CAROLINA
SETTLEMENT
The prologue to Robert Bass' excellent book Ninety Six - The Struggle for the Back Country sets the scene very nicely for the beckening promise of the Santee Valley where Archibald McKee was to settle prior to 1740 as well as for the "back country" of Old Ninety Six where Adam McKee and the Dixons came upon the scene during the 1760s.
The Royalists succeeded in restoring young Prince Charles to the throne of England in 1660. Among his early acts (1663) as King Charles II, the grateful young monarch rewarded eight of his supporters with the gift of a vast, undefined portion of North America naming the territory Carolina. Later the territory would be split into North and South Carolina. Colonization began about seven years after the grant led by Anthony Ashley-Cooper who became the Earl of Shaftesbury. The first settlement was on the neck of land above the confluence of the Kiaway and the Wando Rivers. The town was named Charles Town in homor of King Charles who had granted the proprietorship.and the rivers were renamed the Ashley and Cooper after you know who.
Unlike the "lost colony" experience there were no immediate problems with the Indians around this initial settlement. Relations with the Cherokee Indians were friendly but the incursion of the white man went less smoothly with the Yemassees, a tribe of about 1250 Muskogean Indians some 90 mines southwest of Charles Town.. The Cherokee Path began on the bight across from Charles Town and meandered through the valleys continuing along the Congaree and Santee Rivers. Indians came down the trail to purchase hatchets, guns and trinkets from merchants in Charles Town. A few bold traders ventured up the trail to the Indian villages. From a path for Indian traders and hunters the Cherokee Path became the main roadway into the interior for traders and colonizers. With their capital of Charles Town properly honoring the monarch and the rivers after Lord Proprietor Ashley-Cooper, as settlement layered outward from the capital city the three Proprietors established three counties giving them their own names of Berkeley, Colleton and Craven. However for the first 60 years due to restrictions the Proprietors placed upon immigration the colony grew very slowly and was pretty much limited to a rough triangle along the Atlantic with its apex at Moncks Corner on the Copper River with legs extending north to Winyah Bay and south to Hilton Head.
By 1715 the Yemassees Indians had become hostile and waged an attack but following an hour of intense fighting they retreated across the Savannah River so the settlers were now surrounded only by the peace loving Cherokees. The Carolinian settlers had became dissatisfied with injustices they perceived under the Proprietory system and in 1719 they asked to be made a "Crown Colony". Both King George I and Parliament were receptive but negotiations dragged on for ten years. Finally in 1729 Parliament bought out the Proprietors and Colonel Robert Johnson was sent out as the first governor of Carolina. He encouraged rather than discouraged expansion and a treaty between Scottish baronet Sir Alexander Cuming with the Cherokees in 1730 opened the door for the Ulster influx. Eleven townships were laid out each to contain twenty thousand acres and to be situated on some river within approximately sixty miles of Charleston. By November 1732 surveyers had completed their work on six townships. The second of these -- Williamsburg Township -- is of primary interest to us.. Among the earliest Williamsburg County settlers arriving from Ulster were the Witherspoons and not far behind them came our ancester Archibald McKee .The McKee saga on American soil begins!!.....