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Yamasees settled near Savannah

Source: Invention of the Creek Nation #95

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Though Oglethorpe and his associates in London were inclined to view the territory south of the Savannah River as a vacant land waiting to be settled, the Georgians were not the first to plant a colony in the vicinity of Savannah. Once the region’s indigenous peoples, the Guales and the Escamacus, had been largely eradicated by the 1680s, the Savannah River and its environs attracted a variety of Indian colonizers seeking to tap into the burgeoning trade with Carolina to the north. Among the first to settle in the area were the Yamasees, who settled just to the north of the Savannah in 1685. A generation later, members of the Creek town of Apalachicola took up residence on the north side of the Savannah River some sixty miles upstream from the coast. Although the Apalachicolas and Yamasees eventually abandoned that territory in the wake of the Pocotalico Massacre in 1715, the southern margins of the Carolina colony continued to attract stray bands of Creeks and other Indians who hunted there and traded with the local white inhabitants.