Yuchi

The Yuchi are a people of the southeastern woodlands, whose settlements lay along rivers and valleys from the Tennessee country to the Savannah. Their language is distinct from those of neighboring peoples. Communities farmed, hunted and traded across a wide region, while their towns maintained ties with the Cherokee and other Indigenous nations.

In the early eighteenth century Yuchi people lived at Chestowee in the Tennessee valley. Cherokee warriors destroyed the town in 1714, in a conflict also influenced by English traders. Other Yuchi communities established towns along the Savannah River, including Mount Pleasant, which was occupied again in the 1730s after the upheaval of the Yamasee War. Attacks and changing alliances eventually prompted its inhabitants to leave the valley in the 1750s.