The Moneton people were a historical Native American tribe from West Virginia'. In the late 17th century, they lived in the Kanawha Valley, near the Kanawha and New Rivers.[1]
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What the Monetons called themselves is unknown. In the 1670s, Abraham Wood wrote their name "Moneton" and the other variant "Monyton."
This era was a century before Chickamauga Wars. Points from the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River tributary outcrops have been found near Beckley, West Virginia. The eastern slopes of the southern Allegheny Mountains in today's Virginia is traditionally the Mahock,[2] and western rim of Tutelo and "Monasuccapanough" (1607) Siouan language groups and those of Iroquois dialects. The Monacan, "Monahassanaugh" (1607).
Kahnawáʼkye in Tuscarora (Iroquois) means "waterway", "kye" is augmentive suffix. Kaniatarowanenneh means "big waterway" in Mohawk (Iroquois).
Swanton guessed that the Moneton language was Siouan.[3]
James Mooney declared the Moneton lived in the western part of Colonial Virginia and said their name was an eastern Siouan word. Some scholars suggest Monetons were an element of Monacan and a variation of colonial spelling. The phrase Wood writes can be understood a couple of ways and having no surety.
Wood's remarks imply that some of the [sic]"Tomahittons" favored the [sic]"Occheneechees" position in Virginia's Fur Trade as middlemen. A small group of Tomahitans tied Arthur, Wood's agent, to the stake to burn him under the instructions of the "Occheneechees". The King of "Tomahittons" arrived, in time, and rescued Arthur, shooting that sub-group's leader. This seems to have put a quick end to the political dispute within the Tomahitan tribe. The Tomahitan tribe did accept members of certain other tribes to live with them as subordinates. Wood's recount of Arthur's travels does yield the Moneton neighbor's of 3 days journey or about 60~90 miles away and much further away if by canoe. This distance is based on the well known explorier surveyors Christopher Gist's and George Washington's several journals ability to travel these regions. The Moneton neighbor's shot arrows at Tomahitans on sight, but did not bother themselves to give chase. Alas, this still does not achieve the question, who were the Moneton's?
From a letter dated August 22, 1674 of Abraham Wood to John Richards: "Now ye king (Tomahitans) must goe to give ye monetons a visit which were his frends, mony signifing water and ton great in theire language Gabriell must goe along with him They gett forth with sixty men and travelled tenn days due north and then arrived at ye monyton towne sittuated upon a very great river att which place ye tide ebbs and flowes.[4] Gabriell swom in ye river severall times, being fresh water, this is a great towne and a great number of Indians belong unto it, and in ye same river Mr. Batt and Fallam were upon the head of it as you read in one of my first jornalls. This river runes north west and out of ye westerly side of it goeth another very great river about a days journey lower where the inhabitance are an inumarable company of Indians, as the monytons told my man which is twenty dayes journey from one end to ye other of ye inhabitance, and all these are at warr with the Tomahitans. when they had taken theire leave of ye monytons they marched three days out of thire way to give a clap to some of that great nation, where they fell on with great courage and were as curagiously repullsed by theire enimise," wrote Abraham Wood.[5]
"The word Monetons, according to Mooney (letter of January 7, 1909) is Siouan. The identity of the tribe is doubtful. From location and similarity of name they may perhaps be simply the Mohetan of Fallam's journal, and belong to the Cherokee. The Mohetan told Batts and Fallam that their villages were about half-way between Peters' Mountain and the Ohio."— Clarence Walworth Alvord and Lee Bidgood, 1912. Hale & Mooney defines Siouan "Mon", "Ma" and "Man" meaning a people's land otherwise their "country" which by this definition "Mon" does not directly refer to "water", but, to the "area of". Some scholars have pointed out that unlike the other proper nouns, Wood does not capitalize in his printing "monetons" nor the variant, "monytons", another curious observation. "Mone" means water, and "ton" means large according to Robert Rankin, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Kansas, Siouan linguistics.[6] Doctor Rankin compared linguistically "the Tutelo of Virginia are more closely related to the Crows of Montana than the Catawbans (of Carolinas)". From very recent study of 9,000 pottery shards from Fort Ancient sites in the Kanawha and Ohio River valleys showed that 37 percent of them bore corncob impressions similar to those produced in the Siouan villages of Virginia between 1400 and 1600 as Charleston Gazette staff writer Rick Steelhammer summarized Darla Spencer of Cultural Resources Analysts, Inc results. "I think Siouan was spoken in the Kanawha Valley," Doctor Rankin concluded at the 2009 WV Archaeology Annual Meeting.
