Mysteries and Histories: Nehemiah Evitt and Southern Native American Heritage

As a small child, I lived from time to time with my maternal grandparents on their farm in Oklahoma. They lived in Pushmataha County, on what had been Choctaw Indian reservation land before the Dawes Act, and long before that, Caddo Indian land. My grandmother had taught at the community's one-room school, which still served the local Choctaw families. When I started school there, my cousin Mitchell was in the first grade, I was in the second, and my brother Martin was in the third. We were one row apart from each other, along with other kids, some of whom were obviously Indian.

My maternal grandmother was Lillian Agnes Williams Morrison Slatten, born 1 January 1892 in Walker County, Georgia, died 31 October 1984 in Dallas, Texas. Many years later, after her death, I glanced at an old and familiar photo of her. First, I saw her as she had been, my beloved grandmother. Suddenly, something shifted, and she was an Indian, a surprise to me. And then another shift, and she was my beloved grandmother and an Indian. Partly Indian, she would have said. I didn't know how I had missed that part of her. I hadn't seen it before. No one had told me.

Lillian Agnes Williams Morrison Slatten

I called my mother and blurted out my discovery. My mother denied it staunchly and told me her mother had been Italian. I argued with her, saying there were few Italians in Georgia in the 1800s. My grandmother acted nothing like Italians I knew. There were no Italian names in the family tree. Some months later, when I called my cousin Cecile and blurted it out again, I expected the same fight. But there was only her pause for the right thing to say. "We knew we were Indian," she said. Why hadn't I? But Cecile didn't know how we were Indian. I started looking at things differently.

I rifled through other old photos that I had. People who looked Indian were scattered throughout my family. Lots of darker hair and eyes, wide cheekbones, some darker skin. On both sides, too, possibly three grandparents' worth of partly Indian.

L to R, my grandmother's siblings--Leonard Williams, Theresa Ethelma Williams Crowder, Anna Ruth Williams Kelley, Dessie Lou Emiline Williams Marks, and an unknown, perhaps a stepbrother.

My paternal great-great-grandfather, Henry Fauteck, had been a German carpenter. He had gone to California as a private in the U.S. army as the Civil War started, was there in the early 1860s, and brought back his son, my great-grandfather, Henry Martin Fauteck, born 1863 in California, to New Jersey. My mother had heard a story from the Fauteck family that the elder Henry must have been a bigamist--there is no evidence that he married in California, however--because his wife in New Jersey reportedly wasn't the mother of Henry Martin. Many of the Fauteck descendants had dark hair and resembled Indians, and my mother knew that there had been dark-haired Fautecks remaining in California. The tintype of Henry Martin showed him with dark hair; he reminded me of a California mixed blood that I knew, half Miwok and Pomo Indian, half white.

L to R, Louisa Kreis Fauteck, Albert Martin Fauteck, Henry Martin Fauteck

In my maternal family, Lillian's brothers and sisters, her mother, her father, and her grandfather, Nehemiah Evitt, all resembled Indians, too. I showed the photo of Nehemiah and Rosana Emiline, his wife, to a friend. "He's an Indian," she said, "and she's an Indian, too." The biggest mystery had been that they were "partly" Indian.

Given Nehemiah's appearance, I suspected that either the Evitt line, his maternal Rippetoe line, or both, were intermingled with Native American lines in the early South. This photo had been retouched to put in more beard and to take out his longer hair.

Wilson (2002) claimed Nehemiah was descended from Dutch and Welsh: "William was said to be of Welsh descent and Rebecca [Rippetoe] of Dutch descent." There is no known indication of Welsh descent in William Evitt's male or female ancestry. The Evitt family line an be traced back to the late 1200s in Lincolnshire, in the east of England. In the several generations before immigration to Virginia, it was reported that the Evitts lived in Ireland. 

Neither is it proven that the Rippetoes were Dutch. The Rippetoe name descends from Gabriel Ribouteau, immigrant to South Carolina. Ribouteaus were in frontier Virginia by the early 1700s. Gabriel was a Huguenot and perhaps lived in Holland, but he is said to have been born in France. There is no other apparent Dutch descent in the records of the Rippetoe family.

