"The fate of the Chicora Nation is a strange blank place in our history. The Coree lacuna is an abscess that no one wants opened, since we have forgotten its origin and have become accustomed to the pain."
This manuscript has grown out of a series of letters to various people relating to studies of my own family's history, and the study of various Native American groups, in the context of world history. The culmination of it, for me, was the discovery of conflicts in family lines that indicated my own Indian ancestry, and events that resulted in three violent deaths, shortly after the War of 1812 officially ended.
My study shows that the Revolutionary War lingered on, as documented in the records. It was a shame that it caused the burning of court houses. It was a story that was stifled in the crib in my family. Of it, I have only told what I know of a much larger strife that involved Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, pirates, slavers, revolutionaries, political Tories, and outlaws, which has no end for the addicted history enthusiast.
It is a story that has no recorded beginning, but it had roots in ancient Asia, Europe, the islands of the North Atlantic, and America's far Northwest. That it had a beginning is manifested in what we know, of things that many wanted forgotten. The Coree Are Not Extinct is not complete. I continue the story as I get more information. Someday I may undertake to show that Sugar Creek in Mecklenberg County (Charlotte, North Carolina) was the last stomping grounds of the Chicora Indians. But I would like to see this done by credentialed historians, archaeologists and ethnologists, to give it the pedigree it needs for general public acceptance.
History is not a matter of much concern for most folks. And the situation isn't going to improve soon, because most people don't see the relevance of the past to the present and the future. Sadly, it does matter, at a
time when about half the births in the country are not supported by a marital relationship. Modern American social norms will impact on individual psyches and behaviors as badly as did slavery, which was a major factor in the undoing of Native America; a fact still not well accepted by many American Indians.
We will be a long time paying off the debts incurred in the "sexual revolution," which is really nothing but the old "sorriness" given social sanction. History and genealogy can serve a positive purpose, if it makes us more honest about the common struggle for survival and improvement of ourselves and society. If people knew their ancestry, other than their "Magna Carta lines," there would be much less racism in the country, and we would celebrate a much richer heritage with a happy pageantry that transcends the "we versus them" mentality that drives the efforts of people like Mr. Chavis of the NAACP (who is probably a descendant of Johnny Chevin).
This is the broad theme I have developed in my manuscripts, such as my novel, The Coree Treasure, and The Search For Johnny Chevin and my historical panorama with a world-wide speculum, The Coree Are Not Extinct. I wish everybody could read this manuscript - and understand it. It is a retrospective on where we're coming from as a nation. Extrapolation from it suggests we may be in for some problems.
The road we're on won't get us to where we want to go. We are in the grips of a cultural suicidal depression that is worse than slavery, and its name is deliberate social disorganization. We need desperately to get back to our roots and the practice of the values our roots espoused, even if these values were honored more often in the mouth than in the doing.
There is a group of people south of the Neuse River with whom my family has been associated for many generations, who identify themselves as Waccamaw, Coree or Saponi Indians. These are all Siouan people of the old Chicora nation, of the southwestern end of the Occaneechee Trail and the southern end of the old Coree, or Green's, Trading Path, which was historically obliterated. Many of these people have successfully operated as blacks since civil rights legislation got some pretty good teeth.
Most of these folks are of mixed White-Black-Indian ancestry; some of whom are descended from substantial European colonial stock. My friend Henry Winn, "about eighty-two," who identifies himself as a Waccamaw Indian descended from a slave (a concept which has been poorly accepted by North Carolina Indians until recently) asked me to get him some information on the Winn family in colonial times, with a view to throwing some light on his own ancestry. I looked into it, out of my interest in the Indian ancestors of my great, great grandmother Christian Ammons Pate.
I do not involve myself in the genealogical research Henry needs done, but I got from the North Carolina State Archives last week the Revolutionary War notes of Gen. Richard Winn, published in The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. XLIII, 1942, and Samuel C Williams' biography of Gen. Winn, from The Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol. I, 1942, as well as the widely referred to affidavit of Ludovick Grant, relating to the Cherokees, and the letter of John Laurens and other material from other sources, to get a better sense of the social climate in the 18th century.
