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McCOKMICK MESSENGER, McCORMICK, S. C., THURSDAY, MAY 30, 1940 North Carolina's Men of Mystery/ The Croafans, May Be Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh's 'Lost Colony’ “The Name Is Familiar— BY FELIX B. STREYCKMANS and ELMO SCOTT WATSON By ELMO SCOTT WATSON (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) I N ROBESON county, North Carolina, live near- . ly 10,000 Americans who are truly “men of mystery.” Their racial origins are lost in the scant history of the very first phase of the white men’s conquest of America. Proud of their race and its traditions, they have lived largely to themselves for the last 200 years, consistently holding themselves aloof from the endless debate which historians and ethnolo gists have held over the sub ject of who were the fore bears of these people. According to the North Caro lina law and to reports to the fed eral government they are In dians. A large part Indian they most certainly are, judging by their appearance, their habits and their manner of life. But the fact that since pre-Revolu- tionary days many of them have had curly hair—sometimes red or blonde—and the fact that their dialect, as first recorded by the early colonists, contained many Anglo-Saxon words, is also proof that they are not of Indian blood alone. Are they descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony,” including the romantic Virginia Dare, “the first English child bom in what is now the United States?” Some historians are convinced they are, even though positive proof of that fact may never be established. Raleigh’s Ill-Fated Colony. It was in 1587 that Sir Walter Raleigh sent out his third expe dition to colonize Virginia. Head ed by John White, who was to be governor of “The Citie of Ra leigh in Virginia,” the colony in cluded 17 women and children, among them White’s daughter, Elyoner (Eleanor), who had mar ried Ananias Dare. Because of trouble with his crew, White was not able to take the colonists to a location on Chesapeake bay as instructed. Instead he stopped at Roanoke island in search of 15 men left behind the previous year by Sir Richard Grenville, leader of an other Raleigh expedition. After they landed, White decided to re main on Roanoke island for a time at least and set about build ing a town. There, according to a letter written by Governor White to Raleigh, on “the 18th (August, 1587) Elyoner, daughter to the governor and wife to Ananias Dare, one of the assistants, was delivered of a daughter in Roa noke, and the same was christ- An old Croatan Indian farmer whose prosperity is indicated by the weight of his solid gold watch chain. ened there the Sunday following and because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia, she was named “Virginia.” Soon afterwards White decided to re turn to England. He started on August 27, leaving 120 settlers at Roanoke. When he arrived in England he found that country busy'with preparations to resist the Spanish Armada. His fleet of vessels was seized by the govern ment and when he assembled an other it was driven back by pirates near Madeira. So it was not until 1590 that he was able to obtain passage to America. This was on a priva teer fleet of three vessels sent out to prey upon Spanish commerce. After a series of adventures with the enemy, they finally reached Roanoke island at night and were cheered by the sight of smoke ris ing and a fire glowing through the trees. When they reached the shore at the north end of the island ther blew trumpets and sang familiar English songs. Carved on a Tree. But instead of the joyous wel come which they expected to re ceive, they wero greeted with SARAH DIAL Croatan Indian coed who is an accomplished violinist. silence. They found only the footprints of the Indians who had fled at their approach but on a tree was carved the letters C R O. Pushing on to the site of the “Citie of Raleigh” they discov ered that the houses had been taken down and the place en closed with a high palisade. On one of the posts at the right side of the entrance was carved the word “Croatan.” Before leaving, White had in structed the colonists, if they de cided to move, to carve their destination on a tree, adding a cross if they were in distress. The absence of a cross from the tree and the post on which they found the carved words gave White hope that his people were still living. Croatan island was the site of a village of Indians whose chief, Manteo, had been to England with the first Raleigh expedition and who was friendly to the English. But when White urged the cap tain of the privateering fleet to send a party to Croatan his re quest was refused. Their supplies were low and the captain was anxious to resume his operations against the Spanish. Later Sir Walter Raleigh sent no less than five expeditions to search for his “Lost Colony.” But the seas were swarming with Spanish priva teers and there is no record that any of the ships reached