Chisca facts for kids

The Chisca were a tribe of Native Americans living in present-day eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia in the 16th century.

Spanish Sargeant Moyano attacked the Chisca from the fort near present-day Morganton, North Carolina. He reported that he and 16 men along with around 70 Indians from neighboring North Carolina tribes killed more a thousand Chisca men, women, and children near what is today Saltville, Virginia. After some merged with the larger Shawnee, surviving Chisca who lived in a town near Saltville might have also merged with towns along what is now the I-81 corridor and towns along New River at what are now Austinvlle and Foster's Falls. These were inhabited at the time of the massacre.

Known history

Two major Spanish expeditions of the 16th century who explored the interior of the southeastern Woodlands recorded the Chiscas. Both the 1542 Hernando de Soto expedition and the 1568 Juan Pardo expedition recorded encountering Chisca in their travels. According to de Sotos's account, he sent out a small exploration party near the Nolichucky River in the vicinity of the upper Tennessee River, where they were attacked and defeated by Chisca[warriors. As a result, de Soto limited his explorations in Chisca territory.

Captain Juan Pardo first entered the Southeastern interior in 1567. On his second venture through the mountains beyond the Mississippian culture chiefdom of Joara, where his forces had built Fort San Juan and spent the winter, Pardo's exploration party also met armed resistance from the Chisca. (Pardo called them Chisca; his chronicler called them Uchi.) His men destroyed their settlement at Maniatique, thought to be where present-day Saltville, Virginia is.

Putting others in charge of the garrisons and a total of five other forts, Pardo left in 1568 for Santa Elena, in present-day South Carolina, where the Spanish had a colony. Later that year, all but one of his soldiers were killed and the six Spanish forts destroyed by resisting Native Americans. After that, the Spanish abandoned their colonizing efforts in the interior of the Southeast. They kept colonies in La Florida such as St. Augustine. The name Chisca seldom appeared in Spanish colonial records after the 16th century.

In 1683 the French explorer La Salle found what his expedition recorded as a Cisca village between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers (in Yuchi territory, now northern Tennessee). La Salle persuaded those villagers and the Shawnee north of the Cumberland to relocate to Fort St. Louis in what is now western Illinois, to live under French protection.

Around this time, these Chisca seem to have joined with the Shawnee under the name Chaskepe. They followed the Shawnee's later migrations (1692–1754) through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. La Salle reported that the Chisca had originally lived in the Appalachians east of where he found them, until their town was burnt down by colonists from Florida. (He mistakenly called those colonists English; they were Spanish). The Chisca appeared to have become extinct as a tribe by the 18th century; their descendants intermarried and assimilated into other tribes.