Wateree Erotic

The Wateree were a Native people of the Carolina Piedmont. They lived along the upper rivers of what is now North and South Carolina from at least the 1500s into the early 1700s. By then war, epidemic disease and the colonial slave trade had destroyed them as an independent nation, and the survivors joined the Catawba. Their name has lasted longer than their towns. The Wateree River and Lake Wateree in South Carolina still carry it, though most people who say the word today know nothing of the people behind it.

They first appear in writing through Spanish eyes. In the 1560s the Spanish captain Juan Pardo marched inland from the colony of Santa Elena on the South Carolina coast and reached a town recorded as Guatari. Historians link that town to the Wateree and usually place it on the Yadkin River in North Carolina. The Spanish accounts name women as chiefs there. Pardo left a priest at Guatari who spent months trying to teach Catholic doctrine, one of the earliest mission attempts in the interior Southeast. Spain soon pulled back to the coast, and the mission left no lasting mark. Wateree religious life stayed rooted in the ceremonial traditions shared across the Southeast.

Their language was barely written down. Scholars usually group it with the Siouan languages of the Carolina Piedmont, probably close to Catawba. The evidence is thin, though, and the classification rests as much on geography and later alliances as on recorded words. Like their neighbors, the Wateree grew maize, beans and squash in river bottomlands and hunted deer across the uplands. That hunting later drew them into the deerskin trade with English Carolina.

A century after Pardo, the English found them again. John Lederer visited a Wateree town in 1670. By the time John Lawson traveled the backcountry in 1701, the Wateree had moved south into the South Carolina valley that now bears their name. That put them in easy reach of traders from Charles Town, who dealt in guns, cloth and captured Indigenous people. Slave raiding and traders' abuses helped set off the Yamasee War of 1715, a broad uprising the Wateree joined. They came out of it weakened. Over the next few decades their remaining families merged into the Catawba, a nation that took in many broken Piedmont peoples. Wateree descendants are part of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina today.