The Charlotte News from Charlotte, North Carolina • Page 17

APRIU 1902. THE CHARLOTTE NEWS AND THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT SPECIAL EDITION. PAGE 9. szz I TKeir Customs, a 1fL TL. $4 Characteristic i Abor of 1 1 1 I TXiT7 Tl 11 tl 4 Some Old Historical 4 i Me.cUlethir County, 1 1 4s If I I By Rev.

W. Hoon. Tiie task of writing a sketch rela- part. He then took an instrument out of his pocket which consisted of a split reed set with fifteen rattlesnake teeth. With this he scraped the sore place until the blood came.

He then spurted warm water on the place out of his mouth and bound it up with some powdered herb, telling the man that in two days the soreness would be entirely gone, and so it was. They had houses built of stone ing seldom gathered at a greater distance than a hundred yards from the cabin of the sick. But in the treatment of small pox they were very deficient and from this one cause alone, probably more than from any other, the Indians of this section have disappeared. It seems that their only treatment for this disease wras for the patient to plunge over head into the cold ice water of the streams when the fever was at its height. Of tive to the Indian tribes who inhabited tbe section of the Carolinas vittiin twenty-five miles of the city of Charlotte is a difficult one.

It is difficult for several reasons, the chief of hieh is the scantiness of the mate- from which to glean the facts, veaily all of the works which deal 1-itV this subject are no longer printed and the copies of the old editions Kceedingly rare. bread as any English could have done and was full as neat and expeditious in her affairs." There were no women scolds among them. If they were offered an indignity by their husbands they resented it only in silsnt tears. Of the Waxhaw land it was said: "It is as red as blood and will lather like soap. The town stands on this land which holds considerably farther in the country and is such, in my opinion, that no labor of man could make it poor in one or two ages.

Here are corn stalks in their fields as thick as the small of a man's leg." A traveller among these Indians De-came lame. The medicine man went to see him and looked at the affected bread as we do butter The Indians- take a light and go among them in the night and bring away some thousands, killing them with long poles as they roost in the trees." The culinary art was practiced in a very primitive way. At one town Lawson tells us that "they came out to meet us and made us welcome with fat barbecued venison, which the woman of the cabin took and tore with her teeth so put in a mortar, beating it to rags, afterwards stews it with water and other ingredients which makes a very savory dish." I sup pose we will be willing to take John's word for the savoriness of it without wanting to make the test for ourselves. An Indian, deer-hunter is described thus: "He was the tallest Indian I ever saw, being seven feet high and a Yd real euuil ou iai as iuib wiiLtu wrhich were used for putting persons course this stopped up the pores of in who were afflicted with rheuma- the body and invariably the patient tism. Here they were given hot vapor died.

This practice was continued baths which greatly relieved the suf- among them as late as the middle of lias ever been made to gather Knows ferer. the eighteenth century. Other diseases were treated with wonderful success, the remedies be- (Continued on Page 14.) very straight complete person, always carrying with him an artificial head to hunt withal. They are made of the head of a buck, the back part of the horns being scraped and hollow for the lightness of carriage. The skin associated themselves with the Catawbas, and their descendants are now found in the little, insignificant band that now comprises the Catawba nation.

The Indians of this immediate section were of the Siouan stock and in their treatment of the white settlers were always cordial and friendly. In his "Sketches of North Carolina," Dr. Foote gives this as one of the reasons why the Scotch-Irish came to this vicinity to settle. In studying the history of the habits and customs of the North Carolina Indians we are indebted to material gleaned from the histories of Adair, Byrd, Lawson, Gatschet, Led-erer and others. The chief source of information is Lawson's history of North Carolina, which was first published in London in 1714, of which a re-print was made in Raleigh in 1800.

One of the first things which strikes us as rather singular as we pursue this study, is the information given us by Lawson and Dr. Foote, that two hundred years ago the section in which we live was at that time almost free from timber and was a vast prairie, for the most part covered with a luxuriant growth of grass and pea-vines. Dr. Foote tells us that the timber in which the country abounded fifty years ago had sprung up since the first Scotch-Irish settled here. Writing in 1846 he says: "There are large forests now where a hundred years ago not a tree and scarce a shrub could be seen.

These prairies abounded in game and supplied abundant pasturage both winter and summer for the various kinds of stock that accompanied the This sounds right strange when we consider the great amount of timber that has been cut from the "virgin forests" of all this section. Living was easy among the early inhabitants. When John Lawson wras on his trip through this part of our state he said that the most luxuriant livers he ever saw were the people who dwelt here. He wondered that is left to the setting of the shoulders seem to have completely vanned. in 1701 John Lawson, -the Surveyor-General of the Lords Proprietors, made a trip inland, starting at Charleston and ending at New Berne, he passed through this section and found many tribes of Indians whose names are now all but forgotten.

Of these tribes, the Catawbas alone have a remnant left. The other tribes who lived here vere the Waxhaws, the Saras or Xualas, the Sugerees or Shoccorees and the Saponi. "What has become of these tribes? The ordinarily accepted opinion is that they went down before the civilization of the white man. No doubt a reat many sins against the Indians will have to be answered for by the early white settlers of this country, but one thing is certain and that is, no white man will have to answer for the obliteration of these tribes above named. The first knowledge which we have of these Indians is given us by Gats-chet, a Spaniard who went through this region in 1540.

He locates for us a tribe which he calls the Xuali. This same tribe was by the Cherokees called the Suali and we know that it vas the same as the Saras or Che-raws. Let us look for a moment at the manoevres of this tribe and we will then he able to see what became of the other tribes of this vicinity for the result was invariably the same. which is lined all around with small hoops and flat sort of laths to hold it open for the arms to go in. They have a way to preserve the eyes as if living.

