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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [First Page] [112], (1) Lines: 0 t ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: T [112], (1) 4. Conspiracy Theories inter-indian alliances and the outbreak of the yamasee war The last official assessment of South Carolina’s Indian buffer zone came in the early months of 1715, when provincial authorities commissioned a report on “the number and strength of all the Indian nations . . . subject to the governmentofSouthCarolina .”1 Culledfromthenotesandestimatesoftheprovince’s most knowledgeable frontiersmen, this census listed a grand total of 28,041 friendly Indians scattered within a 640-mile radius of Charles Town. To the west and southwest of the capital—clumped within a hundred miles of each other—were the two towns of the Yuchis, the three towns of the Savannahs, the four towns of the Apalachees, the two towns of the Pallachacolas, and the ten towns of the Yamasees. To the north and northwest of Charles Town, the twelve towns of the Catawbas, the Cheraws, and the Congarees filled out the inner arc of South Carolina’s defensive perimeter. A hundred miles further to the west, one would begin to encounter the largest and most powerful of South Carolina’s Indian allies: the ten towns of “the Ocheses or Creeks,” the thirtytwo towns of the Tallapoosas, the Abeikas, and the Alabamas, and the sixty towns of the Lower, Middle, and Overhill Cherokees. Finally, the six remaining towns of the Chickasaws marked the outer fringes of the alliance network and South Carolina’s thrust into the Mississippi Valley. Those South Carolina imperialists who had enough time to read this census undoubtedly saw it as a comforting confirmation of their power in the Southeast. They would have taken much less comfort in another census that was conducted in the same general area at about the same time. Instead of determining the extent of South Carolina’s Indian alliances, this second census claimed to count the number of Indian towns that were committed to destroying the province . Unaccustomed to paper and pen, these census takers used eight-yardlong strips of deerskin, tying a knot for every town that they deemed receptive to their plans. When Florida Governor Francisco Córcoles y Martínez received 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [113], (2) Lines: 37 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [113], (2) these strips from a delegation of Yamasee and Ochese leaders on May 28, 1715, he counted no fewer than 161 knots.2 The South Carolinians did not need to see these knotted deerskins in order to make some significant revisions to their own census. By that time their desperate struggle to save themselves from their former Indian allies was already more than six weeks old. The Yamasee War hit South Carolina as a horrifying shock that forced many colonists to reconsider everything that they had previously believed about the southeastern Indians. A certain degree of paranoia had always played a role in South Carolina imperialism, but no one had really expected such a disaster to occur during a period of relative peace and prosperity. While the suffering South Carolinians were quick to suspect their French and Spanish rivals, the most thoughtful commentators were not about to underestimate the strength and unity of South Carolina’s new Indian enemies. For men like the Reverend Francis Le Jau, the first terrible weeks of the war suggested a “General Conspiricy of the Indians that Surround[ed them]—from the Borders of St. Augustin to Cape Fear.”3 From the murdered traders near the banks of the Mississippi to the charred ruins of Port Royal plantations, it appeared that South Carolina’s Indian defense network had been turned completely on its head. It is easy to imagine how the South Carolinians could have assumed that the entire Southeast had lined up against them, but it is more difficult to understand how future generations of scholars could perpetuate the colonists’ first confused impressions of the Yamasee War. Over the years it has become fairly common to describe South Carolina’s opposition as a wide-ranging “united front” of various Indian societies whose...

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