The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove

3. Mary Musgrove: Between Creek Nation and Colleton County

55 3 • Mary Musgrove Between Creek Nation and Colleton County . . . that after she was married to Mr. John Musgrove she was settled in Carolina upwards of seven years till June 1732. Mary Bosomworth, 1747 . . . about the year 1716 your petitioner’s first husband, John Musgrove, made an absolute purchase of the said 650 acres of land [in Colleton County, South Carolina] . . . the petitioner and her husband had been 14 or 15 years in undisturbed possession of the said tract and improvements. Mary Bosomworth, 1753 Soon after the Indian war, the said Mary Bosomworth married her first husband John Musgrove . . . that soon after their marriage the said John Musgrove made an absolute purchase of the said tract of land [in South Carolina] . . . that she delivered the said Mary Bosomworth (then Musgrove) of a child upon that very tract of land. Elizabeth Hunt, 1753 [Mary] was born in the [Creek] Nation, lived there till ten years of age, afterwards Carolina, where her relatives and friends frequently visited her;again went to the Nation,where she was delivered of her first child. And in short [Mary] was as well known there before the settlement of this Province [Georgia] as she is now. Thomas Bosomworth, 1756 56 · The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove PieCing togetHer tHe details of Mary Musgrove’s life before her arrival in Georgia is a complicated task that has left many a researcher (this one included) scratching his head. No two writers, it seems, are in agreement as to when Mary wed her first husband, John Musgrove, how much time the couple spent in South Carolina, or exactly how they made a life and livelihood for themselves.1 Little wonder.As the preceding statements illustrate, the paper trail offers several contradictory scenarios, leaving one to ask: wherein lies the truth? The truth is that Mary’s whereabouts at given times between 1715 and 1732 aren’t always clear, although I will make several educated guesses in the pages that follow. That said, the evidence can be reconciled to reveal two trends that characterized Mary’s life as a young adult. The first trend is the enduring racial fluidity of South Carolina’s southern frontier.While leaders of both the South Carolina colony and the Creek nation tried to erect barriers between their respective peoples following theYamasee War, Mary’s life assumed a pattern at odds with official policy. Mary’s presumable return to the Creek nation to deliver her first child suggests that Mary did in fact visit her Creek kin for extended periods of time, perhaps causing her to estimate that she had lived in South Carolina only“upwards of seven years” before moving to Georgia. Just as the Musgroves made occasional treks to Creek country,Thomas Bosomworth hints that their Creek relatives returned the favor by visiting their home in South Carolina.More compelling, however, is evidence confirming the existence of a small Creek community, composed in part of Mary’s relatives, that took up residence on John Musgrove’s Colleton County lands in 1717. Dubbed the“Pon Pon Indians” by the locals, their presence endowed the Musgrove estate with a multicultural character that defied the colony’s emerging ethic of racial separation. The second trend is that the Musgroves appear to have planted themselves ever more firmly in the colonists’ world as time passed. Their process of assimilation, commenced in childhood, intensified following John’s purchase of land in St. Bartholomew’s Parish in 1717. Commonly remembered as a“trader,”John’s principal economic endeavor may have been raising livestock. By 1731 John was also harvesting modest quantities of rice and began identifying himself as a planter, leading one to surmise that Mary assumed the outward appearance of a planter’s wife. Tellingly, that Mary appears to have given birth to a child in South Carolina, slept on a featherbed, and submitted to coverture may reflect her growing tendency Mary Musgrove: Between Creek Nation and Colleton County · 57 to regard Colleton County as“home.”By all accounts, then, the Musgroves had assumed many of the trappings of “Englishness,” enough it seems to have convinced their neighbors (and perhaps themselves) of their status as upright South Carolinians. Keeping open the path between Colleton County and the Creek nation demanded that the Musgroves retain the trappings of “Creekness,” while their aspirations for economic and social respectability required that they generally act like English colonists. For the...