indians. By this time all the tribes of this section, east of the mountains, were in possession of firearms. 2 The first permanent English settlement in South Carolina was established in 1670. In 1690 James Moore, secretary of the colony, made an exploring expedition into the mountains and reached a point at which, according to his Indian guides, he was within twenty miles of where the Spaniards were engaged in mining and smelting with bellows and furnaces, but on account of some misunderstanding he returned without visiting the place, although he procured specimens of ores, which he sent to England for assay. 8 It may have been in the neighborhood of the present Lincolnton, North Carolina, where a dam of cut stone and other remains of former civilized occupancy have recently been discovered ( 11). In this year, also, Cornelius Dougherty, an Irishman from Virginia, established himself as the first trader among the Cherokee, with whom he spent the rest of his life.* Some of his descendants still occupy honored positions in the tribe. Among the manuscript archives of South Carolina there was said to be, some fifty years ago, a treaty or agreement made with the government of that colony by the Cherokee in 1684, and signed with the hieroglyphics of eight chiefs of the lower towns, viz, Corani, the Raven ( Ka'lanfi); Sinnawa, the Hawk ( Tl&' nuwft); Nellawgitehi, Gor-haleke, and Owasta, all of Toxawa; and Canacaught, the great Conjuror, Gohoma, and Caunasaita, of Keowa. If still in existence, this is probably the oldest Cherokee treaty on record. 5 What seems to be the next mention of the Cherokee in the South Carolina records occurs in 1691, when we find an inquiry ordered in regard to a report that some of the colonists " have, without any proclamation of war, fallen upon and murdered" several of that tribe. 8 In 1693 some Cherokee chiefs went to Charleston with presents for the governor and offers of friendship, to ask the protection of South Carolina against their enemies, the Esaw ( Catawba), Savanna ( Shawano), 1 Lederer, John, Discoveries, pp. 15,26,27,29, 33, and map; reprint, Charleston, 1891; Mooney, Siouan Tribes of the East ( bulletin of Bureau of Ethnology), pp. 53- 64,1894. * Mooney, op. cit., pp. 34- 35. • Document of 1699, quoted in South Carolina Hist. Soc. Colls., i, p. 209; Charleston, 1857. • Haywood, Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tennessee, p. 233,1823. * Noted in Cherokee Advocate, Tahlequah, Indian Territory, January 30,1845. • Document of 1691, South Carolina Hist. Soc. Colls., i, p. 126. |
