40 SIOUAN TRIBES OF THE EAST. [ 



BUREAU OF 

 ETHNOLOGY 



sion of tlie prisoners in order to send tliem lionie to their own peojde 

 in the north, in return for a generous act of the Iroquois who had some 

 time before captured some Totero and, instead of kilHngthem by tor- 

 ture in the usual fashion, had treated them kindly and then released 

 them to go back to their friends, with the i)arting message that by such 

 conduct they might hope to bring about a permanent peace. The mat-, 

 ter was debated by the Saponi, who tinally delivered the prisoners to 

 the Totero to be by them conducted back to their home in the north. 

 They repented of their kindness, however, a nigiit or two later, when a 

 terrible storm nearly blew down the village, all owing, so the chief said, 

 to the devil's anger because they had not put the prisoners to death. 

 However, as the chief was a priest as well as a king, he ran out into 

 the storm and began his conjurations at a great rate, and, said Lawson, 

 "I thought he would have been blown away or killed before the devil 

 and he could have exchanged half a dozen words; but in two minutes 

 the wind was ceased and it became as great a calm as ever I knew 

 in my life" — evidently the first Carolina cyclone on record. 



Lawson described the Totero as tall and robust, which he ascribes 

 to their plentiful diet of buffalo, elk, and bear meat. This agrees with 

 Lederer's account of the Nahyssan thirty years before. By this time 

 (1701) the Saponi and Tutelo had been driven entirely out of Virginia, 

 where Lederer and Batts had found them in 1G70-'71, and had become 

 so reduced in numbers that they were then combining with the Keyau- 

 wee, Occaneechi, and Shoccoree — all five tribes numbering together 

 only about 750 souls — and Avere moving into the neighborhood of the 

 Carolina settlements to escape their enemies from the north (Lawson, 3). 

 Hale is in error in supposing from Lawson's narrative that the Tutelo 

 and Saponi in 1701 had found shelter from the Iroquois by jilacing 

 between themselves and their destroyers the ^'living rampart" of the 

 Tuskarora. The error grows out of Lawson's supposition that Sapona 

 river is identical with the Cape Fear, while, as a matter of fact, he had in 

 mind the Yadkin; and the Tutelo and Saponi were then at least a hun 

 dred miles west of the Tuskarora and in the direct line of the Iroquois 

 war parties sent out against the Catawba. As the Tuskarora were 

 friends and kinsmen of the Iroquois, who made their villages a resting 

 place on these southern incursions, the smaller tribes had nothing to 

 expect from them until the war, a few years later, had broken the power 

 of the Tuskarora and rendered them dependent on the whites. 



In regard to the location on the Yadkin of the Saponi and their 

 allied tribes and to the causes of their removal from that stream, Byrd 

 in 1728 says: 



They dwelt formerly not far below the Mountains, upon Yadkin Eiver, about 200 

 Miles West and by South from the Falls of Eoanoak. But about 25 Years ago they 

 took Refuge in A'irginia, being no longer in condition to make Head not only against 

 the Northern Indians, who are their Implacable enemies, but also against most of those 

 to the South. All the Nations round about, bearing in mind the Havock these Indians 

 us'd formerly to make among their Ancestors in the Insolence of their Power, did at 



