Episode Details

John Lawson knew the Tuscarora better than almost any Englishman alive. He had walked their country, written the finest book yet penned about the native peoples of Carolina, and recorded, in plain words, that the Indians treated the colonists better than the colonists treated them. He was also the surveyor whose maps drew the settlers onto Tuscarora land — and in September 1711, the Tuscarora made him the first man to die in their war. This episode follows the Tuscarora War from Lawson’s death up the Neuse to the fall of Fort Neoheroka in 1713: the dawn raid that opened it, the truce a Carolina colonel broke by selling his prisoners into slavery, the European-style fortress the Tuscarora built under an escaped South Carolina slave, and the three days Colonel James Moore — son of the man who had burned Florida — spent burning his way through it. It is the story of how the most powerful nation in North Carolina was undone inside a single fort, of the survivors who walked five hundred miles north to become the sixth nation of the Iroquois, and of the allies who carried the captives down to the ships and began, quietly, to wonder when their own turn would come.