Yamasee

The Yamasee were a multiethnic confederation forged in the seventeenth century from survivors of Georgia chiefdoms shattered by disease and Westo slave raids. Spanish documents first called them the Yamasis in 1663, when they lived on the Georgia and South Carolina border. Their speech was close to Muskogean.

In the 1680s they settled by the Savannah River and Port Royal Sound and became South Carolina's foremost Indian ally, selling captives at Charles Town and forming the core of the militia that fought the Tuscarora War.

Abuses by traders, debts and colonial hunger for their rice lands drove them to revolt in 1715. Joined by others, they nearly destroyed the colony before the Cherokee switched sides and the war ended in 1717. The defeated Yamasee dispersed to Spanish Florida and the Creek towns and ceased to exist as an independent people.