Tutelo/Saponi/Occaneechi in Virginia

in 1970 the US Geological Survey concluded that the Tutelo and Saponi spoke a Siouan language, but the language of the Occaneechi was unclear
Source: National Atlas of the United States of America, Indian tribes, Cultures & Languages (1970)

Languages indicate how tribal units are connected with each other. When European colonists reached North America, the Piedmont and Southwest Virginia appears to have been occupied primarily by Native Americans who spoke a Siouan language. Tribes living east of the Fall Line, in the Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle/Pamlico Sound watersheds, spoke Algonquian languages. Those living along the Meherrin and Nottoway rivers, plus the Cherokee in far Southwest Virginia, the western parts of the Carolinas, and eastern Tennessee spoke Iroquoian languages.

The different language groups indicate that Siouan-speaking peoples migrated into the Piedmont while Algonquian-speaking groups settled east of the Fall Line. Iroquoian-speaking migrants ended up divided into people living on the eastern end of the Roanoke River (Meherrin, Nottoway, and Tuscarora) and west of the Blue Ridge (Cherokee).

Descendants of hunting bands who had lived in the Piedmont and western Virginia during the Paleo-Indian and Archaic periods evidently were incorporated into those new groups and adopted Siouan languages. Though some archeologists associate Eastern Woodland Tradition pottery with Siouan-speaking groups, defining culture by pottery style is problematic. It would be similar to defining cultures today by clothing. Cowboy hats may be associated with west-of-the-Mississippi-River culture... but people all across Virginia, of different ethnicities and religious beliefs, wear cowboy hats.¹

Before the arrival of European colonists, disruption of traditional Woodland Period societies and migrations were triggered by environmental changes. When temperature and rainfall changes produced a drought, people moved. In the 1300's, regional cooling during the Little Ice Age triggered significant migrations to the south. About 1,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Occaneechi-Saponi band migrated from the Ohio River Valley into the Roanoke River watershed and the Piedmont of Virginia/North Carolina.²

The tribes on the Piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas evolved into two Siouan-speaking groups. European colonists in the 1600's discovered a northern group of Monacan and Manahoac occupying the Piedmont south of the Potomac River, plus Saponi, Tutelo, and Occaneechi living near the Roanoke River. The Eno, Sara (Cheraw), Keyauwee, Shakori (Shoccores), Pedee (Pedea), Congaree, Wateree, and Santee lived in the Piedmont that became part of the Carolina colonies. Under pressure from the colonists, those tribes eventually became associated with the Catawba in the early 1700's.³

The arrival of European colonists triggered migrations in the 1600's. Colonists established their first settlements, from Virginia to Massachusetts, along the Atlantic Ocean coastline where rivers were navigable east of the Fall Line. As a result, tribes living near the East Coast had the earliest access to guns.

Those tribes living closest to the ocean, such as the Powhatan paramount chiefdom near Jamestown, were displaced by colonists. Tribes slightly further to the west, in territory beyond the initial capacity of the colonial population to occupy land, were able to trade beaver, deerskins, and other furs for guns.

Both physical and population geography gave the members of the Haudenosaunee confederacy living west of the Hudson River an advantage. The five Iroquois tribes traded initially with the Dutch and then with the English to obtain guns. Those tribes used their new military capacity to expand control over the fur trade.

The members of the Haudenosaunee confederacy conquered their rivals during the Beaver Wars in the 1650's. Prior to the colonists beginning to settle west of the Blue Ridge in Virginia during the 1730's, the Iroquois displaced the Susquehannock, Delaware, Erie, and Siouan-speaking tribes in the Susquehanna River watershed and Piedmont.

The Iroquois also raided further south. Their attacks altered the settlement pattern of the Siouan-speaking tribes in the Dan River watershed during the 1600's:⁴

During the last half of the Dan River phase (A.D. 1200-1450) we see a dramatic increase in settlement size and density. Most villages were located along the banks of the Smith and May Rivers in southern Virginia and the Dan River in North Carolina. Based on information drawn from a number of Dan River phase sites, villages were circular, about one to two acres in size, and surrounded by a defensive palisade, or stockade.

