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As soon as you were able to tote a load, you became a worker for the tribe. Indians had used porters to carry trade goods for many centuries, and a porter's typical load was up to eighty pounds. It was the way trade was done. But, soon after Europeans established trade with tribes in the backcountry, because of economies of scale, packhorses replaced porters. Resentment about being put out of work by horses, and resistance to changing a tradition as old as portering, at least in part, contributed to the outbreak of violence known to history as Bacon's Rebellion.
After Bacon's Rebellion , almost all cargo moved on horseback, until wagons replaced packhorses in the s and s. The collision between the porters and packhorse men was repeated when wagoners replaced packhorse men as the knights of the road. But that is a different story—the story of settlement, not exploration. By , settlement had come to the backcountry.
The arrival of wagons tells us that the age of exploration and frontier mostly had passed into memory. We can share in the memory of those years before settlement by finding, preserving, and studying the old trade routes. Old roads, trails, and paths help us imagine times gone by. Take a look at the old roadbed shown above.
Here they became known as the Westos to the English and as Chichimecos to the Spanish. The women of every clan of the Five Nations shall have a Council Fire ever burning in readiness for a council of the clan. In one property dispute case, the Iroquois Council sided with a claimant who had made improvements and cultivated the land over one who had left it alone. The Iroquois also traded for alcohol , a substance they did not have before the arrival of Europeans. Lemuel Penn Murder. George Washington's Background and Experience d.
Spend a moment imagining what you would have seen, heard, and smelled standing by this road two hundred years ago when it was still in use. Traders exploring for new markets and new products in the remote backcountry found and traveled along the footpaths of the people who had come before—the Indians, escaped slaves and escaped indentured servants, the curious, the desperate, the invisible first people of the frontier. Young Gabriel Arthur saw no wagon roads when he ran through the country with his American Indian hosts. He and the others like him, the first European travelers and explorers, saw only footpaths.
Cowley, Herman. North Carolina Maps. When hiking near the Mohawk Trail last week, my wife asked me if the Native Americans made improvements on their trails similar to the tree and brush removal, well-placed stepping stones, and rough grooming we saw on the hiking trail. With out thinking, I answered "absolutely! It occurred to me that the section of trail we were on may well have once been a Native American trail, and that they may have constructed some of the stone steps on which we were climbing.
Is this possible? Thank you for your comment and for visiting NCpedia! That is an excellent question! I am referring your comment to our library's Reference Team so they can assist you further. A staff member from our library will be reaching out to you via e-mail soon. He gave a very interesting presentation about the evolution of early Native American trails into our present day highway system.
I would highly recommend that you attend his talks even if you are not a history buff. Comments are not published until reviewed by NCpedia editors at the State Library of NC , and the editors reserve the right to not publish any comment submitted that is considered inappropriate for this resource. NCpedia will not publish personal contact information in comments, questions, or responses. If you would like a reply by email, note that some email servers, such as public school accounts, are blocked from accepting messages from outside email servers or domains.
If you prefer not to leave an email address, check back at your NCpedia comment for a reply. Please allow one business day for replies from NCpedia. Skip to main content. Wiley, Brenda. October 11, Accessed February 23, Colonial period Magnuson, Tom. Dear Mr. Tiede, Thank you for your comment and for visiting NCpedia!
Slaving in the South, however, probably did not become fully established until some time in the late seventeenth century, when Jamestown traders, recognizing the need for laboroers to work the tobacco plantations, engaged Piedmont groups like the Occaneechis and the Tuscaroras as slave raiders. Like the Iroquois, these Piedmont slavers first raided among their enemies close at hand. During this time Cherokee-speaking people living in the southern Appalachians may have moved southwest, away from the slave raiders, with some perhaps moving into areas of north Georgia that had been vacated during the collapse of the chiefdoms.
In the late s another group of Indians fleeing Iroquois slave raiding, possibly the Erie, settled on the Savannah River. Here they became known as the Westos to the English and as Chichimecos to the Spanish.
Trade[edit]. The Iroquois traded excess corn and tobacco for the pelts from the tribes to the north and the wampum from the tribes to the east. According to this theory, the Iroquois warred primarily to obtain the trade goods of their neighbors who were in closer contact with Europeans. After the center of fur.
The Westos were predatory slave raiders, allied with English slavers in Virginia and heavily armed. By , in their strategy of playing the English and French off each other and in an effort to replace the hundreds who had died in an epidemic, Iroquois slave raiders struck out to the west and south.
Thus began the Iroquois southern campaigns against the "flatheads," a term the Iroquois applied to all of the southern groups because of their custom of flattening the backs of their infants' skulls at birth. In the South the Iroquois ranged far and wide. The Iroquois campaign lasted almost forty years; the Westos' reign of terror lasted almost twenty years. Assailed from the north by the Iroquois and from the east by the Westos, Indians deep in the interior of Georgia sought refuge by moving southward and westward.
The groups that had settled along the upper Oconee dispersed, with some moving to the Chattahoochee River and with some perhaps joining the Timucuas and Apalachees. Others moved closer to the Spanish mission Indians of Guale and Mocama, on the Georgia coast, and became known as the Yamasees. The Cherokees , somewhat protected by their mountain location, began to coalesce as an identifiable political entity.
The latter two divisions made up the Cherokee inhabitants of north Georgia. Westos slaving ended in When it became obvious that they were not under English control, the Carolinians hired a group of Shawnees, who had moved to the Savannah River in possibly as one of many groups leaving the Ohio Valley because of Iroquois raiding , to destroy the Westos.
In another testament to the unsettled alliances of the time, in the Yamasees, now allied with the English, began raiding the mission Indians, decimating the Timucua of northeast Florida by By this time Carolina and Virginia traders also began to make contact with many of the natives in the interior of Georgia, Yuchi Indians of Georgia. Meanwhile, the same forces swept into the west and north of present-day Georgia, as native slavers, trading with the English, French, and Dutch, raided far and wide throughout the eastern woodlands. Yuchi Indians of Georgia.
As the coalescent societies began to form, Native Americans in Georgia and throughout the South revolted against the slave trade and the English, in particular. This revolt, known as the Yamasee War of , served the Indians' purpose of reforming the trade, if not annihilating the English. Although enslaved Indians continued to be bought and sold, Yuchi Hunters.
When General James Edward Oglethorpe settled Savannah in , the natives he encountered were quite different from the native peoples that Hernando de Soto had encountered years earlier; they were different even from the native peoples that the Virginia traders had encountered years earlier. For Oglethorpe encountered the great coalescent societies of the Late Historic Period, the Cherokees and the Creeks—societies quite experienced in dealing with Europeans. Their societies had been shaped by their experiences with Europeans and in response to the new world economy in which they now were enmeshed.
Hide Caption. Hernando de Soto. Yuchi Queen and King. Yuchi Hunters. Further Reading. Kathryn E. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Robbie Ethridge and Charles M. Hudson, eds.
Charles M. Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds. Leitch Wright Jr. Cite This Article. Lemuel Penn Murder. James V. Carmichael Battle of Pickett's Mill. Mildred Lewis Rutherford Bourbon Triumvirate.
March in Georgia History. Charles Crisp Seminole Wars. Herman Talmadge John Macpherson Berrien CSS Savannah. Noble W. Jones ca. William Stephens