The Catawba Nation: River People of the Carolina Piedmont

Fifteen miles on a side. That was the square of land along their river that the Catawba kept under the treaty signed at Augusta in 1763, after two centuries of trade, war and epidemic, as colonists poured into the Carolina Piedmont.

Before the square there was the river. The people who called themselves Iswa, the river people, built palisaded towns at the fords and shoals of the Catawba and its sister streams. They raised corn, beans and squash on floodplains renewed by every spring flood, burned the understory each fall to keep the woods open for deer, fished the spring runs of shad, and settled quarrels with a ball game rough enough to stand in for war.

Carolina traders came inland for deerskins, and after them came the Yamasee War of 1715, a long balancing act between rival empires, and an alliance with the Patriot side in the Revolution. The nineteenth century was harder: in 1840 the reservation itself was signed away to South Carolina. The twentieth brought federal recognition, lost and then won back, and carried the nation into the present.

The colonists named the river for the people. The people had long since named themselves for the river.