Tomahittan

The Tomahittan were Native Americans whom Virginians James Needham and Gabriel Arthur tried to contact to bypass the taxes of the Occaneechi "middlemen" natives.

What tribe the Tomahittan belongs to is in dispute. For many years, scholars accepted that the Tomahittans were either Yuchi or Cherokee and that the town visited by Needham and Arthur was somewhere west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One investigation places the Tomahittans around the vicinity of present-day Rome, Georgia.

Other sources record that Tomahitan was the name of the main town of the Nottoway people in Southside Virginia. Some authors have mistaken the Tomahitans for the Cherokee, but in 1727 a delegation of Cherokee visiting Charleston referred to the Tomahitans as old enemies of their allies, the Yamasee.[1]

According to archaeologist Gregory Waselkov, the Tomahittan are "a Hitichiti-speaking group, probably a splinter from the Ocute paramount chiefdom on the Oconee River who moved to this vicinity in the late seventeenth century after the fall of Ocute."[2]

Gabriel Arthur claimed that the Tomahittans kept men of the "Weesock" tribe as warrior slaves.[3] Historian John R. Swanton has proposed that the "Weesock" were the Waxhaw.[4]

References
  1. Green, William (1992), The Search for Altamaha: The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of an Early 18th Century Yamasee Indian Town, Volumes in Historical Archaeology #21, Columbia, S.C.: The South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, OCLC 27735429. p. 26n.
  2. Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn.Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn (2010). From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion. ISBN 9780807834350. Retrieved 2015-05-31.
  3. "Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series". 1889.
  4. Swanton, John Reed (2003). The Indian Tribes of North America. ISBN 9780806317304.
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