Within the palisade would have been 15 to 20 households; the households were circular in shape with associated storage pits, burials, and hearths. Houses were located next to palisade walls and surrounded an open, central plaza where community activities took place.

The increase in size of these communities seems to be associated with rapidly growing populations that were relying more extensively on maize cultivation. The construction of palisades to protect villages may have been related to increasing raids coming from the Iroquois to the north–a threat that was well-documented during the latter half of the 1600s.

In the James River watershed upstream of the Fall Line, the Monacan established a paramount confederacy similar to the governance structure of the Powhatan and Piscataway. The other Siouan-speaking tribes in Virginia lived as disaggregated communities, evidently trading and interacting with each other peacefully but without one single leader asserting control over a large number of towns.

The Tutelo were one of the small Siouan groups. They may have been living along the Big Sandy River near modern Williamson, West Virginia, before being forced from their homeland by the Iroquois. The Tutelo appear to have moved south, bypassing the land controlled by the Monacan confederacy, and resettled at the headwaters of the Roanoke River. English colonists first encountered the Tutelo at Totero Town, perhaps at the modern city of Salem.

The Saponis, also known as the Monasukapanough, may have already been living along the Roanoke River when the Tutelo arrived. Together they were known as the Nahyssans. Their territory in the late 1600's included land on both sides of the Blue Ridge, stretching from modern-day Roanoke to Lynchburg and north to the Monacan territory near Charlottesville.

The Sapony at one time lived in the headwaters of the James River. By the mid-1600's, they were living in two major towns on the Staunton/Roanoke River near present-day Charlotte Court House. English traders referred to the towns as Sapon and Sapony West.

The Siouan tribes in the Roanoke River watershed, including the Occaneechi, Keyauwees and Shakori, were decentralized with each town governing itself. Archeology and historical records reveal that towns had a defensive palisade, so there was a military threat from some other group(s) before European colonists arrived. Palisades seen in historic time may have been needed to provide protection from raiding parties that came from the Iroquois to the north and the Catawba from the south. The source of the threat that caused construction of prehistoric palisades may have been more local rivalries.⁵

The first English to reach the Roanoke River arrived in the 1580's as part of the expeditions associated with the "lost colony" of Roanoke. Those colonists interacted with Algonquian-speaking coastal tribes.

The first colonists to make contact with Native Americans who lived inland along the Roanoke River, and to leave a record of that contact, were part of an 1650 expedition led by Edward Bland and Abraham Wood. Wood was trying to expand his fur trading business based at Fort Henry on the Appomattox River.

After a peace treaty in 1646 ended the Third Anglo-Powhatan War, Wood saw an opportunity to travel along the Occaneechi Trading Path. The Occaneechi, who lived on an island in the Roanoke River near modern Clarksville, had established a trading path extending from the Fall Line on the Appomattox River to the Cherokee towns on the Tennessee River, west of the Blue Ridge.

Wood may have been looking for a way to bypass the Occaneechi and trade directly with other tribes, potentially reducing the cost of furs. The expedition in 1650 was also a way to discover potentially-valuable lands which Wood might patent. ⁶

In 1670, 20 years later, John Lederer explored west of the Fall Line. He encountered the Saponi living on the Roanoke River in modern-day Charlotte County. By that time the settlement may have included a mixture of Monacan, Saponi and Tutelo who migrated to the Occaneechi trading place after European colonists began disrupting Native American societies in the Piedmont.

Lederer described the Siouan-speaking tribal groups as:⁷

...distinguished into several Nations of Mahoc, Nuntaneuck, Nutaly, Nahyssan, Sapon, Managog, Mangoack, Akenatzy, and Monakin, etc.

