Delving into the complex history of the American Indians of Pamlico County

When the great blue heron squawks and glides over the creek behind my house, I often squint and attempt to imagine prehistoric times--or anytime in the past 17,000 years when the people indigenous to this land fished this water and breathed the air. I think about how the land shaped their lives, as it has inspired mine. I also imagine this land, far in the future, surviving humans altogether.

This past month I researched the indigenous population of what we call Pamlico County—a county named for the Pamlico, or Pomouik/Pomeiock, Indians. Within the Craven and Pamlico County public libraries, there are only 15 books on the shelves that mention the American Indians of coastal North Carolina.

A bibliography of some of those books can be found at the end of this article. Much of what I discovered was contradictory and sparse: however, the most interesting and current book is Manteo’s World: Native American Life in Carolina’s Sound Country before and after the Lost Colony by Helen C. Rountree and with Wesley D. Taukchiray, both historians from North Carolina.

Most of what these historians learned is from the Englishmen, many of them military men, who left us records from the 1580s onward. There were also two Indian interpreters, named Manteo and Wanchese. Both were young men who came from the Roanoke chief’s territory: we know specifically that Manteo was from Croatoan, at Hatteras Island. They traveled to England with reconnaissance voyagers in 1584 and returned to their homeland the next summer, having learned English and some of the English ways. It is written that the English did not originally stay very long in the Carolina sounds because their colonizing attempts mostly failed. Without the records of the translating and explaining that Manteo and Wanchese did for them, it would be much more difficult to reconstruct what the people indigenous to this land were like.

For example, there is evidence that the American Indians of this region inhabited this land for the past 17,000 years—until colonists appeared on the shore. They lived a life consisting of hunting, fishing, foraging for plants, and farming.

Furthermore, the majority of the American Indians from this region most likely spoke Algonquain. I have found several references online to Pamlico County land as “TaTaku,” or “where the land and the sea meet the sky.” (Jonathan Martin, NC History Project), although, one of the government welcome signs to Pamlico County reads “where the land and sky meet the water.”

It appears that Pamlico County was mostly inhabited by the Secotaóc, the Pamlico and the Tuscarora. Also living along the Neuse River were the Coree (who no longer exist), the Eno (who merged with the Catawba), the Machapunga (who no longer exist), the Neusiok (who merged with the Tuscarora—they lived in Craven County and south of the Neuse--and most died because of war or smallpox by 1696), the Pamlico (who were enslaved and merged with the Tuscarora) and the Tuscarora (who mostly migrated to New York as the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy).

There were three towns along the Pamlico River, composing what historians refer to as Secota. One town, near the river’s mouth, was Secataóc. Upriver, there were two other towns: Secotan on the south bank, and Seco on the north bank. “Secotan” may have meant “town at the bend of a river” in Algonquian. Farther upstream was Panawaioc, which may have belonged to people far enough inland to have made them Iroquoian-speaking Tuscaroras. To the north, at the east end of Lake Mattamuskeet, which the Native people called Paquip, was the capital of Pamlico.

According to an article in The Raleigh News and Observer on May 18, 1940 and reprinted in the winter edition of The Minnesott Beach Herald in the 1970s , “the village of Pomeiok was probably located somewhere about Wilkerson’s Point. Eventually it should be marked as the first place on the mainland to be visited by white men. Aquascogoc was probably about where Oriental is now situated….Secotan was in the vicinity of Vandemere or Cash Corner.”

But in their cultures, there were no concrete boundaries. To them, people did not own the land. They were stewards of it.

The Pamlico Indians’ earliest known home was near the mouth of the Pamlico River. The English made contact with these Indians in approximately 1584 to 1585. Most of the tribe was killed in war or because of the smallpox epidemic in 1696, and by 1710 the remaining members had an estimated population of 75. In the Tuscarora War they were allies of the Tuscarora, but under the terms of the treaty with the English, the Tuscarora agreed to eliminate the Pamlico. Those who survived were probably taken into the Tuscarora tribe as slaves. The last record of them was in 1718.

The name Tuscarora is applied to a confederation of people that the Europeans encountered on the Roanoke, Neuse, Tar and Pamlico Rivers in North Carolina. In 1650 they were called ”Tuscarood" and referred to as a powerful tribe with great interests in trading and commerce. The villages between the Pamlico and the Neuse Rivers were under the direction of Chief Hancock who was eventually executed by the colonists. After the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1713 and the defeat of this confederation, most of the Tuscaroras moved to New York and southern Canada. The Tuscaroras who had not fought the colonists in the Tuscarora War remained in North Carolina until 1802, when they too moved north to rejoin their people.

Nevertheless, both the war and the spread of disease from interaction with the colonists, starting with an English scouting party in July of 1585, caused the disappearance of almost all the indigenous people who originated here in Pamlico County. And, today, only a small population of Tuscarora reside in Robeson County.

In 1940, according to The Raleigh News & Observer article, “Thousands of pieces of Indian pottery and other Indian relics have been found along Bay River—and near the mouth of Bay River, in the Hobucken section, is a huge shell mound left by the Indians. Across Vandemere Creek, about a mile down shore, are said to exist three Indian ovens, or what were commonly called “pitch kettles.” Still evident is a canal dug by hand by the Indians. This is about two miles long, five feet wide and two or three feet deep. It saved great distances when the Indians wished to go from Mouse Harbor Bay to Oyster Creek.”

Special thanks to James “Bossy” Hardison for his help with this article.

Manteo’s World: Native American Life in Carolina’s Sound Country before and after the Lost Colony, by Helen C. Rountree with Wesley D. Taukchiray. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2021

Native Carolinians: The Indians of North Carolina, by Theda Perdue and Christopher Arris Oakley. North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2010

American Indians in North Carolina: Geographic Interpretations, by Thomas E. Ross. Karo Hollow Press, 1999

Native Americans in Early North Carolina: A Documentary History, by Dennis L. Isenbarger. North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2013.

Keeping the Circle, by Christopher Arris Oakley. Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska, 2005

The American Indian in North Carolina, by Douglas L. Rights. John F. Blair, publisher, 1995.

*If you have family stories to share about the American Indians who once lived here, please send them to: [email protected]

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