CHEROKEE HISTORY (with a focus on the "Corridor")

European contact

In historical times, the Cherokee, Creek, and Yuchi tribes occupied the upper Savannah River at various periods. When the first Anglo traders made contact with the Native People in the Tugaloo Corridor area, it was the Cherokees that occupied the area. The Creek were primarily in the west and the ancient Yuchi had been split into enclaves. The first English traders to the Cherokee came from Virginia colony. After the establishment of the Charles Towne colony, competition was the order of the day.

European contact changed the Native world. In the Savannah River area the Yuchi and Shawnee were "removed" and the Cherokee and Creek became the primary tribes of contact for the English.

Tribe distribution in SE
circa 17th century

[click map for larger image]

Yuchi (Euchee)

The Tsoyaha (Yuchi) are not well represented in the history books. While the Yuchi were a large powerful tribe according to reports of the De Soto expedition, evidence indicates that disease/epidemics ravaged the Yuchi after the Spanish men visited the East Tennessee area.

The Yuchi were known to have widely scattered villages that ranged from Florida to Illinois, and from the Carolina coast to the Mississippi River.

Legend has it that the tribe split in half over politics, and the fate of remaining half is not known. We do know that much of what is now Tennessee was occupied by a tribe with cultural characteristics identical to the Mouse Creek (Uchean) culture for at least 6 or 8 centuries, and that these villages intermingled with those of the neighboring tribes.

It was widely theorized that the Yuchi in their widely scattered villages throughout the Southeastern United States, represented the original inhabitants prior to he influx of the Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonkian Peoples. It is certain that the Yuchi were among the Mound-building People, and therefore among the oldest recognizable residents of the Southeast.

The arrival of the Europeans destabilized the delicately balanced alliances that allowed the Yuchi to live in widely scattered villages among many other peoples. The Yuchi villages in East Tennessee, decimated by disease and hostile neighbors, fled to join other Yuchi living down on the Savannah and Chattahoochee Rivers and the Panhandle of Florida, where they failed to be distinguished from the Creek (Muskhogean) peoples that surrounded/dominated the area. (Ultimately many Yuchi were incorporated into the Cherokee, Seminoles, Creek and probably other Nations, and or "assimilated" _ a scattered people absorbed into a desperately changing world). [from http://www.yuchi.org]

Shawnee (Shawano, Savannah, Sewanee)

Shawnee usually prefer to call themselves the Shawano - sometimes given as Shawanoe or Shawanese. South Carolina colonists knew them as the Savannah or Savannuca.

The Shawnees were driven from the Ohio Valley during the first part of the Beaver Wars (1630-1700). The Shawnee lacked firearms and were forced to abandon most of the upper Ohio Valley during the late 1660s. Rather than retreat enmass to Wisconsin, they dispersed into four groups. Two of these moved south towards the Cherokee in eastern Tennessee. Although relations between them had not always been friendly, the Cherokee were already beginning to have their own problems with the Iroquois and allowed one group of Shawnee (Chillicothe and Kispoko) to settle in the Cumberland Basin as a buffer against the Chickasaw (traditional Cherokee enemies).

The Cherokee gave permission to the second Shawnee group (Hathawekela) to cross the Appalachians and settle on the Savannah River in South Carolina to provide protection from the Cherokee's Catawba enemies in the east. After the settlement of South Carolina in 1670, British traders first encountered Shawnee, who they called Savannah, on the upper Savannah River in 1674. Their principal village, known as Savannah Town, was nearly opposite the present Augusta, Ga. It was an important trading point, and Ft Moore was afterward built upon the site. The Savannah river takes its name from this tribe, as appears from the statement of Adair, who mentions the "Savannah river, so termed on account of the Shawano Indians having formerly lived there," plainly showing that the two names are synonyms for the same tribe.

The Cherokee had allowed the Shawnee to settle in the area as protection from the Catawba, and they did this job almost too well. As fighting erupted between the Savannah and Catawba, the British did not remain entirely neutral. The Savannah were less cooperative and seemed hostile to further settlement. Meanwhile, they were attracting Iroquois war parties to the area which posed a danger to everyone, including whites. Under constant attack from the Catawba and Yamasee who were well-armed by the British, the Savannah began to leave the area in small groups between 1690 and 1710. After the main body had been weakened by constant defections, the remaining Savannah met a final defeat by the Catawba in 1707, the date which marks their final expulsion from South Carolina. Some of the Hathawekela went north to Pennsylvania in 1706 and joined the Shawnee who were already part of the Iroquois covenant chain. Others found refuge with the Creek in Alabama settling first on the Chattahoochee and later the Tallapoosa. The rest joined their relatives in Tennessee.
[from http://www.tolatsga.org/shaw.html]