The Yuchi people, spelled Euchee and Uchee Native Americans!

[Artfuldodger]

Some of that stuff from the links is pure fantasy and personal speculation. Some of it may be true, but I would take most of that with a grain of salt.

As for your quote, no, they haven't been erased from history or books or maps. And they didn't hold that vast of a territory at the time of European contact. The locations and sizes of the tribes they encountered were well-documented by the first European explorers. Most of them place the Yuchi/Suwali in a minor territory in the foothills of the NC mountains at time of contact, and later in east-central TN.

I remember reading something awhile back that some of these Yuchi groups are note even related to each other. That somehow they happen to have the same name but like the ones on the Savannah River have no recent connection to the ones in Yuchi Town in West Georgia.

Oh, I definitely agree that a lot of it is pure speculation. Some of it seems to be people just looking for a group to identify with. Lots of politics even.
Plus when the Gambling casinos got popular, Native Americans came out the woodwork to get status.

I'm just trying to look at all the possibilities and go from there. Lots of mysteries that we'll never know the answers to.

 

[NCHillbilly]

I remember reading something awhile back that some of these Yuchi groups are note even related to each other. That somehow they happen to have the same name but like the ones on the Savannah River have no recent connection to the ones in Yuchi Town in West Georgia.

Oh, I definitely agree that a lot of it is pure speculation. Some of it seems to be people just looking for a group to identify with. Lots of politics even.
Plus when the Gambling casinos got popular, Native Americans came out the woodwork to get status.

I'm just trying to look at all the possibilities and go from there. Lots of mysteries that we'll never know the answers to.

There was an amazing amount of diversity here, even in historic times. John Lawson, when he traveled through the Carolinas in 1700, remarked that often, walking twenty or thirty miles would put you in the territory of a different tribe, speaking a completely different language. Some tribes, like the Creek, Cherokee, Tuscarora, and Catawba held large territories, but the spaces between them were filled with a plethora of smaller tribes from several different linguistic and cultural stocks.

 

[Artfuldodger]

Reading about the Bilbo Mound near Savannah, Construction began around 3,545 BC.
Middle layers of the mound dated from around 2165 BC and contained some of the earliest pottery in North America – the Bilbo style pottery. It was fiber tempered like its contemporary Stallings Island Pottery upstream, but had little or no decoration on it.

Interesting on that is they used Black Women to do the excavating during a WPA Works Project in 1937.

http://www.sip.armstrong.edu/Irene/essay.html

 

[Artfuldodger]

There was an amazing amount of diversity here, even in historic times. John Lawson, when he traveled through the Carolinas in 1700, remarked that often, walking twenty or thirty miles would put you in the territory of a different tribe, speaking a completely different language. Some tribes, like the Creek, Cherokee, Tuscarora, and Catawba held large territories, but the spaces between them were filled with a plethora of smaller tribes from several different linguistic and cultural stocks.

I never knew there were so many various tribes as their once were. Probably even some that are already lost.

I remember discussing the Tuscarora & Saponi with you a few years ago. They probably got absorbed by the Catawba.
Part of my family Collier and Brown came from the South Virginia-North Carolina border but I never found an ancestry connection.

 

[NCHillbilly]

I never knew there were so many various tribes as their once were. Probably even some that are already lost.

I remember discussing the Tuscarora & Saponi with you a few years ago. They probably got absorbed by the Catawba.
Part of my family Collier and Brown came from the South Virginia-North Carolina border but I never found an ancestry connection.

Many of those people died from disease before ever seeing a white man, sadly. The Tuscarora moved back up north after the Tuscarora war, and reincorporated with the Iroquois. Some of the Saponi went north to the Iroquois, also, but the rest I guess just got gradually mixed into other tribes until they lost their identity, much as many of the Cataba and Natchez did wit the Cherokee.

According to what I can find in ancestral records, I had a several-times great-grandmother who was a full blooded Tuscarora.

 

[Artfuldodger]

Many of those people died from disease before ever seeing a white man, sadly. The Tuscarora moved back up north after the Tuscarora war, and reincorporated with the Iroquois. Some of the Saponi went north to the Iroquois, also, but the rest I guess just got gradually mixed into other tribes until they lost their identity, much as many of the Cataba and Natchez did wit the Cherokee.

According to what I can find in ancestral records, I had a several-times great-grandmother who was a full blooded Tuscarora.

Did these tribes have physical traits different from other tribes? Maybe not 30 miles apart but would the Seminoles have different features or skin tones from the Cherokee?

Would their tribal name mean or would other tribes know them by being taller, darker, etc.

 

[NCHillbilly]

Did these tribes have physical traits different from other tribes? Maybe not 30 miles apart but would the Seminoles have different features or skin tones from the Cherokee?

Probably some physical differences, but not as much of that as language and culture.

 

[Artfuldodger]

The Creeks assimilated a number of smaller tribes as part of their own, including the Yuchis, also spelled (and pronounced) Ugee or Euchee, and the Kiokees, who settled along the western bank of the Savannah River in what would become Columbia County.
Savannah is also an Indian name, likely a corruption of the French word for “Shawnee,” and the name of a tribe living across the river on land future English settlers would call, South Carolina. During the mid 1600′s, those settlers enlisted the aid of the Savannah Indians to drive out the marauding Westo tribe, who dominated the river and plagued anyone else who settled there. South Carolina rewarded the victors with a village of their own called, “Savannah Town,” and by renaming the former Westobou River after them.

Shortly after 1674 the Hathawekela or that part of the Shawnee afterward so called, settled upon Savannah River, and in 1681 they proved of great assistance to the new colony of South Carolina by driving a tribe known as Westo, probably part of the Yuchi, from the middle Savannah.

 

[Artfuldodger]

The Westo Indians, who lived along the Savannah River near Augusta from about 1660 to 1680, were one of the most important Native American groups in the southeastern United States. They obtained firearms from the English in Virginia before most other Indians in the Southeast did, which gave them a tremendous military advantage over bow-and-arrow Indians. The Westos used this advantage to enslave natives throughout Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. They then traded their captives to colonists in Virginia and South Carolina for items of European manufacture, including guns, ammunition, steel hatchets, blankets, and glass beads.

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/westo-indians

 

[NCHillbilly]

The Creeks assimilated a number of smaller tribes as part of their own, including the Yuchis, also spelled (and pronounced) Ugee or Euchee, and the Kiokees, who settled along the western bank of the Savannah River in what would become Columbia County.
Savannah is also an Indian name, likely a corruption of the French word for “Shawnee,” and the name of a tribe living across the river on land future English settlers would call, South Carolina. During the mid 1600′s, those settlers enlisted the aid of the Savannah Indians to drive out the marauding Westo tribe, who dominated the river and plagued anyone else who settled there. South Carolina rewarded the victors with a village of their own called, “Savannah Town,” and by renaming the former Westobou River after them.

Shortly after 1674 the Hathawekela or that part of the Shawnee afterward so called, settled upon Savannah River, and in 1681 they proved of great assistance to the new colony of South Carolina by driving a tribe known as Westo, probably part of the Yuchi, from the middle Savannah.

It seems that the Creeks were more of a massive confederation of smaller tribes than one ethnic large tribe.