photo #8307501

The Catawba people were living in what is now piedmont South Carolina and North Carolina when European explorers and settlers first made contact with them. How the Catawba came to be there remains disputed and unknown, but they spoke a Siouan language and were bitter enemies of the Cherokee, their Iroquoian-speaking neighbors to the west, and of the Iroquois and the Algonquian-speaking Delaware people to their north. While Catawba women were known for their fine pottery (and still are), Catawba men were skilled hunters and fierce warriors. Presumably to make their men appear more fearsome, Catawba people flattened the foreheads of male infants (their Iroquois enemies called the Catawba “flatheads”). They also wore distinctive warpaint—blackening their faces and painting a white circle around one eye and a black circle around the other. The Catawba were devastated by two 18th century smallpox epidemics, the first in 1738 and the second in 1759. Numbering about 10,000 before the epidemics, by the late 1760’s only a few hundred Catawba remained. Shortly before the beginning of the American Revolution, a 225 square mile reservation was established for the Catawba, just south of the North Carolina border in the area of what is now Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Catawba rented much of the land to white settlers and lived on the rest. When the Revolutionary War broke out, the Catawba allied with the Patriots—not out of any sympathy for the revolutionary cause but rather because their hated traditional enemies the Cherokees had allied with the British. Throughout the war small bands of Catawba warriors acted as scouts and fought alongside the revolutionaries in North Carolina and South Carolina, against the British, the Loyalists, and the Cherokees. British troops under Lt. Colonel Francis Rawdon destroyed the Catawba village in 1781, burning all the homes and taking or killing all the livestock. After the war the Catawba population continued to dwindle, numbering only 110 in 1826 and only 97 in 1911. Most of the remaining Catawba had by then converted to the Mormon faith. In 1959 the federal government terminated recognition of the Catawba tribe, declaring that the Catawba were so assimilated into the local culture and population as to no longer require special federal status. In 1973 the Catawba petitioned to have the federal recognition restored and the tribe adopted a constitution and organized a tribal government. In 1993 Congress reestablished federal recognition of the tribe and paid it $50 million to settle disputed land claims. The Catawba are now the only federally recognized tribe in South Carolina, with about 3,000 enrolled members, many of them living on 700 acres of tribal land in York County South Carolina, the site of their ancestral home. The tribe also owns the Catawba Two Kings Casino, located at King’s Mountain, North Carolina. The photo is from 1913.