An illustration of the death of John Lawson.
Johnston County’s First People By BENJAMIN SANDERFORD
They called themselves the Skarureh (“People of the Shirt”). Outsiders called them the Tuscarora. For hundreds of years, they cultivated the river valleys of the North Carolina coastal plain, growing
corn for food and hemp for clothing. Hence their name. The Tuscarora retained the hunting skills of their earliest ancestors, those who had crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia thousands of years before, but they had long since become sedentary. No
tepees for these people. Instead, they lived in longhouses covered with bark. Each one was roughly a hundred feet long, big enough to shelter an entire clan. These clans were led by “clan mothers” who selected the members of the tribal council, representatives from
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