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. [48]
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), and Congaree, all of that colony, who had made war upon
them and sold a number of their tribesmen into slavery. They were told
that their kinsmen could not now be recovered, but that the English
desired friendship with their tribe, and that the Government would
see that there would be no future ground for such complaint. [49]
The promise was apparently not kept, for in 1705 we find a bitter
accusation brought against Governor Moore, of South Carolina, that he
had granted commissions to a number of persons "to set upon, assault,
kill, destroy, and take captive as many Indians as they possible
[sic] could," the prisoners being sold into slavery for his and their
private profit. By this course, it was asserted, he had "already almost
utterly ruined the trade for skins and furs, whereby we held our chief
correspondence with England, and turned it into a trade of Indians
or slave making, whereby the Indians to the south and west of us are
already involved in blood and confusion." The arraignment concludes
with a warning that such conditions would in all probability draw down
upon the colony an Indian war with all its dreadful consequences. [50]
In view of what happened a few years later this reads like a prophecy.
About the year 1700 the first guns were introduced among the Cherokee,
the event being fixed traditionally as having occurred in the girlhood
of an old woman of the tribe who died about 1775. [51] In 1708 we
find them described as a numerous people, living in the mountains
northwest from the Charleston settlements and having sixty towns,
but of small importance in the Indian trade, being "but ordinary
hunters and less warriors." [52]
In the war with the Tuscarora in 1711-1713, which resulted in the
expulsion of that tribe from North Carolina, more than a thousand
southern Indians reenforced the South Carolina volunteers, among
them being over two hundred Cherokee, hereditary enemies of the
Tuscarora. Although these Indian allies did their work well in the
actual encounters, their assistance was of doubtful advantage, as
they helped themselves freely to whatever they wanted along the way,
so that the settlers had reason to fear them almost as much as the
hostile Tuscarora. After torturing a large number of their prisoners
in the usual savage fashion, they returned with the remainder, whom
they afterward sold as slaves to South Carolina. [53]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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