1606 Hondius Map recorded the Cwareuuock territory |
The Cwar, Core or Coree Indian tribe once occupied the "Core Sound" area. Their territory included land south of the Neuse River in then Craven County, from Craney (Harker's) Island west, including what is now Carteret County.
Cwareuuock shows an Algonquian ending -euuock, which roughly translated "people of" or "land of Cwar." (Blair A. Rudes, UNC Charlotte, The First Description of an Iroquoian People: Spaniards among the Tuscaroras before 1522)
"The Coree...had been greatly reduced in a war
with another tribe before 1696, and were described by Archdale as having
been a bloody and barbarous people. John Lawson refers to them as Coranine
Indians, but in another place calls them Connamox and gives them two
villages in 1701, Coranine and Raruta, with about 125 souls. They
engaged in the Tuscarora War 1711-15, and in 1715 the remnants of the
Coree and Machapunga were assigned a tract on Mattamuskeet Lake, Hyde
County, NC." (O.M. McPherson - Indians of North Carolina 1915, Documenting
the American South)
Al Pate described his Coree ancestors as a proud people who refused to return friendship “with every beating they took.” Pate wrote, “The Coree War is the Indian war that’s in the records, that history ignored and historians forgot.”
The Coree War described by Pate as “a canoe warfare and pitiful delaying action,” started about eight years before the Tuscarora War and lasted another two years after the Tuscarora headed north.
The Tuscarora, outraged over enslavement, land encroachment and the deceitful practices of the white intruders, were angered at being pushed off their land--the area of present-day New Bern. King Hancock and his braves, full of resentment and hatred, murdered Deputy Surveyor John Lawson and decided to declare war.
In September of 1711, according to historian William Powell, King Hancock's warriors, joined by other tribes, including the Coree, "launched an all-out attack along the Neuse and Pamlico, including the town of Bath." The unsuspecting and untrained colonists, also weak from a poor drought-caused harvest, were stunned and frightened. Farnifold Green and others made out their wills.
With help from Colonel John “Tuscarora Jack” Barnwell, Colonel James Moore and their South Carolina troops, including Indians from other tribes, the Tuscarora were finally defeated at Nooherooka in early 1713. The majority of the Tuscarora survivors migrated north and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Coree, as noted by Pate, “grunted at the signing…and hunkered down in their hideaways, deep in the swamps…while their menfolk harried the Albemarle, the women and children of the Coree made their way to rich dry hammocks between the pocosins."
The continuation of the Coree War went on until February 11, 1715, when the colonial government finally returned “a piece of old Pamtico” to the few remaining Coree. However, with names like Core Banks and Core Sound, the Coree left their mark on land south of the Neuse.