Indians of Robeson County Part II

 

THE INDIANS OF ROBESON COUNTY NORTH CAROLINA
AND
HANCOCK COUNTY TENEESSEE  

"An old Indian" George Lowery/Lowrie, made an address at the funeral [atteneded by whites and Indians] of his kinsmen killed by the Confederates in 1864. 

Quoted in Lost Colony of Roanoke by Hamilton McMillan, George Lowery said;

"We have always been the friends of the white men. We were a free people long before the white men came to our land.  Our tribe lived on Roanoke, in Virginia."

• The 1646 act required Abraham Wood to keep 10 men at the old fort. It was, at the time, on the southwestern edge of colonial settlement in Virginia. Wood had few local customers, and ships sailing up the James River could load cargoes and sell their imported goods long before reaching the Fall Line on the Appomattox River. Wood himself had a plantation on Upper Chippokes Creek,

• Indians on the Upper Chippokes Creek:
  
  William Knott, 312 Acres, Surry Co 28 Mar 1666, p. 482 (land patents). 112 acres on south side of James River on south side of Upper Chipoakes Creek, bounded NW on land of Edward Oliver, N upon Wm. Thomas, E on George Gibson [See Indian Jane Gibson of Charles City County]  SE on Mr. Fisher; 200 acres on south side of said River, Wly. on Jeremiah Clements, NW on Edward Oliver, Nly on Wm. Thomas, George Gibson & Edward Minter, Ely. on Wm. Gapins land & Mr. Thomas Busbie [Interpreter for the Crown] and SE on Mr. Richard Hill
  

The Quiyoughcohannock were one of the first Virginia Indian groups the English encountered in 1607 after landing at Jamestown. Situated primarily in present-day Surry County, the Quiyoughcohannocks had four villages in the region likely east of Upper Chippokes Creek  

 

The Expedition of Batts and Fallam: 

• A Journey from Virginia to beyond the Appalachian Mountains, September, 1671

''Sept. 5. Just as we were ready to take horse and march from the Sapiny’s about seven of the clock in the Morning we heard some guns go off from the other side of the River. They were seven Apomatack Indians sent by Major General Wood to accompany us in our voyage. We hence sent back a horse belonging to Mr. Thomas Wood, which was hired, by a Portugal, belonging to Major General Wood, whom we here found. About eleven of the clock we set forward and that night came to the town of the Hanathaskies which we judge to be twenty five miles from the Sapenys, they are lying west and by north in an island on the Sapony River rich land. '

• English explorer Edward Bland wrote in 1650 about the "Occononacheans and Nessoneicks" living on Roanoke River. The "Nessoneicks" were Saponi.^[16] In 1670, John Lederer visited what he described as "Sapon, a Village of the Nahyssans," who were the Saponi.^[16] Lederer wrote about the Saponi: "The nation is governed by an absolute Monarch; the People of a high stature, warlike and rich."^[16]

 

• In 1671 Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam led an expedition that passed through several Saponi villages. After their visit, the Saponi and Tutelo moved downriver and settled with Occaneechi people.  Wikipedia

"We have always been the friends of the white men. We were a free people long before the white men came to our land.  Our tribe lived on Roanoke, in Virginia."-George Lowery

Herbert 1725 Map
Saura/Cheraw Village on the Pee Dee
[Spenser Bolton born 1735 on the Pee Dee according to his 

Revolutionary Pension Application  -testimony proved they

were known as Portuguese and called Melungeons.]

Maps are Great!

Indians of Robeson County Part I

 

THE INDIANS OF ROBESON COUNTY NORTH CAROLINA
AND
HANCOCK COUNTY TENEESSEE  

"An old Indian" George Lowery/Lowrie, made an address at the funeral [atteneded by whites and Indians] of his kinsmen killed by the Confederates in 1864. 

Quoted in Lost Colony of Roanoke by Hamilton McMillan, George Lowery said;

"We have always been the friends of the white men. We were a free people long before the white men came to our land.  Our tribe lived in Roanoke, in Virginia."

July 17, 1890
--Red Springs, North Carolina
Hamilton McMillan
63D CONGRESS 3D SESSION SENATE DOCUMENT NO. 677 INDIANS OF NORTH CAROLINA LETTER FROM THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR TRANSMITTING, IN RESPONSE TO A SENATE RESOLUTIONOF JUNE 30, 1914, A REPORT ON THE CONDITION AND TRIBAL RIGHTS OF THE INDIANS OF ROBESON AND ADJOINING COUNTIES OF NORTH CAROLINA JANUARY 5, 1915.--REFERRED TO THE COMMITTEE ON INDIAN AFFAIRS AND ORDERED TO BE PRINTED

The Croatan Tribe lives principally in Robeson County, N. C., though there are quite a number of them settled in counties adjoining in North and South Carolina. In Sumter County, S. C., there is a branch of the tribe and also in East Tennessee. In Lincoln County, N. C., there is another branch, settled there long ago. Those living in East Tennessee are called "Melungeans," *a name also retained by them here

The Melungeons 
 Paul Converse 
 Southern Collegian December 1912

This is quite a fine theory, but most people are more prosaic and hold the Melungeons to be a mixed race, having Indian, Negro, and Caucasian blood in their veins. This the word “Melungeon” itself would indicate and the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington classifies them as a branch or offshoot of the Croatan Indians of North Carolina, who are a people of obscure and mixed descent in whose veins Indian blood predominates..

