HISTORIC OCONEE COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA Subject: SENECA Version 1.0, 15-Dec-2002, H-01.txt **************************************************************** REPRODUCING NOTICE: ------------------- These electronic pages may not be reproduced in any format for profit, or presentation by any other organization, or persons. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material, must obtain the written consent of the contributor, or the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. Paul M Kankula - nn8nn Seneca, SC, USA Oconee County SC GenWeb Coordinator Oconee County SC GenWeb Homestead http://www.rootsweb.com/~scoconee/oconee.html Oconee County SC GenWeb Tombstone Project http://www.rootsweb.com/~scoconee/cemeteries.html http://www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery/southcarolina/oconee.html **************************************************************** DATAFILE INPUT . : Paul M. Kankula at kankula1@innova.net in Dec-2002 DATAFILE LAYOUT : Paul M. Kankula at kankula1@innova.net in Dec-2002 HISTORY WRITE-UP : Mary Cherry Doyle, Clemson, SC in Jan-1935 Dedicated To: Dr Edgar Clay Doyle FOREWORD In presenting these fragmentary facts that have come to my knowledge, it is my hope that they may prove helpful in preserv- ing the history of Oconee county for the youth of the land and all who are interested in the history of Oconee county for South Carolina. With knowledge there will follow a fuller appreciation of the great heritage that is ours. I wish to acknowledge a great debt of gratitude to Dr. J. Walter Daniel, an author- ity on Indians of the South. We are indebted to members of the Wizard of Tamassee Chapter S. C. D. A. R. and many other friends. MARY CHERRY DOYLE. January, 1935. SENECA Our little city greets you. Linger a little while and refresh yourselves. You are in a section of the little state of South Carolina full of local history. Seneca nestles in the lap of the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. These hills rise from eleven hundred to two thousand feet above sea- level. From the tops of many of these hills you may look at a single glance of the eye into four states. Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. All along your journey you have looked on the lofty peaks of the Blue Ridge mountains. The Cherokee Indians who once inhabited this section named them Sah- ka-na'-ga, "The Great Blue Hills of God," their god, of course. White men destroyed the beauty and grandeur the Cherokees wrote into the name they bestowed on these mountains by crudely translating Sah-ka-na-ga into English, the Blue Ridge. Six people from the east, north, south and west, speaking distinctly different tongues have come to abide in these salubrious hills. First an unidentified tribe of Indians who came in the long ago. Nobody knows their tribal name but they have left many fragments of their pottery and stone implements by which their occupancy is distinctly established. Then came the Creek Indians from far away Mexico, fleeing from the cruelty of the Spaniards, nearly four hundred years ago. They brought with them the seed of the tomato or tamartl, as they called the plant. Two place names still abide in their adopted territory, Tomotley and Tomatola, which are attempts of their successors, the Cherokees, to pronounce the Mexican word. This name undoubtedly proves that the first soil in which the tomato was cultivated in North America is the soil on which we now stand. These Mexican Indians also gave the name of our county, Oconee. Their largest town and capital stood on Cane creek about three miles from this spot, Uk-oo-na they called it, from the plural of Ak-ta, eye, Oota, water, and Nanna, hill. The name is a compound word meaning Water Eyes of the Hills, suggested by the thousands of clear springs bursting from the bases of these everlasting hills. While the Creeks had possession of this tract of country the Nun-da-wa-di-gi clan of the Iroquois Indians came from territory now within the state of New York doubtless looking for a climate more moderate and salubrious than that which they formerly inhabited. The clan was permitted to settle on the west bank of what was then Keowee river. Their clan name, Nunda Wadigi, signified Bright sun-colored men. All Indians were fascinated by the rainbow and the colorful glow of the sun on the infolding clouds when she retired to her chamber for the night in the Darkening Land, the west. The sun was to them a beautiful woman to whom they paid homage, her red colors were her gorgeous robes. It is not surprising, therefore, that they adopted the clan-name, Bright sun-colored people. The Nunda Wadigi Indians built their town on Keowee not later perhaps than 1630 and it may be a century earlier than that date. Faint traces of old mounds still remain to mark to site of Old Seneca. The Indian town stood almost opposite the west side of the campus of Clemson College, built by the state around the old mansion of John C. Calhoun to perpetuate the memory of our greatest statesman. Seneca is not an Indian name but the survival of a nickname bestowed on the Iroquois by the early Dutch traders in New York state. The Dutch nickname has clung to them from that early day to the present. The Dutch called them Sinabars because they used red paint in their red sun-colored facial paints. Sinabar is simply the Dutch word for red paint. The Cherokee Indians to whose territory their kinsmen, the Nunda Wadigi, came could not enunciate the sound of th labial b and substituted for it the hard "sound of k and. therefore, pronounced their nickname Sineca, then softened the harsher northern enunciation to Suneka then added an initial e from the name of their supreme Good Spirit to indicates that these Iroquois Indians were foreigners and not equal socially, politically or in any other respect to the great body of the Cherokee people. E-su-ne-ka was corrupted by the white settlers to Isundiga which was once the name of the Savannah river from the tributaries of the Keowee to Augusta. The novelist Simms regrets the beautiful name Isundiga had perished and wished that it might still become the name of some county or town to be preserved forever in our Indian nomenclature. The wish of our greatest novelist has material- ized in the reincarnation of the name the Sun-colored people bestowed on their town three hundred years ago. Old Seneca was destroyed by Col. Andrew Williamson who led 1,860 Carolinians against it on July 31, 1776. Every house was burned to the ground, 5000 bushels of corn was destroyed, the peach trees were cut down and the green corn with all growing crops trampled in the earth. The Sun-colored people were led in the defense of their town by Cameron, the British Indian agent, and a number of Tories painted and dressed like Indians. The conquest of the town was so complete that the Indians were driven into the woods never again to return to the town they built over three hundred years ago. The little clan of Senecas was absorbed by the Cherokees and followed them finally to the Cherokee reser- vation west of the Mississippi river in 1838. A small clan of Catawbas were permitted by the Chero- kees to settle near Toccoa, Ga. These Catawbas were originally from Canada. So the first unidentified tribe who at some time preceded the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Senecas, and the last English make up the six people who have lived on the soil of Oconee. The first treaty ever made between white men and Cherokees was made in 1684 by the colonists at Charleston and signed by the hieroglyphics of eight Chiefs, all of whom lived in Oconee county, their names were: Corani, the Raven; Sinawa, the Hawk; Nellow-gitehi, Gorhaleka and Owasta, all of Toxawa; and Canacaught, the great Conjuror; Gahoma and Cau-na-saita, of Keowee, his name translated into English means Dogwood. This is the first and oldest Cherokee treaty on record. It is an interesting coincidence that the last treaty was made by the United Colonies in 1785 at Hopewell, the home of General Andrew Pickens, within a stone's throw of the site of old Seneca town. J. WALTER DANIEL The Seneca Indians belonged to the Six Great Nations, and lived west of Seneca Lake in New York. A number of these Indians came down and joined themselves to the Cherokees in the latter part of the seventeenth century, or perhaps earlier. It was their proud boast that a Seneca could never be tricked and compared themselves to foxes and panthers who came with deadly swiftness and left in the same manner. The Senecas were the cleverest of their kind. They were splendidly built, with piercing eyes like birds, lean of face and lithe of body.