Neusiok Erotic

The Neusiok were a Native American people who lived along the lower Neuse River in coastal North Carolina, mostly on its southern bank. They were there before the first English voyages of the 1580s and remained until the early 1700s, when war and colonial settlement broke them apart and their survivors joined neighboring nations. The river still carries their name.

Their country lay in what are now Craven and Carteret counties. It was pine flats, cypress creeks and brackish shoreline where the Neuse widens toward Pamlico Sound, and it sat on a border. Algonquian-speaking towns held the sounds to the north, and the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora held the interior. Almost none of the Neusiok language was ever written down, so no one can say for sure which side of that line it belonged to. It is usually classed as Iroquoian and related to Tuscarora, but the evidence is thin and the question is still open. Almost nothing is known of their religion beyond the general remarks English writers made about the region.

The first English mention of them dates to 1584. Arthur Barlowe reported on the voyage that scouted Roanoke and described a country called Newsiok on a river the locals called the Neus. He wrote that it was allied with a neighboring country called Pomouik and at mortal war with Wingina, the Algonquian leader whose people had welcomed the English. Over the next century the Neusiok declined the way most coastal Carolina nations did, through epidemic disease, slave raids and the steady spread of settlers. John Lawson, the colony's surveyor general, published his account of Carolina in 1709. He listed the Neuse Indians as two small towns with about fifteen fighting men.

The breaking point came in 1710, when Swiss and German Palatine colonists founded New Bern where the Trent meets the Neuse, on land the lower Neuse peoples considered theirs. The Tuscarora War started the next year, and the Neusiok appear to have fought on the Tuscarora side. The Native alliance lost. Some survivors likely joined the Coree, who were later settled with other small surviving groups near Lake Mattamuskeet, and others may have gone north with Tuscarora refugees. After the war the Neusiok no longer appear in the record as a separate people.

Their name outlasted them. Besides the river, the Neusiok Trail runs roughly twenty miles through the Croatan National Forest, from the banks of the Neuse toward the salt marshes of the coast. It crosses the same pine and swamp country where they once hunted and fished.