“History does not make clear the policy of the North Carolina colony in dealing with the Indians in regards to their lands; it does not appear that any official policy was adopted until the near the close of its colonial existence . . .

“. . . the relations existing between the settlers and natives were friendly and peaceful up to the year 1711 . . . After the conquest of the Tuskarora there was no other tribe, except the Cherokee, on the their western frontier which the colonists deemed worthy of consideration . . .

“It would seem . . . that but a comparatively small portion of the territory of North Carolina was purchased from the Indians . . . Mr. James Mooney, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who has made a careful study of the natives of the section, remarks-The tribes of between the mountains and the sea were but of small importance politically; no sustained mission work was ever attempted among them, and there were but few literary men to take an interest in them. War, pestilence, whisky and systematic slave hunts had nearly exterminated the aboriginal occupants of the Carolinas before anybody thought them of sufficient importance to ask who they were, how they lived, or what were their beliefs and opinions.
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