Copies of this material I gave to Henry Winn. I had my own agenda in this activity, but I was disappointed. I did not find the tribal migration information I wanted. Nor did I find information relating the Winns of Wayne County, North Carolina, to the Winns of Fairfield County, South Carolina. I have concluded to my own satisfaction, though, that Henry is probably descended from Chickahominy Indians historically and ethnologically identified as Algonquians (who I believe were Siouan and the ancestors of the Nansemonds), but I lack the energy, vanity and resources to pursue it or prove it for a genealogical or historical certainty.
Indian history and genealogy has been suppressed and obscured for a number of reasons, lovingly belabored by Sheila Spencer Stover and others. After digesting the tribal synonomies of Mooney, Swanton, Rights, et al, ad nauseum, we find, in essence, that all the tribes of the Siouan Chicora nation, that John Lawson told of being distributed from Charleston to Southside, Virginia at the beginning of the 18th century mysteriously disappeared.
At that time the Indians were in great cultural, social, economic, military and geographic turmoil. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the Chicora Nation had been either more or less surreptitiously absorbed into the White population, forced into slave populations, been brutally annihilated, or had become Creeks, Cherokees, Catawbas, Senecas or other such entities to meet the "Our Indians, Their Indians" criteria of the European international "factory" system of dealing with them in the lucrative fur trade. Or they sequestered themselves in hidden out-of-the-way corners of the land, from which they now continue to emerge, seeking to reclaim their Native American identities.
The involvement of the Moore family in the affairs of the Siouan peoples of eastern North and South Carolina has been of particular interest to me. But the Moores have said little of this involvement. It was enlightening to learn that a James Moore was prominent among the Tories who, allied with Indians, was in conflict with Richard Winn, who was for two years Indian Agent for the Southeastern Department. Thus we see that the Moore family was split, as were the Pates and Jernigans, and others, regarding loyalty to Britain and involvement with the Indians. These are themes developed to some extent in my material.
It appears to me that the Revolutionary War was the main instrument of the Native American's undoing, as much as it was anything else. The Indian was an expendable pawn in the game played by European governments and colonial "revolutionaries". Individuals in this game had complex programs, as close readings of the activities of men like Jefferson, Burr, Gallatin, Jackson, and countless others indicate. My studies leave me with no doubt that the Native American was basically either sopped up or mopped up, depending on the tastes of those involved, to clear the continent for "development."
Identifiable Native Americans are still going the way of the Sugarees of Sugar Creek. Before the process is over there will be Alaskan Inuits discovered in Siberia, where they have run to escape the process. You don't have to be an economic engineer (or convinced of international economic conspiracies) to appreciate the long term impact of oil spills, mining effluents, industrial wastes, etc. on a hunter/fisher economy.
A visit to present-day pathetic Waccamaw Lake tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the hunter/fisher recreation is fast following the hunter/fisher economy on its way to extinction. We have lost the Native American capacity to enjoy, but not destroy, the environment, by trying to mechanically and chemically pump the work out of survival, and recreation. The Chicora Nation, once centered in the PeeDee Valley and extending from the Curry Tuck to well below Charleston, and inland to the Smokey Mountains, now exists only in a gigantic real estate development that is not a credit to the generations of folks who died to let Myrtle Beach and other degraded environs be.
Forgive the sermon. It is just that, as my friend Dr. Jim Peacock says, "so much to do, and so little time (left) to do it." Unfortunately for many people the long term developmental trend in the country is toward needing fewer and fewer people to do the short-term survival tasks by means that are doing long-term damage socially and environmentally. Silas and some of the early Pates, like Shadrach, were "strong to preach," and some of the Indians, like my greatx3 grandmother Christian, felt no shame as they went about with these preachers in "fair style," as their menfolks preached a predestinarian gospel of irresistible moral and social uplift, and responsible racial integration.
Historically the Native American was too busy surviving to be "savage." He was generally interested in joining with the Europeans in a merger of cultures. However, where he became involved in White society he either died outright, or was culturally erased.
The Siouan Indians of the Southeast, and other Native Americans about whom I speak, were not unmindful of the dangers of involvement with Europeans and their value system, as records preceding the explorations sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh indicate. The Indians quickly saw that they were only to be only slaves and tools of the Europeans, so long as they pursued the native lifestyle. So many emulated the Whites; often to their undoing. Eighteenth century european values trod too close to the edge for many Indians to follow, without going over the brink.
