CHAPTER I 



POPULATION 



INDIANS. 



The tlirce fundamental races of mankind, the yellow, the white and the 

 black — the American, the European, and the African — are occupants of 

 the soil of South Carolina. AVithin her borders, as elsewhere on many 

 wider fields throughout human history, the still unsettled problems of 

 the conflict and intermingling of races present themselves for solution. 

 Although four centuries barely separate-us from the discovery of America, 

 it would be quite as difficult to give an accurate statement of the nations 

 and tribes of the Indians and of their numbers, as encountered by the 

 first European explorers, as it would be to turn back forty centuries and 

 to disentangle the Egyptian, Ethiopian, Libyan, Chaldean, Nubian and 

 Berber races, united under the sixth dynasty of the Pharaohs iu the con- 

 struction of the })yramids. The history of the. Indians is almost a blank. 

 Their earth mounds, stone implements and weapons, and other relics, 

 throw only a very uncertain glimmer of light over their past. Their vague 

 traditions are known in some instances not to retain any count of many 

 memorable events for even one century. Their origin is a subject open to 

 the widest conjecture. Adair entertains the fanciful notion that they are 

 descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and the proximity of Northwest 

 America to Asia, has suggested their migration by way of Behring Straits 

 to this continent. The most recent researches, noting on the other hand 

 a general westward migration of the Indian tribes from the Atlantic to the 

 interior, and tracing a resemblance between their languages and that of the 

 Basque people of Europe, hold that they are emigrants from that country. 

 That they were driven thence by the intrusion of the Aryan hordes from 