Croatan. For more than a century the vicinity of the ill-fated colony was unexplored and its fate accepted as an unsolved mystery. Then in 1709 John Dawson, an English ex plorer, visited the Hatteras In dians who had gray or blue eyes and were familiar with the art .of reading, in that they knew that the English “could make paper speak.” These Indians were less than 100 in number and it was be lieved that they were descend ants of survivors of the Roanoke colony who had been assimilated into the Indian tribe living on Croatan island. Old Names Persist. The name Virginia Dare was unknown among them but Ham ilton McMillan and other histo rians of the tribe believed that the Indian surname “Dorr” orig inally was “Dare,” the change be ing the result of the tribe’s gut tural pronunciation. On the ros ter of the “Lost Colony” were the names of Henry Berry, John Sampson and a score of others which are to be found among the Indians of Robeson county and have been since before the Revo lution. An Indian named Henry Berry enlisted in a company of North Carolina colonial troops to fight against the British and Henry Berry Lowrie was the leader of the famous Indian out law gang which terrorized that part of North Carolina for 10 years after the Civil war. Although, in colonial days these Indians were proud of the name “Croatans” and boasted of their white as well as Indian ancestors, today these people do not like the name, some preferring to be known as “Cherokee Indians of Robeson County” while others call themselves “Siouans.” The tribe’s aversion to the name Croatan is the result of re ports made to the department of interior in Washington the ef fect that the blood of a number of runaway negro slaves also was to be found in some families of the race. And although the de partment’s study included many excerpts from the histories of Mc Millan and Stephen B. Weeks, an other historian who believed he had found conclusive evidence that the “Lost Colony’s” descend ants were here, it also quoted oth ers who took the position that the white blood of the race came from roving seamen, including pirates who once were bottled up in the nearby Cape Fear river by ships of the English and early colonial navies. The Indians were incensed and for a quarter of a century have endeavored to shake off the name “Croatan” with only partial success. The best known name in Croa tan history is that of Henry Berry Lowrie, the famed outlaw previ ously mentioned. The state put a price of $10,000 on his head, dead or alive, and anyone wh» killed or captured a member of his gang was given half as much. A number were killed in gun fights but in the entire history of the gang’s operations only one member was ever captured and held long enough to be executed by the statq. What finally be came of Lowrie is almost as much a mystery as the anteced ents of the tribe. Driven to Outlawry. As hated as the Lowrie gang was in the days when its rob beries and murders were com mon occurrence, those who in re cent years have studied its his tory are inclined to place much of the blame on the whites. Among these historians is R. C. Lawrence, an attorney who has devoted the last several years of his life to writing and to research. In the first place, the Indians who volunteered or were conscripted for service in the Civil war fre quently were placed with gangs of negro slaves and assigned to work rather than to fight. Many immediately deserted. The final straw was the summary execu- HENRY BERRY LOWRIE Famous Croatan Indian outlaw (From an old daguerreotype) tion of Lowrie’s father and broth er by members of the home guard, who were investigating instances of petty thievery. On that day Henry Berry swore re venge and regardless of where the blame lay, there is no doubt that he got it. Most persistent in the war against the Lowrie gang was Frank W. Wishart, formerly a captain pf the Confederate army, who was commissioned by the state to run the outlaws down. Along with many others, he was killed by the gang, but Lawrence writes that he is due more credit than any other individual for the eventual sudcess of the campaign. How and why the gang dis solved is uncertain. One story is that the chief accidentally killed himself while cleaning his rifle. Another is that he called the gang together, formally dissolved it, and left this vicinity forever. Once a group of men from Lum- berton, the seat of this county, thought they recognized as Henry Berry Lowrie an old man, obvi ously part Indian, they found working around a hotel in Okla homa. The next day they sought to investigate, but the Indian had disappeared and no one was to be found who knew where he had come from. But the Lowrie name and Low rie leadership is still to be found here and members of the family are proud of Henry Berry Low rie, whom they consider another Robin Hood. One of his great nephews, Principal Kermit Low rie of the Indian school, has as his most prized possession old Henry Berry’s favorite rifle. Oth er