A Sketch of the Early History of South-Western Virginia

Abstract

No comprehensive history of Southwestern Virginia has ever been written, and a seeker after historical information concerning that region must, of a necessity, consult much source material, and check and recheck his findings before he tries to write or to talk about the section. It is with the idea of collecting in one place data to be found in a score and more of works that this paper has been prepared. writer lays no claim to being an authority on the subject, but he has spent many hours consulting books, magazine articles, and maps that deal with Southwestern Virginia, and has striven to separate fact from fiction or hearsay when he wrote down his notes. When Captain John Smith and his companions landed at Jamestown, in 1607, the Saponi and Tutelo tribes of Indians, belonging to the Monacan Confederacy of the Siouan stock, probably had a few small villages in Southwestern Virginia. These tribes were the remnants of the Siouans, that great stock which once inhabited Virginia west of a line drawn through Richmond and Fredericksburg, up to the Blue Ridge, or about one-half the area of the State. In North Carolina, the Siouians were spread over the basins of the Roanoke, the Tar, the Cape Fear, the Yadkin, and the upper Catawba rivers, comprising more than two-thirds of the area of that state. In South Carolina, these Indians peopled nearly the whole central and eastern portion. In the three states the territory in question comprises an area of about 70,000 square miles, formerly occupied by about forty different tribes.1 In prehistoric times, perhaps in the 16th century, the majority of the Siouians abandoned the country and gradually retreated across the mountains to the West, continuing their migration until they crossed the Mississippi River. The most probable cause of this great exodus was the pressure from the north and from the south of hostile tribes of alien lineage, leaving to the weaker Siouian tribes no alternative but to flee or to remain and be crushed between the millstones.2 Iroquoian tribe, the powerful Cherokee nation, succeeded the Siouians in the control of their former territory in Southwest Virginia. Cherokees, although of Iroquoian stock, were hostile to the northern Iroquois and to the great Southern