First South Carolinians

Before European contact, there were over 30 tribes of native people who lived in present-day South Carolina. Europeans - first, the Spanish and then, the French - wrote about the native people and from these accounts we have knowledge of how native people dressed, lived, hunted, gathered food and interacted with their environment and their neighbors. The book describes how the native people lived and the vivid illustrations show how they dressed, hunted, cultivated crops, built their dwellings, made their canoes and hunting tools and participated in games and ceremonies, some of which are still practiced today. The authors stopped the story after first contact with the Europeans, who brought diseases, pigs, guns, knives, metal tools, rum and other things which greatly changed the culture and diminished the numbers of our native people.