ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 It is generally believed that four main nations of Indians once lived in North Carolina. The Cherokee lived in the mountains; the Sioux in the piedmont; the Algonquin on the coast; and the Tuscarora, of Iroquois stock from the north, came and went as hunters and marauders. For some 200 […]
Native People
1654: First Mention of the Eno Indians
ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 This complicated narrative, written when Raleigh’s fort was still standing at Roanoke, shows how the English bargained sharply with the coastal Indians for three great rivers and explains their fear of inland Carolina. In September last, a young man, a trader for beavers, being bound out to the adjacent parts […]
1670: First Encounter with the Eno
ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 John Lederer has been called a “travel-liar,” but it is nonetheless likely that he journeyed down the Trading Path and met with the Occaneechi, Eno and Shocco Indians. He was commissioned by Gov. Berkeley to find a trade route to the Orient; instead he found a lucre : ve path […]
1673: Second Exploration
ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 This narrative about Needham and Arthur, transposed through the wooly mind Abraham Wood, indicates that the white traders had moved on to the Indian Trading Path and that Eno Town was a familiar stopping place along the route. It shows also the increasing hostility of the Occaneechi as they sensed […]
1676: Bacon’s Massacre
ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 Elizabeth Duke, Mistress Bacon, was one of the first Dukes to come to America. Tormented by the Indians, her husband Nathaniel Bacon, with a posse of planters, took the law into his own hands. He chased the offending Indians onto the Occaneechi Islands, massacred them there, then turned treacherously on […]
1733: Meeting with Shacco Will
ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 Many have identified Byrd’s Shacco-Will, a guide, with Eno Will, Lawson’s guide, and have pointed to this incident as symbolic of the demise of the noble savage and of the Siouan tribes. … we sent for’an old Indian called Shacco-Will, living about seven miles off, who reckoned himself seventy-eight years […]
An Occaneechi Tale
ENO JournalVolume 4, No. 21976 This local story is another of the traces left to us of the Occaneechi on the Eno. Among the members of the tribe was a beautiful maiden, the daughter of the chief. Her name was Ulalee, which means wood thrush. She was fond of birds, and wherever she went she […]
![Woodland forms of buffalo and elk once ranged the mountains and the northwest piedmont in scattered herds. Yet even by the arrival of the early European explorers, their numbers were scarce. Both species were largely eliminated by hunting and indigenous tribes most likely traded these animals on the Great Indian Trading Path. While buffalo were occasionally seen between 1720 and 1750, they were gone by 1765. Elk may have died out even earlier, around 1700. Remnants of the buffalos statewide presence persists in many place names like Buffalo Creek in northern Orange County. Some say that even our earliest roads, deeply carved with curved banks, were buffalo trails.
📸: Betsy Russell
Text source: 1985 Calendar
[image description: river in winter sunlight with trees and banks dusted in snow]](https://www.enoriver.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)