Date: June 23, 1907
Paper: Dallas Morning News
Peculiar Peoples In America
By Frederic J. Haskins
Sheltered by some pocket in
the hills living in seclusion in some quiet valley or guarded by
impenetrable grasses in some far everglade, there are here and there
throughout the United States groups of people that are peculiar and
distinctive from the rest of the inhabitatants. Segregating in close
communities they have preserved for centuries, traits and
characteristics of some remote and often unknown ancestry, and through
traditon only can they trace their past.
....On Newman's ridge in
Hancock County, Tennessee, overlooking the beautiful Clinch River
Valley, lives one of the most mysterios people in America.
Through their Anglo-Saxon neighbors or through writers of romance the
name "Malungeon" has been given them, a name that the better element
resents. They resemble in feature the Cherokee Indians, and yet
have a strong, Caucasian cast of countenance that makes their claim to
Portuguese descent seem probable. They came, so a legend runs, of
a bard of Portuguese pirates, who long yeas ago were wrecked on an
unknown coast, became adopted into an Indian tribe and were part of the
Cherokees who two or three centuries later refused to go West and live
on the reservation that a kindly Government offered when it needed
their Eastern lands.
In the 'Tractado das Ilhas
Novas" written by Frandisco de Sousa in 1570, and published in San
Miguel, Azores, only about forty years ago, there is an acount of a
Portuguese colony which is said to have existed on the eastern coast of
British North America over 100 years before Jamestown was
settled. This colony was known as Terra Nova, and from 1500 to
1579 the records at Lisbon show that commisions were regularly issued
to Gaspar and Miguel Corte Real as Governors of the settlement.
One hundred years before Columbus came to these shores it is claimed
that the Basques, then great seafarers, but now a mountain people of
Spain, came to these shores and lent much of their language to Indian
dialects. From the Corte Real settlements and from these Basques
speculating historians have tried to draw an ancestry for the
"Malungeons." Whatever the origin may be as a people they were
practically outcasts for many years. They were there in the
Tennessee mountains when John Sevier organized the State of Franklin,
and were supposed by their neighbors to be Moors. In 1834 they
were denied the right of suffrage because they wee accounted "free
person of color," and for many years suffered this political
idignity. As a natural consequence they became lawbreakers and
evaders of the newer processes of civilization. It is claimed
that there is also negor blood in the "Malungeon" strain.
In Robeson County, North
Carolina, lives the remnant of the once powerful Croatan Indian tribe
which welcomed Amadas and Barlowe when they came to roanoke Island of
whom Hakluyt wrote in his "Voyages." The explorers claim to have
found several auburn-haired children among them, the Indians explaining
that they were descendants of some shipwrecked white men picked up on
the coast of Secotan twenty six years before. These modern
Croatans are even more pronounced in the proof of an Anglo-Saxon
strain, and yet they have not intermarried with their white
neighbors. There are several hundred of these Indians, some of
whom have light hair, others have blue eyes, and names Dorr and Dare
are said to be common among them. Because of this, historians
have deduced the theory that the remnants of Whate's colony which
disappeared from Roanoke Island between 1587 and 1590 were taken away
into the camps of the Croatan or Hatteras Indians and that Ananias
Dare, his wife and little Virginia gave their name and their coloring
to the tribe as we find it today.