While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Chaunis Temoatan (Chaun-istem-oatan, 'salt-making
village'. Topker). A country situated, in 1586, indefinitely westward from the
English settlement on Roanoke id., N. C. Ralph Lane, from misinterpreted Indian
information, believed it to have been a copper-producing region, and that it was
situated "vp that riuer Moratoc [Roanoke]," 20 days journey overland from the
Mangoaks (Nottoway), who then dwelt about 160 m. above the Roanoke settlement.
Lane's version of the Indian report shows that the Indians referred to salt
making rather than copper mining. By Bozman, Bancroft, and others, this Indian
report, as given by Lane, has been regarded as a fiction devised by a crafty
Indian to lure the English to destruction; but Reynolds says that N. Georgia
"corresponds as nearly as possible to the province of Chaunis Temoatan,
described by distance and direction in Lane s account," while Tooker places it
in the vicinity of Shawneetown, Gallatin co., Ill. In view of what Lane said of
the Moratoc r. itself, the Indians probably referred to salt springs of the
Kanawha and Little Kanawha valleys of West Virginia, or in the slopes and
foothills of the Blue Ridge and Cumberland mts. "And for that not only
Menatonon," says Lane, "but also the sauages of Moratoc themselves doe report
strange things of the head of that riuer, and that from Moratoc itself, which is
a principal towne upon that River, it is thirtie dayes as some of them say, and
some say fourtie dayes voyage to the head thereof, which head they say springeth
out of a maine rocke in that abundance; that forthwith it maketh a most violent
stream; and further, that this huge rock standeth so neere unto a sea, that many
times in stormes (the winds coming outwardly from the sea) tlie wanes thereof
are beaten into the said fresh streame, so that the fresh water for a certaine
space, groweth salt and brackish." From this it would appear that even the
sources of the Roanoke were reputed to be 30 or 40 days journey from Moratoc
town.
Consult Lane in Hakluyt, Voy., in, 1810. Reynolds in Am. Anthrop., i,
Oct., 1888; Tooker in Am. Antiq., Jan., 1895.
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includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes
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Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Frederick Webb Hodge, 1906