The hunter puts on a match coat of deer skin, with the hair on, and a part of the white of the deer skin that grows on the breast, which is fastened to the neck end of this stalking head, so hangs In these habiliments an Indian will go as near a deer as he pleases, the exact motions and behaviour of a deer being so well counterfeited by him that several times it has been known for two hunters to come up with a stalking head together, and unknown to each other, so that they have killed an Indian instead of a deer, which hath happened sometimes to be a bro ther or some dear friend; for which reason they allow not of that sort of practice where the nation is Lawson testifies as to the mark-manship of the Carolina Indians. He says of one: "He always shot with a single ball, missing but two shots in forty, they being curious artists in managing a gun to make it carry either ball or shot, true." Whether all of the tribes about here the white settlers did not push up here to live, where they could have had an abundance" at all times. "A quest after game was as freely and peremptorily enjoyed by the meanest as by him who was the highest in dignity." And that the fdllow "who was master of his gun had as good a IDIM In 1540 this tribe was located on the west bank of the Catawrba river, almost due west from where Charlotte now stands. In 1670 they were still there but five years later they were not to be found about their old habitations. Instead a tribe was found answering to their description and of the same name, located in a village on the Dan river near to where Went-worth now stands.

Twenty-fivie years pass and search is made for them at their late home but they are not found, but again a tribe is found in the northern part of South Carolina where Cheraw now is, that is proved to be this same wandering tribe of Xualas. In 1715 they have been so depopulated by the ravages of smallpox that they are unable to withstand the onsets of their enemies and they move up and join forces with their cousins, the Catawbas. What was the cause of this wander practiced flattening the head is not known. Lawson speaks of the Wax-haws as following this practice, but the others may have done so too. The method of producing these flat-heads is described as follows: "In their infancy their nurses lay the back part of their children's heads on a bag of sand; They use is placed upon the baby's forehead, it being laid with its back on a flat board and swaddled hard down thereon from one end of this engine to the other.

This method makes the claim to have continued courses of delicacies crowded upon his table as he that was master of a great purse." When camped among the Sugeree Indians somewhere near where Charlotte now stands he saw pigeons in great quantities. They rose up from everywhere and when they lighted on the trees the limbs were broken off. I must confess that I began to lose some of my faith in the truthfulness of "Gentleman John Lawson, Surveyor General of North Carolina" when I read this, but on inquiry among the child's limbs as straight as an there being some Indians that are old men who were living in Mecklenburg county in 1837, I was told that during that summer for two days the Wind all kinds of fibre on Cones and Tubes crooked inclined at their first coming into the world, who are made perfectly straight by this method. I never saw an Indian of mature age that was any ways crooked, except by accident, and that very seldom for 3 pace, conomy in Floor they cure and prevent deformities of the limbs very exactly. The instru Case Power and Packing entire earth was covered with pigeons and when they rose up in great multitudes they made it twilight at noonday, so I had to believe that friend Lawson was telling the truth.

On this same trip Lawson had an Indian guide who "walked like a horse" and the only way the rest of the party could keep up was to load the fellow down with the camp baggage. Toward evening they would relieve him of part of his load and then he would push ahead and an hour later the rest of the party would come up with him at the point he had selected for a camp and he always had a few wild turkeys and a deer or two which he had killed in close proximity to the stopping place for the night. Woodcock were always ment I spoke of being. a sort of press that is let out and in. more or less, according to the discretion of the nurse, in which they make the child's head flat: it makes the eyes stand a prodigious way asunder, and the hair nang over the forehead like the eaves of a house, wrhich is very frightful.

They being asked the reason why they practiced this method replied the Indian's sight was much strengthened and quicker thereby to discern the ing? The answer is easy. Just west of the first dwelling of these people were the Cherokees, a tribe of an altogether different tribal stock. The Xualas or Cheraws were Siouan, the Cherokees were Algonquian. The Cherokees were constantly making war on their eastern neighbors. The Cheraws became so weak that they could not repel their enemies and so moved away.

But in their settlement on the Dan, they had moved up near to as inveterate an enemy, the northern Indians of Iroquoian stock, and these made life miserable for them and again they were compelled to move. So they took their journey southward keeping to the east of their old enemies. In doing this, however, they came too near to the hostile Tus-karoras and life becoming a burden they decided to unite with their friends, the Catawbas, who seemed to game in hunting, and so never missed Charlotte, N. C. Boston, of becominsr exnert hunters." Law- verv Dlentiful.

son says that among these Waxhaws he found a woman cooking who was as cleanly about her work as any one PFIRfiF could be, "washing her hands before CHAS, W. SOUTHERN AGENT. Speaking again of the plentifulness of pigeons, Lawson says: "You may find several Indian towns of not above seventeen houses, that have move than a hundred gallons of pigeon oil or fat; they are using it with pulse or she undertook to do any cookery and repeating this unusual decency very ne able to stand against their foes. This same result followed the different tribes named above. All the red men who stayed in this section often in a day.

She made us as white GATE We are Independent Manufacturers of more than Twenty Years Experience and Wherever Known Our Name is Synonymous with Quality. CLEVELAND, 0 NG ATLANTIC Headquarters, Greensboro, N. C. H. 1.

HOPKINS, Southern Sales Agent. TACK SAUNDERS, South Carolina; 0. L. ROACH, ueorgia; UlAa. -mch, 4 9 ESMS A' J.

M. HOPKINS, Florida; W. E. MOORE, Alabama..