Catawba People - History of The Catawba People

History of The Catawba People

From the earliest period, the Catawba have also been known as Esaw, or Issa (Catawba iswä, "river"), from their residence on the principal stream of the region. They called both the present-day Catawba and Wateree rivers Iswa. The Iroquois frequently included them under the general term Totiri, or Toderichroone, also known as Tutelo. The Iroquois collectively used this term to apply to all the southern Siouan-speaking tribes.

Albert Gallatin (1836) classified the Catawba as a separate, distinct group among Siouan tribes. When the linguist Albert Samuel Gatschet visited them in 1881 and obtained a large vocabulary showing numerous correspondences with Siouan, linguists classified them with the Siouan-speaking peoples. Further investigations by Horatio Hale, Gatschet, James Mooney, and James Owen Dorsey proved that several tribes of the same region were also of Siouan stock. The linguistic forms and traditional evidence all point to this eastern region as the place of origin and coalescence of the Siouan tribes from indigenous ancestors.

In the late nineteenth century, the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft recorded the purported Catawba traditions about their history, including that they had lived in Canada until driven out by the Iroquois (supposedly with French help). They migrated to Kentucky and to Botetourt County, Virginia, and then around 1660 settled on the Catawba River, contesting it with the Cherokee.

But, Mooney later dismissed most elements of Schoolcraft's record as "absurd, the invention and surmise of the would-be historian who records the tradition." He pointed out that, aside from the French never having been known to help the Iroquois, the Catawba had been recorded by 1567 in the same area of the Catawba River as their later territory. Mooney accepted the tradition that the Catawba and Cherokee had made the Broad River their mutual boundary, following a protracted struggle.

The Catawba were long in a state of warfare with northern tribes, particularly the Iroquois Seneca, and the Algonquian-speaking Lenape, who had become vassals of the Iroquois. The Catawba chased their raiding parties back to the north in the 1720s and 1730s, going across the Potomac River. At one point, a party of Catawba is said to have followed a party of Lenape who attacked them, and to have overtaken them near Leesburg, Virginia. There they fought a pitched battle. Similar encounters in this longstanding warfare were reported to have occurred at present-day Franklin, West Virginia (1725), Hanging Rocks and the mouth of the Potomac South Branch in West Virginia, and near the mouths of Antietam Creek (1736) and Conococheague Creek in Maryland. Mooney asserted that the name of Catawba Creek in Botetourt came from an encounter in these wars with the northern tribes, not from the Catawba having lived there.

The colonial governments of Virginia and New York held a council at Albany, New York in 1721, attended by delegates from the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) and the Catawba. The colonists asked for peace between the Confederacy and the Catawba. The American Indians promised to stay in their own territories; the Iroquois agreed to north of the Potomac. The colonists gained the tribes' permission for European-American colonists to use the Indian Road or Great Warriors' Path (later called the Great Wagon Road) through the Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia backcountry without interference from the Native Americans. This heavily traveled path, used for centuries by the Native Americans, went through the Shenandoah Valley to the South.

In 1738, a smallpox epidemic broke out in South Carolina. It caused many deaths, not only among the Anglo-Americans, but also among the Catawba and other tribes, like the Sissipahaw, who had no natural immunity to the disease, which had been endemic in Europe for centuries. In 1759, a smallpox epidemic killed nearly half the tribe. Native Americans suffered high fatalities from such infectious Eurasian diseases.

In 1744 the Treaty of Lancaster, made at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, renewed the Covenant Chain between the Iroquois and the colonists. The governments had not been able to prevent settlers going into Iroquois territory, but the governor of Virginia offered the tribe payment for their land claim. The peace was probably final for the Iroquois, who had established the Ohio Valley as their preferred hunting ground by right of conquest. The more western tribes continued warfare against the Catawba, who were so reduced that they could raise little resistance. In 1762, a small party of Algonquian Shawnee killed the noted Catawba chief, King Hagler, near his own village. From this time, the Catawba ceased to be of importance except in conjunction with the colonists.

In 1763, South Carolina confirmed a reservation for the Catawba of 15 miles square, on both sides of the Catawba River, within the present York and Lancaster counties. When British troops approached during the American Revolutionary War in 1780, the Catawba withdrew temporarily into Virginia. They returned after the Battle of Guilford Court House, and settled in two villages on the reservation. These were known as Newton, the principal village, and Turkey Head, on opposite sides of Catawba River.

In 1826, the Catawba leased nearly half their reservation to whites for a few thousand dollars of annuity, on which the few survivors chiefly depended. In 1840 by the Treaty of Nation Ford with South Carolina, the Catawba sold all of their 144,000 acres (15 square miles) reserved by the King of England to the state but a single square mile, on which they now reside. The treaty was invalid ab initio because the state did not have the right to make it and did not get federal approval. About the same time, a number of the Catawba, dissatisfied with their condition among the whites, removed to the eastern Cherokee in western North Carolina but, finding their position among their old enemies equally unpleasant, all but one or two soon returned to South Carolina. An old woman, the last survivor of this emigration, died among the Cherokee in 1889. A few Cherokee intermarried with the Catawba.

At a later period some Catawba removed to the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory and settled near present-day Scullyville, Oklahoma. They merged with the Choctaw and did not retain separate tribal identity.

The Catawba were sedentary agriculturists, who also fished and hunted for game. They had customs similar to neighboring Native Americans in the Piedmont. The men were good hunters. The women have been noted makers of pottery and baskets, arts which they still preserve. They seem to have practiced the custom of head-flattening to a limited extent, as did several of the neighboring tribes. By reason of their dominant position, the Catawba had gradually absorbed the broken tribes of South Carolina, to the number, according to Adair, of perhaps 20.

When the English first settled South Carolina about 1682, they estimated the Catawba at about 1,500 warriors, or about 4,600 people in total. They named the Catawba River and Catawba County after the indigenous people. By 1728, the Catawba had been reduced to about 400 warriors, or about 1400 persons. In 1738, they suffered from a smallpox epidemic, which also affected nearby tribes and the whites. In 1743, even after incorporating several small tribes, the Catawba numbered fewer than 400 warriors. In 1759, they again suffered from smallpox, and in 1761, had some 300 warriors, or about 1,000 people. By 1775 they had only 400 people in total; in 1780, they had 490; and, in 1784, only 250 were reported. During the nineteenth century, their numbers continued to decline, to 450 in 1822, and a total of 110 people in 1826. As of 2006, their population had increased to about 2600.