John Lederer explored into the Piedmont territory controlled by the Siouan-speaking groups, reaching the Akenatzy (Occaneechi) town on the Roanoke River
Source: University of North Carolina, The Discoveries Of John Lederer

In 1671, Abraham Wood sent Thomas Batte (Batts) and Robert Hallom (Fallam) west from Wood's trading fort the Fall Line on the Appomattox River. Wood probably sought to obtain direct access to deerskins and other furs, seeking to open trading relations with the Native Americans who were providing skins that the Occaneechi brought to his fort to trade.

the Occaneechi Trading Path provided access for traders at Petersburg to the Native American towns on the Piedmont of North Carolina
Source: J. Carter Brown Library, "Early Maps of the American South," A compleat map of North-Carolina from an actual survey by Captn. Collet, Governor of Fort Johnston (by John Abraham Bayly, 1700)

Guides from the Appomattoc tribe led Batte and Hallom to the Tutelo at Totero Town. Some accounts suggest that encounter was on the New River near modern Radford, but it was likely to have been on the Roanoke River at the site of the modern James I. Moyer Sports Complex in Salem.

The Tutelo provided a guide for Batte and Hallom to go further west across the Eastern Continental Divide; they may have gone as far west as modern Pearisburg. Along the New River, Batte and Hallom found corn fields which had been abandoned recently by "Mohecan." The reference may indicate that the Monacans considered the New River valley to be part of its territory.

After returning to Totero Town, Batte and Hallom met "Mehetan Indians" who had arrived there. One of those Native Americans told the explorers that they had been:⁸

... half way to the place they now live at. That the next town beyond them lived on a plain level, from whence came abundance of salt. That he could inform us no further by reason that there were a great company of Indians that lived upon the great Water.

If the Mehetan statement was accurately reported, it is possible that if Batt and Hallom had continued traveling across the mountains they would have encountered Siouan-speaking Yuchi at modern-day Saltville.

In 1676, Bacon's Rebellion demonstrated that colonists were willing to attack even the peaceful Pamunkey and Occaneechi tribes, who were allies of the colonial government. That rebellion was initiated in part by efforts of Governor Berkeley to establish tight control over trade with Native American tribes. Leading colonists such as William Byrd I were unwilling to let Berkeley monopolize the business.

Bacon's Rebellion was triggered by a dispute on the northern edge of colonial settlement with the Doeg. Bacon marched his forces to the Roanoke River and got the Occaneechi to go further south and return with Susquehannock captives. Rather than reward the Occaneechi, Bacon then massacred them. The Occaneechi then moved south to the Eno River, near modern Hillsborough North Carolina.⁹

In the late 1600's, the small towns of the Siouan-speaking tribes between the Blue Ridge and the Fall Line were threatened from north and south. The Cherokee and Catawba raided north into territory controlled by the Iroquois. Particularly after suppressing and incorporating the Susquehannocks in the 1670's, the Iroquois traveled south through Virginia's Piedmont to attack rivals south of the Roanoke River.

Much of the Virginia Piedmont became a "shatter zone" and was depopulated. The Monacan retreated into the valleys of the Blue Ridge. Many of the Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, plus some Monacan refugees known as Stuckanox and other groups, migrated to join the Siouan-speaking Catawba in North Carolina.

Tutelos moved during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.

Some of the Saponis, Tutelos, and Keyauwees joined together at the Occaneechi town on the Roanoke River. Trade between the Virginia colonists at the Fall Line and the Cherokee, who lived west of the Blue Ridge and had better access to deerskins, continued through the Piedmont on the Occaneechi Path.¹⁰

the town of the Occaneechee (Akenatzy) on an island in the Roanoke River was a key trading location in the Piedmont for deerskins and furs from groups living as far west as the Tennnessee River
Source: University of North Carolina, A new discription of Carolina by the order of the Lords Proprietors, (John Ogilby, c.1671); North Carolina State Archives, A New and Accurate Map of the Province of North and South Carolina, Georgia, etc. (1747); University of North Carolina, A Compleat map of North-Carolina from an actual survey (by John Collet, 1770)

Living west of colonial settlement did not protect the Occaneechi during Bacon's Rebellion. He marched his rebels to the town and convinced them to capture Susquehannocks blamed for "depredations" in the backcountry. Bacon's men then massacred the Occaneechi and looted the town.¹¹

After Bacon's Rebellion, many of the remaining Siouan-speaking Native Americans in the Virginia Piedmont migrated to the Yadkin River and began living with the Catawbas at Trading Ford. North Carolina explorer and surveyor John Lawson, found the Tutelo living west of the Saponis in 1701. Moving very close to, or into, the mountains reduced exposure to raids from both the Iroquois and the English colonists.