The problem was that colonial leaders wanted, indeed expected, all others, Indians included, to exhaust and extinguish themselves scratching the earth in all the ways that put money into their pockets. For Europeans this was the behavioral norm, accepted by the lower classes; but the Indians naturally resisted, when the system bound them uncomfortably. The naturally democratic Indians intuitively saw in rigid stratification and harnessing of European society forms that still grind relentlessly on many people today. But many bought into the White Man's ways, and became effectively and ultimately White.
The Indian was not alone in sensing social malaise. Wealth, leisure, mind states, social worth and status must be measured in something other than self-indulgent material parameters, excelled in by the leadership, if we are ever to overcome the moral depression that grips our nation. People are going to have to truly unite spiritually in a rational understanding that we really are all members of the same big family, in which an affront to one is an assault on all.
I gained a sense of this from the reading of an ancestor's will. According to the will of Jesse Ammons, his daughter Christian was the wife of (Silas) Daniel Pate. In the will of "Old" Shadrach Pate, (son of the son Charles of the original Charles in the now Wayne County area who migrated to the Pee Dee) Christian is referred to as Christo, a daughter. She was, in fact, his daughter in law. Shadrach was a counter-migrant, having returned from the Pee Dee to Patetown in Wayne County.
Silas Daniel Pate was also the name of Christo's grandson, baby brother of Henry Franklin Pate, father of my grandfather Daniel Floyd Pate. Christo, as she was called, was the daughter of Jesse Ammons, one of the "worst of the bad Indians," as the Corees were described to my grandfather, Daniel Floyd Pate.
Pate lines diverged and reunited long ago in Wayne County; and kinship is frequently not acknowledged in the area due to ignorance (and indifference and envious aspects that don't need belaboring). I recently discovered a long-lost illegitimate brother, who was the son of a Lumbee Indian, according to my mother. But not all family relations were so modest.
It was enlightening for me to recently learn from Billie Faye Evans (from South Carolina Baptist records in the Crozier Manuscript, Furman University) that Charles Pate, Jr., was born 1 May 1772 in Bertie County, N.C., that he married a Sarah Henderson, and in 1772 they had children Sarah, Charles, Mary, Rebecca, Ann, Shadrack (who settled in Wayne County), and Joel. This information indicates connection to a prominent and ambitious and successful line of land brigands, and proves my line back to Thoroughgood Pate of the Rappahannock Valley and Roquis Pocosin on Cashie River, sometimes of Edenton, where he last married Sarah Chevin, sister of Deputy Lord Proprietor Nathaniel Chevin and mother of William Pate, ward of Nathaniel Chevin.
The last big personal question for me about all this business is whether or not Thoroughgood Pate was the militia major carried about, trussed like a pig on a pole, who was repeatedly stabbed in the throat by John Barnwell, because of the rage he expressed at Barnwell's treatment of the "Indians." I have always felt a strange identity with that poor fellow, whoever he was. Thoroughgood died in 1713, the year the rebel Tuscaroras signed a peace treaty, while the Corees continued to struggle against colonial oppression.
My father was Floyd Clarkson Pate. Pate lines of unclear relationship to each other converged when the son of Bryant Handley Pate, Sr., DeWitt Clinton Pate, married the daughter of Christo and Silas Daniel Pate, Leatha (sometimes Talitha). Shadrach, the son of the Charles, Jr. (who went from the Patetown area to the PeeDee) came back north and settled in Wayne County on Pate's Branch of Stoney Creek (as distinguished from Howell's Branch of the same creek).
After satisfying my mind about who the Pates were, with a study of the family entitled Debtor's Legacy, I realized that I had only scratched the surface of my heritage. I then set about to historically identify the "Coree Nation" without an appreciation of the process by which it had been obliterated, beginning at the turn of the 18th century. It was part of a bigger process of general disenfranchisement of the Native American that was hammered into its lethal shape in ancient Sumeria, honed to razor sharpness by Rome against the Celts, polished by the British Empire all over the World, and is gilded and bejewelled with bloody genocide by the international banking community today where ever luxury hotels are magically springing from the earth where peoples have been dispossessed of their native lands.
You have to have an anonymous numbered Swiss bank account to appreciate the mechanics of such processes. For the average man on the street, for whom "good money" is sufficient to keep him ahead of his creditors and body and soul together, the "destruction" of people is a concept limited to murder in the streets, and slavery to drugs and prostitution in all its varieties. A story about such a process should be a good one. The Coree Are Not Extinct is such a story.
