The Tutelo and Totero, People of the Roanoke Valley Before the Railroad
Near Roanoke, Virginia
Long before the Norfolk and Western's surveyors walked the Roanoke Valley, before European settlers built their first trading post on the Roanoke River, the Roanoke basin was home to a people whose descendants still carry their name: the Tutelo, also known in colonial records as the Totero. They were Siouan-speaking people, which puts them linguistically in the same family as the Catawba and the Monacan to the east, quite distinct from the Algonquian-speaking nations of the Tidewater coast. The Tutelo lived in the Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge valleys for at least several centuries before European contact.
Their villages were concentrated along the rivers that drain the Valley of Virginia. They were farmers who also hunted, traders who moved along established paths through the mountains, people who maintained diplomatic relations with neighboring nations across a wide region. Seventeenth-century English colonial records mention them repeatedly, sometimes as trading partners, sometimes as participants in the shifting military alliances of the contact period.
The colonial period was catastrophic for the Tutelo. Population loss from introduced disease, combined with warfare and displacement, drastically reduced their numbers through the late sixteen hundreds and early seventeen hundreds. By the mid-eighteenth century, the surviving Tutelo had largely merged with the Cayuga of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the north, to whom they became formally adopted.
The name Tutelo persisted in Haudenosaunee records and ceremonies well into the nineteenth century and beyond. The word Roanoke itself comes from this world. It derives from an Algonquian-Siouan trade term for the shell beads, called rawrenoke or variants thereof, that circulated as a form of currency and diplomatic gift through the networks that connected the Blue Ridge peoples.
When the town was renamed in eighteen eighty-two, the railroad boosters who chose the name likely understood it as a regional geographic label. But it carries, if you listen for it, the trace of a commerce that was already ancient when the first English ships arrived on the Atlantic coast.