Following Lawson's visit, the Virginia Native Americans moved again and founded Sapona Town.¹²

Governor Alexander Spotswood feared the French as well as the Iroquois. British officials considered the possibility that explorers from Canada could establish connections with Shawnee and other tribes in the Mississippi River Valley and gain control of all lands west of the Blue Ridge.

Spotswood responded in two ways. He encouraged colonists loyal to England to settle west of the Blue Ridge, creating a buffer of loyal citizens that served as an early warning system before French/Native American raiders could come east into the Piedmont. Scotch-Irish and German-speaking immigrants were welcomed even though they did not worship according to the Anglican faith; being Protestant and not Catholic like the French was sufficient.

William Beverley and other members of the Virginia elite were given land grants in the Shenandoah Valley. Even individuals without strong connections to the First Families of Virginia were given land grants, based on their ability to recruit colonists. Some grants were awarded within the boundaries of territory claimed by Lord Fairfax, leading to almost a century of legal disputes.

When the Tuscarora War started in 1711 in North Carolina, the Virginia tribes did not join in attacks on the colonists. Even the Iroquoian-speaking Meherrin and Nottoway stayed passive.

On October 9, 1711, Governor Spotswood got the "tributary" allies of the colonists to affirm their commitment to peace, as stated in the treaty adopted after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Practically the tribes might provide only minimal support to colonial militia in case of a battle with Tuscsarora, Catawba or Iroquois, but at least they would not be a threat requiring militia forces to guard/fight them. Spotswood then got some of the Tuscaroras to sign a peace treaty.

Another treaty in 1713 reduced tensions significantly. Spotswood planned to relocate the Tuscarora from the Virginia-Carolina border region to a new fort, to be built on the Rapidan River.

Those measures were not sufficient to guarantee a continued peace of the southern frontier. The governor also sought to get all the tribes to move from their scattered towns to one location, where he could control trade and manage the sale of weapons and gunpowder. Once consolidated, he also intended to transform the culture of the remaining 300 or so Siouan-speaking Native Americans living in on the Virginia Piedmont south of the James River.

Fort Christanna was built on the south bank of the Meherrin River in 1714-1715. Spotwood signed a treaty in which Tawhee Sockha Hoontky of the Saponies, Nehawroose in behalf of the Hoonthymiha of the Stukanoe Indians Chaweo in behalf of the Hoontky of the Occaneechee Indians and Mawseeuntkey, and Hoontky of the Tottero Indians ageed to "maintain a strict Peace, Friendship and Amity with all her Majestys subjects," plus:¹³

The said Indians do consent and promise that as soon as a Tract of Land shallbe alotted them for their habitation, and a School Master and Minister establishedamong them, all their Children, and also the Children of any other Nationof Indians who shall incorporate with them shall be taught the English languageand instructed in the principles of the Christian Religion.

The fort was built quickly and cheaply. It was five-sided, with a wooden palisade of split ("mauld") wood. Instead of bastions for firing cannon at each corner, five houses were built inside for the soldiers and traders. Warehouses were built as well to stockpile English trading goods and acquired furs. Nearby, outside the walls, Spotswood had a house constructed for his personal use once he was no longer governor.

A 1716 letter said:¹⁴

...the Fort consists of five large pentagonal log houees which serve for bastions and a curtain of mauld wood wi'th earth on the inside from one house to another, aft of the four closed. Each house has a great gun ab.w 1400 lb. each.

About 300 Siouan-speaking Native Americans moved there. In addition to their housing, they built sweathouses made from wattle and clay near the cold waters of the Meherrin River.

Some English settlers also chose to live there, including blacksmiths who could repair weapons and wagons. The various tribal groups were all labelled "Sapony" according to the 1714 treaty. A schoolteacher was hired to teach Native Americans at Fort Christanna.

Virginia officials also sought to entice the Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway to move to the fort. Force was planned to get the Iroquoian-speaking Meherrin there. They had left the territory where they had lived in 1677 and migrated downstream to the mouth of the Meherrin River, ending up in the borderland where the boundary of Virginia and North Carolina was not clearly defined. The Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway and Meherrin declined to move.