Like a pretty girl, a good story should come home with the boy who took her to the dance. I have waltzed the Coree maiden to the tunes of her records, tales and traditions until I'm exhausted, but she has not tired nor dampened the handkerchief she wears at her wrist. Now they're playing the last song, and she has little inclination to go home. Worse, she now shows an inclination to run off to meet the sunrise with the notorious Iroquoian badboy Tuscarora.
These allusions are best understood if you are a student of the Native American. Dr. David Phelps, of the Archaeology Department of East Carolina University, now concedes that the Tuscaroras may have had some allies in the so-called "Tuscarora War." Is this a belated concession to Col. John H. Wheeler who, in 1851, published his Historical Sketches Of North Carolina From 1584 To 1851? Wheeler says of the Indian uprising in North Carolina in 1711:
"The Tuscaroras, a powerful tribe, formed a conspiracy with the Pamplico Indians, to attack the planters on the Roanoke. The Cotechneys, who lived in the present county of Greene, engaged to come down and join the Corees, and attack the planters on the Neuse and Trent Rivers. Bath was to be attacked by the Mattamuskeets and the Matchepungoes."According to Wheeler, the concerted attack was carried out, but strangely the damage was confined principally to the area under the nominal control of the pro-English Tuscaroras from Pennsylvania. There was a renegade element among the Tuscarora who sympathized with the plight of the Siouan Indians who were being systematically driven from their lands, who sided with the local Indians, such as the Coree (who were prohibited by English law to have title to their ancestral lands). They were the rebel element whose destruction was participated in by the official leader of the Tuscaroras, Chief Blount of Oconerunt, from whom some of the most illustrious of our local citizenry are descended, and to whom some of my most ancient ancestors were related...
Those willing to re-read the records will have to concede that the Corees were the Indians who were the real obstacle to European settlement of this area. They were the ones who pronounced judgement on John Lawson, and sentenced him to tortuous incineration. Lawson identified them as the Shakories, identified by Swanton as the Chicora who were made famous by their stinging contacts with Spaniards like DeSoto, Ayllon and Pardo, and of whom the Woccons of the Goldsboro, North Carolina, area were a sept.
Who is this beautiful and mysterious girl called Coree? Maybe Sir James George Frazer, in his multi-volumed work (condensed into one book by the author, for wider public consumption) The Golden Bough, gives us a clue. Kore is the Greek goddess of the corn. Maybe it is not just coincidental that the historical origins of the Coree is in the Welsh Tract of the Pee Dee Valley. The Welsh have a tradition of their own origins in the colony of the Trojan Greeks in the British Isles.
For my efforts I have achieved nothing but the alienation of the Indians, the "wannabee" Indians, the non-Indians, and the anti-Indians. In a word, I have failed to make my point about most of the Indians in our midst in eastern North Carolina. The point being that we are creating barriers and divisions, about Native America identities, where we should be breaking them down.
My study of the Corees has convinced me that they are the people known to Ayllon, DeSoto and Pardo as the Chicora. At the height of their hegemony, their tribes were scatterd from the Chesapeake, south of Norfolk, Virginia, to the Waccamaw Neck, which is the area of the present Georgetown, South Carolina, on Winyaw Bay. Recently I drove down there, to feel the spiritual ambience.
The feeling was not a good one. It is a tortured place. It is becoming successor to southern California, as the playground of the hedonistic materialist. The people of the old West Stock lost every turn of the stone-rock-scissors game they've played since Lederer's time. The historical center of Chicora is a thriving industrial center now, with all that this implies in scenic ugliness.
Georgetown's historic waterfront is towered over by a great state-of-the-art steel mill, driven by nuclear power from the Brunswick plant. The atmosphere and the water are overpowered by the gigantic paper mill that is Georgetown's western skyline. But the people have work. The government has met its first responsibility. And there is the prosperity for which so many Coree sacrificed their birthright and identity.
The scene at Georgetown is repeated in its essential features in the later home of the Chicora people, the Coree Nation, in the Uwharrie Mountains of North Carolina's Piedmont. There they were known as the Shakorie, and finally as the Sugarees, before those still visible were absorbed by the Catawbas. Morrow Mountain, the great mountain of the Uwharries, is the western foundation of Badin Dam, which provides power for the Alcoa plant there, the aluminum Pittsburg of the country. At the foot of the mountain the beach party has begun.