    

 AN INDIAN TO BE HANGED

 
Georgia Crotan to be Executed Next Month for Murder.

New York Times
February 28, 1897, Wednesday

ATLANTA, Ga., Feb. 27. -- For the first time in fifty years an Indian is under sentence of death in Georgia. He will be hanged in Glynn County next month.  Marcellus Lowry, the condemned man, is a Crotan Indian from the celebrated band
in North Carolina, many of whom have drifted with the turpentine and timber men into Southern Georgia, where they are called "Melungeons." 

Swan Burnett

 Since the above communications was read before the Society I have received from several sources valuable information in regard to the Melungeons; but the most important contribution bearing on the subject, as I believe, is the little pamphlet published by Hamilton Mc Millan, A. M., on “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony” (Wilson, N.C., 1888). Mc Millan claims that the Croatan Indians are the direct descendant of this colony. What connection I consider to exist between the Melungeons and the Croatan Indians, as well as other material I have accumulated in regard to the Melungeons, will be made the subject of another communication which is now in preparation.

* *Read before the Society at its regular meeting, February 5, 1889.

Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology - Ethnology - 1907

Across the line in South Carolina are found a people, evidently of similar origin, designated "Red bones." In portions of w. N. C. and E. Temn. are found the so-called "Melungeons" (probably from French melangi', 'mixed') or "Portuguese," apparently an offshoot from the Croatan proper, and in Delaware are found the "Moors." All of these are local designations for peoples of mixed race with an Indian nucleus differing in no way from the present mixed-blood remnants known as Pamunkey, Chicka- hominy, and Nansemond Indians in Virginia, excepting in the more complete loss of their identity. In general, the physical features and complexion of the persons of this mixed stock incline more to the Indian than to the white or negro. See Mi-tis, Mixed bloods

The North Carolina Booklet: Great Events in North Carolina History 

James Mooney

" The Croatan applied for recognition by the United States as Cherokee, but it was denied and the Cherokee acknowledge no relationship, having visited the Croatan country on a tour of inspection. There is a queer offshoot of the Croatan known as "Malungeons," in South Carolina, who went there from this state ; another the "Redbones," of Tennessee. Mr. Mooney has made a careful study of both of these branches also.

 In a column called "The Southwest Conrner" published in the Roanoke News, Roanoke, Virginia, on February 25, 1934, Dr. Gooridge Wilson wrote the following .......

........"Mr. Robert Gray, one of the last survivors of those who drove the great herds of cattle, horses, and mules from the mountains to the sea, says that the Melungeons were in much demand for this work, being expert handlers of the stock on long treks...... ... when he was a boy some of the oldest of the clan told him that they were "Croatans," survivors of the Indians tribe

The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries

Volume XXV 1890
Page 258

  After the reports of various committees had been read, and other business transacted, Judge Lea addressed the society on the subject of the Melungeons. He outlined the early history of the settlement of North Carolina. A party under the protection of a friendly Indian chief had gone into the interior when the first settlers came to that coast and had been lost. No other settlers came till a century afterward, and they were told of a tribe who claimed a white ancestry, and among whom gray eyes were frequent. This people were traced to Buncomb and Robeson counties, where the same family and personal names were found as in the lost colonies.

 
They are now called Croatans, on account of a sign they made on the trees to keep their way. The Basques of the Spanish coast have been said to have settled in that country, but this theory was not thought to be trustworthy. It would be impossible for negroes to form a distinct race, because the number necessary for a colony would not have been allowed to run at large. The race has several old English words which are used as they were in England two hundred years ago, and a case of civil rights has been won in court by a Melungeon displaying his person and proving to the court that he was of Caucasian blood. North Carolina gives the Croatians $1,000 a year for a normal school, and they have excellent roads. This colony, whose early history is thus so clearly traced, lies within forty miles of the Tennessee Melungeons. 

 

 See Melungeons Redboned & Croatans - HERE

From 1890 into the 1900s Historians, Anthropologists, Ethnoligists, Smithsonian etc., declared the Melungeons were an offshoot of the Croatan/Lumbee Tribe.  

