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Chapter 2 Agricultural Settlers From the Atlantic shore various Euro- and Afro-Americans and their descendents tended to follow the Great Valley of Virginia in a west, southwest direction toward Tennessee. The Great Valley and some of its parallel linear valleys in southwestern Virginia offered the easiest travel along wellestablished footpaths that animals and aborigines had traversed for millennia . The valley floors were also the most conducive to agriculture, and thus its forests were the first to fall. At this point named Indian groups begin to emerge.1 The groups that bear mentioning in relation to southwestern Virginia were, in order of significance , the Cherokee, Shawnee, Tutelo, and Yuchi. From the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, the Cherokee Indians constituted one of the largest and one of the most enduring tribes in what became the southeast United States, with permanent villages established from northern Georgia to western North Carolina. They roamed southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee as part of their traditional hunting grounds. And as the southeast’s greatest tribe, the Cherokee easily posed the most substantial resident in proximity to southwestern Virginia. At the outset of the historical era, the Cherokee numbered around 20,000 and lived in concentrated villages spread over an area of about 15,000 square miles. Their vast hunting grounds, of course, encompassed much more land, including southwestern Virginia as far east as the New River, most of Kentucky , eastern and central portions of Tennessee, and parts of northern Alabama . Other tribes, such as the Creeks and Shawnees, also used various parts of this territory.2 Before the pelt trade with Euro-Americans arose, Indians tended to hunt in the western Virginia highlands only seasonally. Also, considering the Indians’ relatively small population numbers and their animistic respect for mammals and other living entities besides themselves, their predatory approach generally existed in a less disruptive fashion in regard to greater biological and naturalistic forces. These hunting activities had tended to sustain the aborigines century after century without extinguishing animal species. All this drastically changed as Native Americans acquired firearms and horses and began hunting animals year round to supply Euro-Americans with pelts.3 28 j Agricultural Settlers The Shawnee influence on southwestern Virginia is more difficult to ascertain . By the early historic period, the Shawnee appear to have lived around the Cumberland River in Tennessee. With the rise of the deerskin trade in the early eighteenth century, the Cherokee and Chickasaw drove the Shawnee north to the Scioto River in Ohio. It was from this northern base that the Shawnee periodically raided southwestern Virginia and the Cherokee territory during the years surrounding the French and Indian War. They appear frequently in the colonial record enumerating Indian raids on southwestern Virginia’s white settlements and, indeed, helped temporarily reverse agricultural settlement for a time prior to the conclusion of this noted conflict. Around midcentury some Shawnee unsuccessfully tried to reestablish themselves around their former Cumberland River home before banding together with the Creeks.4 Much more itinerant than the Cherokee, they appear to have represented a relatively more sporadic, though sometimes quite intense influence on southwestern Virginia. Being a highly mobile people, the Shawnee did not have a sedentary sphere of influence comparable to that of the Cherokee. They may have been among southwestern Virginia’s prehistoric hunters and fishers, and during the early historic era southwestern Virginia seemed to function as something of a buffer zone between the Cherokee and Shawnee, as the Shawnee sphere of influence then centered around part of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.5 In addition to the famous Cherokee and Shawnee Indians were lesser known groups who occupied the area around the Roanoke and New River valleys on the eastern edge of the focus area, and along the western edge into the mountains of Tennessee. The tribe of Tutelo or Totero were a small group of Indians who apparently abandoned their late prehistoric period home on the eastern edge of Virginia’s mountainous region during the first half century following European contact.6 The Yuchi Indians apparently lived in eastern Tennessee only after the historic era began, and then only as Cherokee and/or Creek groups subsumed them into their larger, more powerful groups, perhaps sometime during the Woodland/Mississippian prehistoric era or, at the latest, during the early historic period. Certainly by the late seventeenth century they lived in eastern Tennessee with the large Creek tribe, and from that locale they may have fished and foraged into southwestern...

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