Governor Spotswood saw control of trade as an important military tool, and also as an opportunity for him to profit personally. Independent traders acquired skins by selling guns, ammunition, and gunpowder, which were essential for killing deer. Spotswood established the Virginia Indian Company in hopes of controlling sales of military equipment, and obtained a share of the company for himself.

Fort Christanna was an initial success. Virginia traders could bring trade goods and Native Americans could bring furs, to one location on the Meherrin River with a town of 300 just outside the walls of the fort.

Other traders and English merchants, who were excluded from making their traditional profits by the monopoly, did not consider consolidating trade to be a success. They got King George I to block the Virginia Indian Company charter.

The Virginia Indian Company was required to fund the military guard and maintain the wooden structures at Fort Christanna after December 1716, but without a monopoly the economic capacity of the company was constrained. On May 24, 1718, the General Assembly decided to abandon the fort and the school. The schoolteacher then started teaching at the Brafferton School at the College of William and Mary. To maintain trade, the Virginia Indian Company repaired the fort and invited the Saponis to move inside it.

After a surprise attack in 1717 by Seneca/Meherrin warriors killed and captured about a dozen Catawba, the Saponis no longer viewed the site as secure.

By 1722, Fort Christanna was abandoned. The Virginia Indian Company investors divided the 36-square mile property among themselves.

Some Saponis moved inside the fort. Others left to join the Catawba in North Carolina, and a portion of them later migrated north to New York in the 1740's.

Others established new communities nearby in what today is Dinwiddie County. Those who founded the Flat Rock Creek settlement in modern Lunenburg and Mecklenburg counties moved into North Carolina after the American Revolution. There they created the High Plains settlement. The North Carolina government labelled them as "Indians of Person County" until 2003 to "Sappony."¹⁵

William Byrd II did not consider the efforts of the teacher at Fort Christanna, to transform Saponi culture through education, to have been a success. Byrd wrote in 1727:¹⁶

In short, all the pains he had taken among the infidels had no other effect but to make them something cleanlier than other Indians are.

Byrd recorded a visit with the Saponi on the Meherrin River in 1728. By that time, they had moved east from the Piedmont of Virginia and Carolina, merging previously-separate groups that shared the common Siouan language. In addition to the Tutelo and Saponi who had lived in the Roanoke River watershed, some apparently came from a one-time "Totero Town" in Albemarle County near Scottsville. Others may have been descendants of people displaced from Monacan towns on the James River upstream of the Fall Line.

after mapping the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina, in 1733 Edward Mosely recorded a Tutelo Fort on the Pee Dee River
Source: University of North Carolina, A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina (Edward Mosely, 1733)

In 1749, when Thomas Walker explored through southwestern Virginia and passed through Cumberland Gap, those Native Americans had largely abandoned their towns west of the Blue Ridge. The area was a conflict zone and was visited too often by Catawba and Cherokee war parties moving north to attack the Iroquois and northern raiders moving south.

Relocation and consolidation provided greater capacity for the Siouan-speaking groups to defend against attacks from Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee from the west and the six Haudenosaunee tribes (now including the Tuscarora) from the north:¹⁷

This People is now made up of the Remnant of Several other Nations, of which the moft confiderable are the Sapponys, the Occaneches, and Steukenhocks, who not finding themfelves Separately Numerous enough for their Defence, have agreed to unite into one Body, and all of them now go under the Name of the Sapponys...

...They dwelt formerly not far below the Mountains, upon Yadkin River, about 200 Miles Weft and by South from the Falls of Roanoak. But about 25 Years ago they took Refuge in Virginia, being no longer in condition to make Head not only againft the Northern Indians, who are their Implacable enemies, but alfo againft moft of thofe to the South.