Using topographic maps, geographic landmarks and travel distances, Briceland (1987)[7] demonstrates that Batts & Fallam reached Matewan on the Tug Fork. There are no known, else discovered, archaeological village sites on this branch. However, using the same method, the local university discussions point to the Guyandotte at the Logan County archaeological village site being Batts & Fallam's farthest reach in exploration. The islands near Logan resembles the falls of the James River near Wood's Fort in Virginia. The gravel bar near Matewan, West Virginia does not resemble these early descriptions of the village's location of Batts & Fallam. These studies, also, are speculation yet to be proven.
Of the unidentified people on the Ohio Valley, Wood writes, "He (Gabriell) made signes to them the gun was ye Tomahittons which he had a disire to take with him, but ye knife and hatchet he gave to ye king. they not knowing ye use of gunns, the king received it with great shewes of thankfullness for they had not any manner of iron instrument that hee saw amongst them ". The reports of this tribe given by the Mohetan to Batts and Fallam correspond with those given to Arthur by the Moneton. Fallam called those on the Great Kanawha River "Mohetan" and this is perhaps an example of tribal influx. In 1671, Thomas Batts wrote, "We understand the Mohecan Indians did here formerly live. It cannot be long since we found corn stalks in the ground." Batts and Fallam, Wood's agents, are credited as having discovered Kanawha Falls. Ouabano was a band of Mohicans or Eastern Lenape who lived within the region (Hodge). Mr Batts wrote about what he saw. Earlier scholars have this site as found to be on Campbells Creek near Belle.[8] Continued best guess otherwise, there is the archaeological village site at Marmet which is more likely Gabriel Arthur's visit with the Moneton (Maslowski et al.) and very near Belle.
The Iroquois League, Huron Confederacy and Andaste (Sultzman) are well reported as blocking the Nation du Chat from attaining fire arms, the Andaste serving as middlemen to the French and Dutch trade. The Dutch had provided Andaste with fire arms, another of the League's enemy who also spoke a dialect of Iroquois as did the "Panther People" (corrupted Nation du Chat) otherwise of the Iroquian word "Erielhonan".[9][10] Their neighbor east, at that time, of the Allegheny Mountains were the late Conestoga (Quaker for Andaste), earlier called Susquehannocks (Virginian). Susquehannocks is first mentioned in the Voyages of Samuel Champlain for 1615 as he calls one of their some 20 villages "Carantouan". It rallied more than 800 warriors with two other villages, Champlain reports. "Carantouan" was nearer to the New York and Pennsylvania border on the tributaries of the Susquehanna River on his map approaching towards the region from the Saint Lawrence Seaway.[11] West Virginia's Grant, Hampshire and Hardy counties and Maryland's Allegheny county region (Brashler 1987) possess archaeological sites having Susquehannock Ceramics. A Susquehanna site is located at Moorefield, West Virginia.
