Coree Erotic

The Coree were a small Native people of the North Carolina coast. They lived around Core Sound and the mouth of the Neuse River until the early 1700s. War with English colonists broke them, and the survivors were folded into the Machapunga community at Lake Mattamuskeet. They left almost nothing of their language and no account of themselves in their own words, but their name stayed on the water. Core Sound and Core Banks carry it, and people along that shore still call themselves Core Sounders.

Their country was the low, wet edge of the continent: shallow sounds behind barrier islands, salt marsh, and pine and cypress ground rising behind it. Coastal peoples here planted maize and relied heavily on the water, building fish weirs, gathering oysters and clams, and hunting waterfowl. So little of Coree speech was written down that the language cannot be placed with confidence. Some scholars group the Coree with the Algonquian speakers who held the sounds to the north, and others with the Iroquoian Tuscarora inland. Their closest documented allies were the Neusiok, their neighbors along the Neuse.

English settlement reached them late. Planters moved south into the Pamlico and Neuse basins in the years around 1700, and when John Lawson described the region's Native nations in 1709, the Coree could field only a few dozen fighting men. The next year Swiss and German Palatine colonists founded New Bern where the Neuse and Trent rivers meet, on land Native people were still using. In September 1711 the Coree joined the southern Tuscarora, the Neusiok, the Pamlico, the Machapunga and others in coordinated raids along the Neuse, Trent and Pamlico rivers. The raids killed well over a hundred settlers and started the Tuscarora War.

The colony struck back with its own militia and with two expeditions from South Carolina, both made up largely of Native allies. The fall of the Tuscarora fort at Neoheroka in 1713 ended the main resistance, but the Coree and Machapunga kept fighting from the swamps and pocosins for two more years. A 1715 peace settled the survivors of both peoples on a reservation at Lake Mattamuskeet, in what is now Hyde County, and after that the Coree name fades from the record. Over the following decades the reservation was sold off in pieces, though families of Mattamuskeet descent stayed in the region. Today the Coree are remembered mostly through place names and through their part in the war that decided who would hold eastern North Carolina.