The mule has bolted the lot. We can't recapture the Indian, Coree or whatever, in some primitive pen. We can't recreate the Native American in any image. He is transcendent in our society, through his genes that give strength to his worst enemies, modern-day politicians like my distant cousin Congressman Martin Lancaster and the old Coree himself, Senator Loch Faircloth, owner of Coharie Farms, who see no need for a more honest appreciation of the Indians in our midst and in our genes.
The United States, of all nations, needs the sort of cultural assimilation of elements that England has achieved, the Irish problem notwithstanding. The Indian nations need their public respect, as the Celtic tribes, the Picts, Romans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Normans, etc., enjoy in the English (as opposed to British) culture. We need to be showing how the Indian became a power in the American gene pool and society; not how he was hounded and isolated in his native land, as we celebrate his fate in the Trails of Tears of his people.
The hounding and isolation are undeniable realities, but the Indian was not so unimaginative and inflexible as to be unable to cope with change, as some of our most respected experts would have us believe. The inflexible Indian should be seen as a living monument to integrity, where compromise and betrayal were the rule. But the Coree people's history speaks volumes to this point, that neither my family nor the people of Chief Carter want to hear, of alternatives to geographical displacement and treaty violations.
Douglas Rights, in his fine study, The American Indian In North Carolina, in Chapter XI, "Last Chronicles Of The Piedmont Tribes." in which he gives a good synopsis of the fate of the Siouan people of North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina, catches the gist of the Coree Nations fate in a few lines, under the heading, "Lost Tribes":
"Several tribes of Northeastern South Carolina whose territory extended upstream above the state line, including Waccamaw, Peedee, Winyaw, Sewee, and other small groups, thought to be of the Siouan stock, continued to live near the settlements during the early years of the eighteenth century. Occasional references in the colonial records tell of their troubles, of poverty, pestilence and strife. The government (ostensibly) sought to maintain peace, but in vain, for the scattered tribes in their weak condition were a prey to straggling war parties seeking revenge or endeavoring to secure slaves."The parentheses in the above paragraph are mine. Much of the grief brought to the "Lost Tribes" came through Indians who were absorbed into White society. A typical example of the assimilation of the Native American into White society is found in the story of the Bass family, documented by Albert D, Bell in his Bass Families Of The South, and by James Albert Bass, Jr. and Sr., in their study The Bass Family of Black Creek North Carolina. My grandparents were married at the Black Creek Primitive Baptist Church.
The Basses are documented as being French Huguenots, who masqueraded as Italians, bribed the King of England, and ended up as Nansemond Indians. Black Creek, is just north of Patetown. Richard Bass, who with the Jernigans and others founded the town of Waynesboro, came from there. Thus began a basic political, social and genealogical split in Wayne County, that was manifested in the depredations of the Barna Jernigan Gang, made up of Tories and Indians, which continues to our time.
I have continued to try to make sense of the Jernigan conflict with the Coor-Penders, and their connections with Indians as far south as Florida. To really color between all the lines, you have to bring your own story to the picture, as the pallet from which you work with the historical or genealogical brush of your own choosing.
Wiley Thompson, who sold the wife and child of Osceola into slavery, was a native of Robeson County. Descendants of his ancestors are related to the Pates of the Pee Dee area. According to Edgar T. Thompson, of Durham, he was the grandson of John Sanderson Thompson of the Halifax, North Carolina, area, who was born in 1740 and migrated to the Welsh Tract that straddled the Pee Dee River. Wiley migrated to Mississippi, from whence he trod the path to his destruction among the Seminoles. If I could afford to, I would trace his steps.
A few days after I got a letter from Sheila Stover, asking if I had heard from Paul Ritty, Jr., I got a letter from him. He expressed interest in getting a copy of "The Search for Johnny Travis." I sent him a copy of the poem The Search For Johnny Chevin, and described The Coree Are Not Extinct. I did not sense profound depth in his interest.
Mr. Ritty is a librarian in Roxboro. He was looking for a source document on Native American ancestry to satisfy a thesis requirement. I hope he is doing a study that will make a significant contribution to the history of the Native Americans of the Southeast, that transcends their "disappearance." He will do much to throw light on our national history, if he is able to help to explain the fate of the Siouan people of the Southeast, in the context of the shattering of their linguistic and national solidarity that blocked westward continental European westward expansion in America.
