The People of the River

Long before Charlotte existed, before any European had seen the Carolina Piedmont, a people lived along this river system they called their own name for it, a name that settlers would eventually shorten to Catawba. The river and the people were one thing. The Catawba Nation traces its presence here to at least six thousand years before the present, and likely much longer.

Their homeland covered most of the Piedmont of what is now North Carolina and South Carolina, stretching into parts of Virginia. The Catawba were traders and diplomats by tradition, maintaining alliances and exchange networks across hundreds of miles. Their matrilineal society traced descent through women. Their pottery, coiled and pinched by hand without a wheel, was already ancient when the first European ships appeared on the Atlantic coast.

In fifteen forty, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto marched his expedition through the Piedmont heading west in search of gold. That encounter and others like it carried diseases the Catawba had no defenses against. Smallpox swept through Catawba villages at least four times in the century following contact. By seventeen sixty, the population that had once numbered between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand people had fallen below one thousand. In a single century, roughly ninety-five percent of the nation had died.

The Catawba did not disappear. They signed a treaty with the British Crown in seventeen sixty-three that established a boundary for their remaining territory. They survived the American Revolution, the removal era, the Civil War, and the industrial transformation of the Piedmont. Through all of it, the women of the nation kept making pottery by hand in the way it had always been made.

Charlotte today is built on Catawba land. The river that runs along the western edge of the metro area still carries the name the settlers gave to the people who lived along it. The city grew without acknowledging this, which is itself a history worth knowing.