A euphemism in the south for a mixed blood was often Black Dutch, to explain away dark complexion and hair color:

Black Dutch is an unofficial American ethnic designation. It was commonly used in Pennsylvania among ethnic Germans, some of whom migrated south to Virginia and other points. Separately, it became adopted around 1830 and afterward among certain Southeastern families of mixed-race ancestry, especially those of Cherokee descent. When used in the South, it usually did not imply admixture, although some families who used the term were of tri-racial descent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Dutch). 

While there is less of a record of this with Black Irish or Black Welsh in the South, those terms also have existed to dissemble dark complexions in white cultures. 

There were other maternal family lines where there was evidence. Since my mother's ancestors had been early settlers in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Oklahoma, they had lived close to populations of Indians from the early 1600s to the 1900s. While it is known that some of them fought Indians, it is also likely that some intermingled and intermarried over those hundreds of years.

The intermingling of many of the early colonists in Virginia with women from the Powhatan Confederacy can be established from colonial records. Separate letters to King Phillip III of Spain in 1612 from the Marquess of Flores and Don Pedro de Cunega reported that as many as forty to fifty colonists had married Indian women (Link out of date. Was at: http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/jame1/moretti-langholtz/chap10a.htm, citing Brown 1964). 

At a time when there were very few European women in Virginia, forty to fifty colonists represented a substantial percentage of the population: "the dearth of English women at Jamestown in its early years and the close proximity of Indian women probably made intimate relationships between English men and Indian women inevitable" (Goetz 2012, 65).

Such relationships were apparently pursued strategically: "The English pursued a second strategy common in trading communities: cultural assimilation and commercial advantage through sexual alliances" (Games 2008, 131).

In early colonial Virginia, it has been said that the Great Powhatan Wahunsenacawh, chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, fostered many of these relationships in diplomatic moves to establish better relations with the European colonists (see Bernhard 2003, 16). The marriage of Pocohontas, the Great Powhatan's daughter, to John Rolfe ushered in an eight-year period of peace (http://www.virtualjamestown.org/jrolfe.html). 

Pocahontas Matoaka Rebecca Rolfe

While Pocahontas' marriage is the best-known English and Indian union in colonial Virginia, other prominent unions are noted in historical records. In one instance, Lt. Col. John West, the son of Gov. John West and the grandson of Thomas West, 2nd Lord de la Warre, had a long-term liaison and a child or children with Cockacoeske, the Queen of Pamunkey, a cousin of Pocahontas, in the mid-1600s (see McCartney 2006). Outside the Powhatan Confederacy, white and Indian relationships are also documented among the Cherokee, Catawba, and other Southern tribes.

William L. Deyo, the tribal historian for the Patawomeck [Potomac] tribe of Virginia, has published multiple articles and books detailing many more historical unions between whites and Indians in Virginia, including the Pettus, Bryant, and Williams families: 

Chief Wahanganoche was very shrewd in allowing a number of his daughters to marry well-to-do English colonists in the area . . . It is because of the children of those daughters and some of the orphan children of [the massacre] of 1666, who also married English colonists that the Patawomeck Indians and their culture survived (http://virginiaindians.pwnet.org/today/patawomeck.php).

Such interminglings represented a continuing reality of colonial life:

In colonial Jamestown, the first biracial Americans were the children of white-black, white-Indian, and black-Indian unions. By the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 people of "mixed" heritage resided in the colonies. During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson begged Americans to consider "let[ting] our settlements and [Indians'] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people" (http://www.ferris.edu/News/jimcrow/question/may10/index.htm, citing Hodes 1999, 11).

Many anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting intermingling between whites and Indians were eventually passed in the South: South Carolina (after 1717), North Carolina (after 1715), Tennessee (after 1715 as North Carolina, after 1796 as state), and Georgia (after 1750). Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana passed laws that prohibited only relationships between whites and blacks. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase in 1815, white and Indian cohabitation and intermingling were permitted in Louisiana, but not marriage, unless both parties were Catholic (http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/american_antimiscegenation.htm).