William Mayo's 1728 map of the "dividing line" boundary between Virginia-Carolina showed the Occaneechi Trading Path downstream from the Ackoneechy Island
Source: University of North Carolina, "Early Maps of the American South," A Map of the boundary between Virginia and Carolina laid out by His Majesty's order and assent of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina in the year 1728 (by William May, 1728)

the Occaneechi, Saponi, and Tutelo had a network of trails for trading between the Piedmont and Blue Ridge
Source: Yale University Library, Indian Trails of the Southeast (by William E. Myer, 1925)

A group also settled on the Eno River, near modern-day Durham. The Riverwalk in Hillsborough, North Carolina has an Occaneechi Village Replica Site.¹⁸

by the mid-1700's, there was an Occaneechi settlement on the Eno River south of the Virginia-North Carolina border
Source: Library of Congress, A new & accurate map of the provinces of North & South Carolina, Georgia &c. (by Emanuel Bowen, 1752)

Erie/Rickahocan/Westo in Virginia

John Lederer

The Monacan in Virginia

Native American Tribes in Virginia Since Contact

Siouan-Speaking Native Americans in Virginia

Source: Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation: From the Revolutionary War to the 20th Century

Source: Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, The Occaneechi in Present Day

a 1671 map showed the main Occaneechi town on the Roanoke River
Source: North Carolina Maps, A new discription of Carolina by the order of the Lords Proprietors (John Ogilby, ~1671)

Source: Lignum Crucis Productions, Our People: The Sappony

Lignum Crucis Productions, Our People: Occaneechi Band of Saponi Nation

Links

• American Anthropologist
• On the Historic Location of the Tutelo and the Mohetan in the Ohio Valley (1942)
• American Indian Quarterly
• An Odyssey among the Iroquois: A History of Tutelo Relations in New York (2005)
• Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation
• Brunswick County, Virginia
• Fort Christanna Historical Site
• Colonizing the Virginia Frontier: Fort Christanna and Governor Spotswood's Indian Policy
• Database for Indigenous Cultural Evolution (DICE)
• Tutelo
• Excavating Occaneechi Town: Archaeology of an Eighteenth Century Indian Village in North Carolina
• Fort Christanna Historical and Recreational Park
• Haliwa-Saponi
• LearnNC (North Carolina Humanities Council)
• About the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation
• About the Sappony
• North Carolina's American Indian history: A webliography
• The Haliwa-Saponi
• The Waccamaw Siouan
• Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation
• The Lost Creek Settlement of Vigo County, Indiana
• Occaneechi Saponi and Tutelo of the Saponi Nation: aka Monacan and Piedmont Catawba; Includes The Eastern Band of the Cherokee and Lumbee Nation and Southeastern Indian Nations, etc.
• North Carolina History Project
• Occaneechi
• Saponi Indians
• Pittsylvania Historical Society
• Rediscovering Pittsylvania's "Missing" Native Americans
• Prince William Network/Virginia Department of Education
• Virginia's First People
• Saponi-Catawba Nation of the Ohio Valley
• The History of The Saponi-Catawba
• Saponi Nation of Ohio
• Saponi History
• Sappony
• Searching for Saponitown
• Smithsonian Institution
• Handbook of North American Indians: Southeast
• The Tutelo Tribe and Language (Horatio Hale, 1883)
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Documenting the American South
• John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof. And A Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel'd Thro' Several Nations of Indians. Giving a Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, &c.
• Research Laboratories of Archeology
• Excavating Occaneechi Town
• Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries - Virginia Birding and Wildlife Trail
• Fort Christanna Historical Site
• Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
• Virginia Indian Heritage Trail

map of the southeastern Indian tribal territories and major settlements ("towns"), circa 1680
Source: Smithsonian Institution, Handbook of North American Indians (Figure 5, 2022)

References

Source: The Center at Belvedere - Charlottesville, VA, MappingErasure: Acknowledging the Siouan Indians of the Piedmont

the Saponi lived in Sapona and Nahisan, as well as the Akenatzy (Occaneechi) town, when John Lederer explored south of the James River in 1669 and 1670
(on map, north is to the right)
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, A new discription of Carolina by the order of the Lords Proprietors (by John Ogilby, c.1671)

islands in the Roanoke River near the old Occaneechi town were mapped by Confederate engineers in 1864
Source: Library of Congress, Map of Mecklenburg Co., VA (Confederate Engineer Bureau, 1864)