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!
Cape Fear Indians. A small tribe,
possibly Siouan, formerly living near the mouth of Cape Fear river, N. C.
The proper name of the tribe is unknown, this local term being applied to
them by the early colonists. They were first known to the English in 1661,
when a colony from New England made a settlement near the mouth of the
river, and soon incurred the ill will of the Indians by seizing their
children and sending them away under pretense of instructing them in the
ways of civilization, resulting in the colonists being finally driven from
the country. In 1663 another party from Barbadoes purchased lands of Wat
Coosa, head chief of the tribe, and made a settlement, which was abandoned
a few years later. Necoes and other villages then existed on the lower
part of the river. In 1665 another colony settled at the mouth of Oldtown
creek in Brunswick county, on the south side of the river, on land bought
of the Indians, but soon abandoned it, though the Indians were friendly.
The next mention of them is by the colonial governor, Col. Johnson, in a
letter of Jan. 12, 1719 (Rivers, Early Hist. So. Car., 94, 1874), which
gives a table of Indian tribes in Carolina in 1715, when their population
is given as 206 in 5 villages. They probably took part in the Yamasi war
of that and the following year, and suffered proportionately in
consequence. They are last noticed in 1751 in the record of the Albany
Conference (N. Y. Doc. Col. Hist., vi, 721, 1855) as one of the small
friendly tribes with which the South Carolina government desired the
Iroquois to be at peace.
See Mooney, Siouan Tribes of the East
Bull. B. A. E., 1894. Cape Fears.-Rivers, Early Hist. S. C., 94, 1874.
