Several thousand Tuscaroras were living in Virginia and North Carolina when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century. Speaking an Iroquoian language, a fact that indicates a probable northern origin, they were the most powerful Indians in the region, occasionally raiding neighboring Algonquins. The Tuscaroras brokered furs, rum, and other trade items between Europeans and Native Americans. They established agriculture, permanent settlements, and a strong political organization. In winter they moved to hunting quarters, bringing with them corn that the women had cultivated, with some help from the men.
Peaceful relations prevailed during the first two centuries of European colonization. But Tuscarora territories were increasingly seized by whites. Tuscaroras were frequently cheated, abused, and captured and sold into slavery. Bent on vengeance, southern Tuscaroras attacked several white settlements, killing families and capturing some women. North Carolina whites appealed to Governor Edward Hyde for protection. Though Hyde asked Virginia for help, he received little because of North Carolina-Virginia boundary disputes. He petitioned South Carolina, and an expedition of whites and British tributary Indians ruthlessly devastated several Tuscarora villages.
The Tuscaroras and their Iroquoian allies—the Merherrins, the Nottaways, and several smaller bands—were defeated, but later regrouped and continued the Tuscarora War (1711-13) under the leadership of Hancock (Hencock). This conflict provided the English with an opportunity to exterminate the Tuscaroras or drive them from North Carolina. The Northern Tuscaroras, led by the ambitious, accommodationist Tom Blount, professed neutrality but soon joined the English in the war against their southern kindred. Pretending friendship, Blount betrayed Hancock to the English, who promptly executed him. Another expedition under James Moore finally vanquished the Tuscaroras.
Starved into submission, their power broken, the Tuscaroras experienced the end of hostilities in 1713. Some were forced onto a small reservation in North Carolina and the rest fled north, some settling in Virginia where Blount was now the English-recognized Tuscarora leader. Over the next ninety years North Carolina Tuscaroras migrated in clusters of families or small bands into Virginia, Pennsylvania, and ultimately to the homeland of their linguistic and cultural relatives, the Iroquois in New York State. The League of the Iroquois admitted them as its sixth member nation in 1722. The last Tuscaroras left the South for New York in 1804.
During the American Revolution Tuscaroras and Oneidas sided with the colonists, but the other Iroquois groups joined the English. Although at war's end George Washington ordered the punishment of pro-British Indians, Tuscarora villages were also destroyed. The Tuscaroras rebuilt their cabins but these were later burned by the British in the War of 1812. The Tuscaroras finally settled on a reservation adjacent to Lewiston, close to Niagara Falls. The reserve was later enlarged by Seneca grants and land purchased by the Tuscaroras themselves and eventually encompassed ten square miles.
In the early nineteenth century many Tuscaroras were converted to Christianity. A few practiced the Handsome Lake religion until Christians burned their longhouse. Despite their unequal status in the Iroquois League, the Tuscaroras retained their chiefs' council, matrilineal kinship system, and many other aboriginal traits, while adopting many aspects of white material culture. They vigorously resisted the New York State Power Authority's plan to construct a reservoir that flooded hundreds of acres of their reserve (1957-60). Though they lost the struggle, it gave them and other Iroquois peoples a renewed sense of identity and helped to inspire the Red Power movement of the 1960s.
John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 137 (Washington, D.C., 1946); Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Northeast, vol. 15 of Handbook of North American Indians ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978); Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Modal Personality Structure of the Tuscarora Indians Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 150 (Washington, D.C., 1952).
David Landy
University of Massachusetts at Boston and
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