I don't have much respect for Stanley A. South, as a somewhat shallow historian of the North Carolina Native American, but he did show some appreciation of the significance of the Siouan nation in the area, in spite of the simplicity of his philosophy. His book Indians In North Carolina was obviously written for a juvenile audience. On page 49 he says, with reference to "The Eastern Sioux":
"On his way from the Occaneechee town toward what is now the present city of Raleigh, Lawson met a group of Tuscarora Indians who were on their way to the Occaneechee town to trade wooden bowls for furs which they would in turn trade to the colonists for clay pipes, glass beads, and cooking metal pots."It tiresome to belabor the obvious. Suffice it to say the Tuscaroras were hooked on civilization, and the Siouan people had their "fix." This situation was allowed to exist only until the "Long Knives", the White traders, got their act together in the Albemarle. Then the Tuscaroras had to go. The story of his undoing and sad return to the North is well known.
The fate of the Chicora Nation is a strange blank place in our history. The Coree lacuna is an abscess that no one wants opened, since we have forgotten its origin and have become accustomed to the pain. Recently Henry Winn gave me material on the Brewington family. Part of this material was an article by Claude Moore about the Rev. Charles D. Brewington. Claude is descended from the illustrious Moores who contributed many notables to our history. Claude taught History at Mount Olive College, and contributes a discrete weekly historical article to the Mount Olive Tribune.
The Brewingtons are closely associated with the Jacobs, Winns, Simmonses, Emannuels, and others, identified now as Coharies. The story of these Indians does not lend itself well to the establishment of Indian tribal identities. Claude Moore has been careful to steer clear of the controversial traditions of these people, while generally acknowledging the existence of the people and their traditions.
I talked to Claude on the phone. He didn't have time to see Henry and me. He criticized the traditional sources of my material, while acknowledging that he occasional refers to such in his writing.
Claude intrigued me with his reference to the "Bass Gang" of Tories and Indians that terrorized this area after the Revolutionary War. I asked if this was the same as the Barna Jernigan gang. Claude said he didn't know.
I have since learned more details of the Bass involvement with Tories, no thanks to Claude Moore. Claude Moore is like Savie Moses, a mixed-bred lady long associated with the Pates from whom I have got helpful hints. He is acculturated to the conspiracy of silence. But Claude dropped his guard long enough to tell of the lovely Indian slave women who travelled as companions of the Moore ladies on their trips to the North, who were invited by the northern hosts of their mistresses to break their bondage in acceptance of proposals of matrimony (or concubinage).
According to Albert D. Bell, in Bass Families Of The South, Rice, Herman and John Bass, of Duplin County were identified in a petition as marauding Tories. Considering that Barna Jernigan was the Tory who paid with his life for the depredations (as did my great grandfather "Lame David" Jernigan), it seems safe to assume that the Bass brothers were not the leaders of the gang.
I have the feeling I could learn more from Claude about the Corees. He said there is much about the ancestry of many in this area that the families don't want to know. I put it to Claude pretty straight, when I said to him that much of what I've written about, "he wouldn't touch with a stick."
Claude just snickered and said, "That's right."
Just as I do, Claude knows the Corees are not extinct. I took the Coree princess to the ball, and I danced her about. But someone else will have to bring her home. Maybe someone like United States Senator Loch Faircloth, from Sampson County, North Carolina. Like many parts of the world, there is pageantry is his part of the country that transcends the mindless hell raising of Mule Days in Benson, North Carolina, where they've forgotten the significance of the "Old Road" that still connects Chesapeake's Coree Tuck to Charlotte's Chicora Creek.
I'm broke, tired, and too old to care much anymore about the Coree maiden's dancing partners or her bed fellows, but I still have curiosity that is not satisfied about the Coree Nation. Please share copies of this material with anyone who is interested. Maybe they can contribute to the growing appreciation of the Native American's role in our nation's development.
The Faircloths are an old Coharie (Coree) Indian family, well represented in Wayne and Sampson Counties, North Carolina. Details regarding the Indian Faircloths of Sampson County, are in "Sketch of the CLASSIFIED INDIANS of Sampson County North Carolina," by Enoch Emanuel. The Pates are not among the families listed, but the Ammonses are. If you can contribute anything to expansion of material relating to the Indians of eastern Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, with reference to explicit family relationships, please share it with me.