A variance in this pattern was Virginia, which in 1691 prohibited marriages between whites and negroes, mulattoes, and Indians. However, when the law was amended in 1705, it omitted mention of Indians. In 1753, the law in Virginia was reenacted, but it still only addressed black-white marriages (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2012/06/01/intermarriage-and-the-law-colonial-style/). In part because of the change to Virginia's laws in 1705, "In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a good number of Anglo-Americans advocated inter-marriage with the Indians as a means of speeding up efforts to 'civilize' the Indians or as a means of acquiring Indian land" (Lemire 2011, 47). In the Virginia legislature in 1784, Patrick Henry proposed the payment of rewards to white men and women who married Indians; the bill did not pass (Higginbotham and Kopytoff 2000, 108, n. 133).

When Virginia eventually passed a law barring white unions with Indians in the Racial Integrity Law of 1924, an exception was made that skirted racial-status issues for descendants of such earlier unions, particularly those of Pocahontas, whose descendants included some prestigious and influential American families (http://www.americanancestors.org/an-excursion-into-southern-genealogy/): 

[I]t was not until 1924 that Virginia again expressly barred marriages between whites and Indians and even then it declared that “persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.” This so-called Pocahontas exception was expressly designed to accommodate descendants of the John Rolfe-Pocahontas marriage (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2012/06/01/intermarriage-and-the-law-colonial-style/). 

As a result of the changes in Virginia's laws, intermarriage with Indians was at least legally permitted, even if not always socially accepted, from the earliest settlements to 1691, from 1705 until 1924, and from 1967 on. In 1967, all states' anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the U. S. Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia case (388 U.S. 1 (1967)).

Virginia, therefore, was a haven, along with other states without anti-miscegenation laws, for those families who were Indian and white. Except for the years between 1691 and 1705, only 14 years, Virginia had no fundamental legal sanctions against Indian and white marriages for over three hundred years, between 1608 and 1924.

Despite illegality in other Southern states, these unions still took place, especially on the frontier, where such connections into tribes were useful for trade, diplomatic relations, and establishing further settlements, and where enforcement might be weaker: "The Indians often initiated interracial liaisons . . . these matches had benefits for tribe and trader" (Ingersoll 2005, 68). However, there is often little or no documentation, because it was not just illegal, it was socially unacceptable and even dangerous. In white-dominated communities, people passed for white if they could.

White and Indian intermingling in the South was prevalent throughout the colonial era, especially in Virginia. It was a force in the settlement of the frontier, and it is documented in many family genealogies, in DNA testing, and in the historical literature. 

I eventually identified about thirty-five Native Americans in my mother's other family lines, primarily women. I found my paternal great-great-grandmother, Louisa Smith, was Miwok, Pomo, and Kamchatkan/Aleut.

I also found that Nehemiah Evitt was a direct descendant of Pocahontas/Metoaka and her father, the Great Powhatan, on the Evitt line. 

I eventually had my DNA tested, and there were European, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, Austronesian, and Native American markers. Siberian ones, too. Intermingling had been happening for thousands of years. However, it turned out that the Ribouteau line may have been from Sardinia, via Genoa, Italy--probably Repetto. My mother had been partly right.

References:
Bernhard, Virginia. 2003. Pocahontas Was Not the Only One: Indian and English Liaisons in Seventeeth Century Virginia. In Searching for Their Places: Women in the South across Four Centuries, ed. Thomas H. Appleton and Angela Boswell, 12-36. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. 

Brown, Alexander. 1964. The Genesis of the United States. New York: Russell & Russell.

Games, Alison. 2008. The Web of Empire : English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goetz, Rebecca Anne. 2012. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff. 2000. Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. In Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors, 81-139. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hodes, Martha, ed. 1999. Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. New York: New York University Press.

Ingersoll, Thomas N. 2005. To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed-Bloods in the United States from the Earliest Times to the Indian Removals. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Lemire, Elise. 2011. "Miscegenation": Making Race in America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

McCartney, Martha W. 2006. Cockacoeske, Queen of Pamunkey: Diplomat and Suzeraine. In Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and M. Thomas Hatley, 243-266. Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press.

Wilson, John. 2002. Evitts Were Among Earliest Ooltewah Settlers. Chattanoogan.com, February 17. Excerpt from Wilson, John. 2001. Early Hamilton Settlers. N.p.: Sheridan Books. Accessed February 6, 2014. 
http://www.chattanoogan.com/2002/2/17/18127/Evitts-Were-Among-Earliest-Ooltewah.aspx.