Winyah Erotic

The Winyah were a small Native American people of the South Carolina coast. They lived around the bay that still bears their name until the early eighteenth century, then faded from colonial records. Most likely they merged into neighboring peoples such as the Waccamaw, the Pee Dee and eventually the Catawba. What defined them was place. Their country lay at the lower end of a river system, where the Black River and the Pee Dee reach Winyah Bay through tidal marsh, cypress swamp and pine ridge. Today that land falls in Georgetown, Williamsburg and Clarendon counties.

Almost none of their own words survive. Scholars place the Winyah language in the Catawban branch of the Siouan-Catawban family, mostly because of geography and a few recorded names. That puts them in the same language group as the Sewee, Santee, Waccamaw and Pee Dee of the Carolina coastal plain, and apart from the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora to the north and Cherokee in the mountains. Daily life can only be sketched from what is known of the region. People lived in towns near the rivers and grew corn, beans and squash. They also depended by season on fish, shellfish and deer from the marshes and higher ground. Nobody wrote down the beliefs and ceremonies that belonged to the Winyah in particular.

Their history follows the familiar and brutal arc of the Carolina coast. Spanish slaving and colony voyages reached these shores in the 1520s, and some historians place the landing of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's failed 1526 colony at or near Winyah Bay. Lasting contact came after the English founded Charles Town in 1670. Coastal peoples were pulled into the deerskin trade, trapped by debt, raided for the Indian slave trade and struck again and again by epidemic disease. After the Yamasee War of 1715 shook the colony, South Carolina opened a public trading post at Winyah, but by then few Winyah were left. Within a generation, colonists had laid out Georgetown on the bay and turned the tidal river lands into rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Their Gullah Geechee descendants still live in the area.

The Winyah name outlasted the people. It survives in the bay, in the Episcopal parish of Prince George Winyah in Georgetown, and in the Winyah Indigo Society, a colonial planters' group that paid for one of the area's early schools. No living community traces itself to the Winyah by name. The state-recognized Waccamaw and Pee Dee tribes of South Carolina do trace their roots to the coastal Siouan peoples who shared the Winyah's world.