Harriet is correct that the line separating Indian territory from the royal province of South Carolina kept moving northwestward as more settlers encroached on Indian lands. As far as the area of Old Ninety Six District is concerned, there were two Indian clans that lived there in the mid 1700s. A small, isolated group of Chickasaws lived above Fort Moore on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River near Horse Creek. The main tribes of Chickasaws lived in what is now northern Mississippi. These Indians tended to support the English throughout the French and Indian wars and were on the main quite peaceful. In 1765 some of the Chickasaw leaders went to Charlestown to complain about squatters on their land and horse thieves. They also reported that all those who knew the boundaries to their land were now dead and requested it be resurveyed. The Council promised to have their land resurveyed and to have a Justice of the Peace remove the squatters. They were told that when a thief stole an Englishman's horse, the thief was sent to Charlestown and was hanged, and if white people steal Indian horses they should be hanged also. The Chickasaws ended up supporting the British during the Revolutionary War and had their South Carolina lands confiscated by the new state of South Carolina along with other British loyalists’ lands. The other Indians in northwest South Carolina were, of course, the Cherokees. They were some times peaceful and sometimes very much on the warpath. As you might expect, they were destined to lose the fight with the endless resources of the Europeans and the endless influx of settlers. Every time they went on the warpath, more territory was given up as a result. In 1730 Sir Alexander Cuming negotiated a treaty with the Cherokees and took several of them on a visit to London. The Indians were very impressed. Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter) replied, "Your white people may very safely build houses near us. We shall hurt nothing that belongs to them." This was, of course, before any significant numbers of settlers began to come into the northwest Upcountry. The whites they came in contact with were mostly traders who wanted their business and a few hunters. The Cherokee Path went up the west side of the Congaree and Saluda rivers and by 1737 had been widened into a wagon road from Charlestown to the Congarees. It was a road of commerce and eventually (1759) was 30 feet wide all the way to Fort Prince George near Keowee. But by 1746, after having had more experience with the white man, the Indians were more cautious and refused to allow whites to settle on Indian lands. In February 1746 the colonial government purchased a large tract of land from Ninety Six settlement (the fort was not built there until 1759) westward towards Long Canes. As part of this purchase, the northwest Indian boundary was defined as Long Cane Creek (in current Abbeville County) to its head, thence eastward to the nearest tributary of the Saluda River (Turkey Creek?), and thence down that stream to the Saluda River (below Ware Shoals, Greenwood County, SC), thence north to the intersection the Catawba-Cherokee Path. This was paid for with lead, gunpowder, vermillion paint, and beads, amounting to 189 pounds sterling. When the Calhouns and neighbors moved to the Long Canes area in 1756, they settled on the west (Indian) side of Long Cane Creek, and declared that they had secured permission from the Cherokees, but this did not prevent the Long Canes massacre in 1760. Conocautee (Old Hop) and other chiefs of the Cherokee nation signed the Saluda Old Town Treaty July 2, 1755 with Gov. James Glen of South Carolina. According to Historian Roy Vandergrift of Saluda, SC, this treaty ceded a large part of what became Ninety Six District, territory that embraced all or large parts of the present counties of Spartanburg, Cherokee west of the Broad River, Union, Newberry, Laurens, Greenwood, Abbeville, McCormick, Edgefield, Saluda and a small part of Aiken. In December 1761 after the 1758-1761 Cherokee War with much fighting, the Cherokees and colonial government in South Carolina signed another treaty. This one set the boundary forty miles from the Indian town of Keowee, a line proposed by the Cherokees. This new boundary was a straight line from the Savannah River where the Anderson County-Abbeville County line is today up to the Reedy River and thence a straight line northward to Tryon Mountain in North Carolina. The boundary line was actually surveyed in 1766. You may see a map with this boundary drawn on it in Meriwether’s Expansion of South Carolina, p 212. More that anything else, it was the Cherokee treaty of 1761 that led to a large influx of settlers into the Upcountry of South Carolina. This boundary meant nothing to the Creek Indians, who conducted raids around Long Canes and the Saluda valley in 1763-1766 time frame. These boundaries also meant nothing to northern Indians - Senecas, Mohawks, and other Iroquois tribes - who moved up and down the Appalachians for 20 or 30 years raiding both white and Indian (Catawbas, Chickasaws, and Creeks) settlements. As early as 1753 the Assembly in Charlestown put a huge bounty (100 pounds and later 50 pounds) on the head of Northern Indians. Like the Chickasaws, the Cherokees lost all their land in South Carolina because of their support of the British during the American Revolution. In 1786 Pendleton County and Greenville County were created out of the former Indian lands in the northwest corner of South Carolina. For more Indian-related history in South Carolina, consider, in addition to Meriwether’s Expansion of South Carolina, Robert Bass’s Ninety Six, John Henry Logan’s History of the Upper Country of South Carolina, and J. B. O. Landrum’s Colonial and Revolutionary History of Upper South Carolina. David Duncan Wallace, David Ransey, and Edward McCrady also wrote histories of South Carolina covering this period.