The Catawba Nation: River People of the Carolina Piedmont
By Margaret Ellsworth Boyd
Length4h 39m
About this audiobook
Fifteen miles on a side. That was the square of land along their river that the Catawba kept under the treaty signed at Augusta in 1763, after two centuries of trade, war and epidemic, as colonists poured into the Carolina Piedmont.
Before the square there was the river. The people who called themselves Iswa, the river people, built palisaded towns at the fords and shoals of the Catawba and its sister streams. They raised corn, beans and squash on floodplains renewed by every spring flood, burned the understory each fall to keep the woods open for deer, fished the spring runs of shad, and settled quarrels with a ball game rough enough to stand in for war.
Carolina traders came inland for deerskins, and after them came the Yamasee War of 1715, a long balancing act between rival empires, and an alliance with the Patriot side in the Revolution. The nineteenth century was harder: in 1840 the reservation itself was signed away to South Carolina. The twentieth brought federal recognition, lost and then won back, and carried the nation into the present.
The colonists named the river for the people. The people had long since named themselves for the river.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 39 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The River and the Towns
2Chapter 2: The Coming of the Trade
3Chapter 3: The Yamasee War, 1715
4Chapter 4: Between Empires
5Chapter 5: The Deerskin Road
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6Chapter 6: The 1763 Treaty and the Fifteen-Mile Square
7Chapter 7: The Revolution and the Long Alliance
8Chapter 8: The Long Nineteenth Century
9Chapter 9: Allotment, Removal, and the Twentieth Century
10Chapter 10: Recognition and the Modern Nation
11Chapter 11: The River People in the Twenty-First Century
12Chapter 12: What the River Remembers
13About the Author
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