TheCroatan/Lumbee lived on the Pee Dee River, the Melungeons lived on the Pee Dee River.  The Cofitachequi, visited by DeAyllon - 1527. DeSoto - 1540 and Pardo - 1570, lived on the Pee Dee River. 

One of DeSoto's ships were Portuguese explorers who mixed with the Indians from the Pee Dee River to the Mobile Bay.  

Excerpt from the 1871 North Carolina Joint Senate and House Committee as they interviewed Robeson County Judge Giles Leitch about the ‘free persons of color’ living within his county: 

Senate: Half of the colored population?

Leitch: Yes Sir; half of the colored population of Robeson County were never slaves at all…

Senate: What are they; are they Negroes?

Leitch: Well sir, I desire to tell you the truth as near as I can; but I really do not know what they are; I think they are a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and Indian… 

Senate: You think they are mixed Negroes and Indians?

Leitch: I do not think that in that class of population there is much Negro blood at all; of that half of the colored population that I have attempted to describe all have always been free…They are called ‘mulattoes’ that is the name they are known by, as contradistinguished from Negroes…I think they are of Indian origin.

Senate: I understand you to say that these seven or eight hundred persons that you designate as mulattoes are not Negroes but are a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, white blood and Indian blood, you think they are not generally Negroes?

Leitch: I do not think the Negro blood predominates.

Indians of Robeston County Part II

 

 

Cherokee Choctaw & Portuguese

Cherokee Choctaw & Portuguese

The Free Press

27 September  1901, Fri · Page 7

Bridger, Montana 

How White Blood Preponderates in Certain Tribes.

North Carolina Croatans, who claim to be descendant of Raleigh's lost colony[1], are not the only peculiar people among the red inhabitants of these United States.  The claim is not new.  It has been more or less exploited these 30 years, along with that of the more curious Melungeons of East Tennessee. Their name, said to come from the French melange, a mixture, must be pre-eminently fit, since they show racial characteristics of the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Portuguese [See Below Cherokee Chief Nimrod Smith 2] and the plain ordinary whites.  Their language is as mixed as their blood, and their civilization is in somewhat the same condition.

Over against them set their neighbors, the Eastern Cherokees, who live in Qualla Boundary, in western North Carolina, and are so up-to-date that they formed themselves into a regular corporation, so as to share in the government benefits which were in danger of monopoly by the rich and out-reaching western Cherokee nation. [See Below lawsuit 3]   Right here it may be proper to say that after the outcry against Indian population of today is not so very much less than that which Columbus found here, and the so-called Five Civilized Nations of Indian Territory, have quintrupled in numbers since crossing the Mississippi.

[1] The Crotans did not claim to be 'Lost Colony of Roanoke' Hamilton McMillan who had witnessed the speech of George Lowery in the 1860s  and in McMillan's own words Lowery said in "Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony, with the traditions of An Indian Tribe in North Carolina indicating the fate of the Colony";

ROANOKE IN VIRGINIA 
NOT NORTH CAROLINA
[To Be Continued- Next Blog]

Chief Nimrod J Smith

[2] I said to myself, "This is not a modern face of the every-day world; it does not belong to any race admixture of which I know anything; it might have belonged to a Spanish cavalier of the olden time;"  and as if in answer to my thought came the information that there was an admixture of Portuguese blood in his veins, or to speak in vernacular, he was "part Portygee."

[3]  As principal chief Smith devoted most of his time to the Eastern Cherokee's legal battles. Hoping to gain access to the annuities and other trust funds held by the U.S. government for the Western (Oklahoma) Cherokee, the Eastern Cherokee filed suit in the court of claims against the United States and the Cherokee Nation West in 1883. Two years later the court handed down a decision adverse to the Eastern Cherokee, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1886. The courts ruled that the Eastern Cherokee had dissolved their connection with the Cherokee Nation by their refusal to move west. The decision deprived them not only of the trust and annuity funds but also of their tribal status and consequently left them in an extremely ambiguous legal position."

https://the-melungeons.blogspot.com/search?q=nimrod+smith

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next time you read the Melungeon or Croatan/Lumbee families or your family were rejected in the Cherokee applications consider this;  The United States Government ruled the EASTERN CHEROKEE DISSOLVED THEIR CONNECTION TO THE WESTERN CHEROKEE BECAUSE THEY 'DID NOT WALK' 

And it continues today. 

January 19, 2007

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. -
"Every year thousands of people are told or "discover" they have Native American blood. Sometimes it's true, sometimes not. And the tribe people most commonly associate themselves with is Cherokee. A group of Cherokee Nation employees and officials recently formed a task force to deal with these "wannabe" Cherokees."

https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/news/non-recognized-cherokee-tribes-flourish/article_ac02834f-35d3-5bc3-bd2c-ad2b69101baf.html