Shakori Erotic

The Shakori were a small Native American people who lived along the Eno River and nearby streams in the North Carolina Piedmont during the 1600s and early 1700s. By the 1710s they no longer appear in colonial records as a separate group, and most likely merged into larger nations, probably the Catawba to the south. In their own time, what set them apart was their close tie to another people as much as any place. Nearly every colonial account puts them side by side with the Eno, in neighboring or shared towns, moving through the same country and facing the same pressures.

No record of their language survives. The Saponi and Tutelo nearby spoke Siouan languages, so scholars place the Shakori in the same family. They were part of a Siouan pocket in the interior, with Iroquoian Tuscarora to the east, Cherokee in the mountains and Algonquian speakers along the coast. Their religious life was never described in any detail either. For a people this thinly documented, what we know comes mostly from their surroundings and from two outsiders who passed through.

Their world was the Piedmont farming village: corn, beans and squash planted in river bottoms, deer hunted in the uplands, and towns of pole-framed houses near good water. The Great Trading Path from Virginia crossed the Eno in their country, close to present-day Hillsborough. By the later 1600s, deerskins moved north along it in exchange for cloth, metal tools, guns and glass beads. The same trade that brought those goods also put the Shakori within reach of disease and of the slave raids that fed the Carolina Indian slave trade.

The German explorer John Lederer came through in 1670 and recorded the Shakori as neighbors of the Eno. In 1701 the English surveyor John Lawson was guided across the region by a man he called Enoe Will, who headed a combined community of Eno, Shakori and Adshusheer. Lawson shows a people already shrunk and regrouping to survive, a pattern repeated across the Piedmont in those decades. Some writers have tried to tie the Shakori name to Chicora, the land Spanish slavers described on the Carolina coast in the 1520s, but no one has ever shown that the two are connected.

Today their legacy lives mostly on the map. Shocco Creek and Shocco Township in Warren County carry a form of the name and may mark an earlier home. Shakori Hills in Chatham County carries it as well. The Eno River valley, now largely protected parkland, still holds archaeological sites from the Piedmont towns of their era.