Cusabo

The Cusabo were a loose group of tribes, including the Kussoe, living on the South Carolina coast between Charleston and the Savannah River when English colonists arrived. Their language was poorly recorded and matched none of the neighbouring families, suggesting an isolate, dying out in the eighteenth century.

Charles Town was founded in 1670 in their midst: war with the Kussoe broke out in 1671, and after further fighting the Cusabo were forced to cede land and pay tribute in deerskins. They nevertheless became the colony's Settlement Indians, serving as hunters, scouts and slave-catchers and fighting in the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1712.

A census of 1715 counted them in five villages with fewer than three hundred people. In the Yamasee War later that year they sided with the colonists, after which most drifted away and merged into the Muscogee or the Catawba.