descendants of the members of the gang are among the larg est landowners of this primarily agricultural region. Their sons go to college and many have made names for themselves in various professions. The once strained relations be tween the Indians and the whites of this section are now harmoni ous. The real turning point came, say the Indians, when more than half a century ago the state of North Carolina recognized them as a race apart and provided separate schools. Today there are three kinds of schools in this county—the Indians, whites and negroes each having institutions of their own. A theater in a near by town has a separate entrance for members of each race. And in Pembroke the state has operat ed an Indian school since 1887. “It’s still too early to talk much about it,” said one of the younger leaders of the community, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if some day we wouldn’t readopt the name of Croatan. I know something about the history of my people and to my way of thinking, it’s a name of which we should be proud.” if Von Bunsen Bunsen Burner *"pHAT small gas burner the den- tist has that makes things so hot so fast, is called a Bunsen burner. It consists of a straight tube with small holes at the bottom where air enters and mixes with the gas. The jxygen in the air causes the gas to ourn with a hotter flame. Your gas stove works the same way—there are air vents in the pipes that lead to the Durners so that mu are burning a mixture of gas and air, other- vise you wouldn’t »et much heat !rom the gas alpne. It really ioesn’t make nuch difference vhere the holes are placed along Jie pipe—as long as they are this side of the meter. But what we started out to say vas, this burner is named after Robert Wilhelm von Bunsen, a Ger- nan chemist who was born in 1811 and died in 1899. He was a profes sor of chemistry at Kassel in Bres- au, and later at the famous uni versity at Heidelberg. P. S. Von Bunsen didn’t invent die burner—either a man by the aame of Peter Desdga or the famous Michael Faraday did. At least, it is mown that both of them used the same type of burner before Vou Bunsen. * • • Sanforizing C'OR the fact that your Adam’s ^ apple isn’t in danger of being squeezed out of shape by a tight Dollar after your shirt has been laun- iered a few times, you can thank a 36-year-old native of Troy, N. Y.— Sanford L. Cluett. He was the in ventor of a pre-shrinking process which is used to treat one-fifth of all the available fabrics in this coun try before they are made up into wearing apparel and which has added a new word to our ev eryday speech— sanforizing. After the World war, American men, accustomed to khaki shirts, o . ™ LL wanted to contin- Sanford Cluett ^ ue wearing soft Dollars. But they shrank after washing and no purchaser knew how much shrinkage to expect. Shirt manufacturers had shrinking ma- Dhines but they didn’t do the job Dompletely and they had to allow ihree-quarters of an inch for shrink age in each collar. The problem was to produce a uniformly shrunk fabric that would not change its size when given the average laundry wash. In 1919 Cluett, a veteran of the Spanish-American war, an engineer and an inventor with a number of patents to his credit, joined the re search department of the company af which his name is now a part. After a long series of experiments ae finally produced in 1928 the proc ess now known as sanforizing and all those devoted to wearing shirts with soft collars breathed easier. V ooth figuratively and literally! * * • Nobel Prize T HERE’S more than a little irony in the fact that the most famous jf all prizes for the person or or ganization who best serves the in- ;erests of world peace each year paid out of a fund that had its arigin in the sale of a product which adds to the horrors of war. Yet such is the case of the Nobel prize. ^Ufred Bernhard Nobel, Swedish chemist and in ventor, born in 1833, was educat ed in Russia and sent to America to study engineer ing. But within a year he returned to Europe to aid his father in de veloping military and naval mines and torpedoes. In 1862 he helped the elder Nobel in perfecting the manufacture of nitroglycerine, called “Nobel’s blast- mg oil,” and further research by the :wo led to the invention and com mercial production of dynamite, originally known .nites.” Alfred Nobel as “Nobel’s ig- When Nobel died in Italy in 1896 ne left a large fund, from the inter est of which annual prizes were to oe awarded achievements in various lelds, including physics, science, Dhemistry, medicine and literature. But the most humanitarian, the No- oel peace prize, is paid from the profits of a “merchant of death.” (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) Ancestor of Modern Football Every year in January for the last 600 years they have played at Haxey in England an ancient ball game which was the ancestor of modern football. Lovely Crocheted Bedspread Pattern 6665. 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