The tribes on the south eastern Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia in a region of the Blue Stone and Greenbrier river tributaries can be found in Batts and Fallows' September, 1671 Expedition. Penecute, an "Apomatack" Indian with seven more additional escorts who were later sent by their leadership, was hired and later a "Sepiny" Indian guide of the Sapony River (Staunton River) was hired to trek towards the "Teteras" (Toteras.) September 12, 1671, a Teteras guide was hired from a village just west of today's Salem, Virginia. It was declared while on the New River at Peters’ Falls, where the New River breaks through Peters’ Mountain, near Pearisburg, Virginia the "Moketans had formerly lived." On the valleys near today's Lewisburg and Beckley of the West Virginia area, "One came ("Apomatack" excort) and told us they heard a Drum and a Gun go off to the northwards..." and some days later they learnt the "Mountain Indians" of the Kanawha Falls ("Walnut Gather Place") area already possessed firearms, "...We have found Mehetan Indians who having intelligence of our coming were afraid it had been to fight them and had sent him to the Totera’s to inquire. We have him satisfaction to the contrary and that we came as friends, presented him with three or four shots of powder. He told us by our Interpreter, that we had [been] from the mountains half way to the place they now live at. That the next town beyond them lived on a plain level, from whence came abundance of salt. That he could inform us no further by reason that there were a great company of Indians that lived upon the great Water."[12] It can be surmised these were the arrival of the Les Tionontatacaga or Guyandotte of which namesake is the Guyandotte River in Cabell County. This journal does not identify the "Salt Village" on the Kanawha, but, that the "Mehetan" were associated with these and apparently not those further down to the Ohio River.
"Les Tionontatacaga" (Guyandottes), shown on Homann Johann Baptist's map of 1710, had taken refuge farther in West Virginia's hollows (after 1701) from the great heat of the Iroquois invasion, the Moneton's territory.[13] "Les Oniassoutlea", dialect variation Oniassontke, shown on the map are otherwise Black Minqua (Dutch) of the Upper Ohio Valley and Honniasontkeronon of the Middle Ohio Valley. Honniasontkeronon "infested the country above the rapids of the Ohio River" as the Seneca told La Salle in 1669. They were reported to be hereditary enemies to the Nation of Fire.[14] The Shattera's (Swanton's Toteras element of Tutelo) village is shown at Williamson (Tug Fork) according to a letter written to the Lord of Trade, New York, dated April 13, 1699. E.B. O'Callaghan M.D. also cited this source in his "Colonial History of the State of New York", published at Albany in 1856. There is uncertainty as which stream they migrated at first to near Salem, Virginia, either their Big Sandy (or the Logan site) or the Great Kanawha rivers.[15] The Big Sandy River, a border of West Virginia and Kentucky, was once known as the "Toteroy River" in their memory as shown on early maps.
Anthropologist James B. Griffin in 1942 concluded, "there is not…any sound historical evidence for believing that the central Ohio Valley was the point of dispersal for the Siouan speaking tribes." Griffin's book On the Historic Location of the Tutelo and the Mohetan in the Ohio Valley is devoted in greater part to the Tutelo.[16] Griffin devotes one paragraph of the Mohetan's east-to-west movement within the area and one sentence about Mosopolea occupation on the Ohio Valley.[17] James Mooney, in a monograph surveying “The Siouan Tribes of the East”, lists Mohetan as one of at least nine groups clearly Siouan. The Occaneechis (Akenatzy, etc.) language was said to be much like Tutelo and a lingua franca or a Virginia trade language. Tutelos and Saponis spoke virtually the same language. The Monyton's language is thought to be similar to Occaneechis while mąnį΄ ‘water’ in Tutelo; anį΄ in Ofo & Biloxi. ithą΄ ‘big, great’ in Tutelo; same in Ofo/Biloxi (Rankin 2009).
Western Virginia "Cherokee" (contemporary "Calicuas") were reported at Cherokee Falls[18] (today's Valley Falls) in 1705.[19] Indian trader Charles Poke's trading post dates from 1731 with the remanent Calicuas of Cherokee Falls still in the region from the previous century. "The Monetons are regarded to have been a distant branch of the Cherokees (contemporary "Tomahittons"). They had a natural antipathy for the Shawnees (contemporary "Showanoes"[20]), who were located on both sides of the Ohio in the vicinity of the mouth of the Scioto River. After terminating their visit with the Monetons the Cherokees went out of their direct path of return for a few days' swing to the westward to take a "clap" at their ancient and formidable enemy, the Shawnees.", quoting the Kentucky Historical Society (1922).[21]
In his book, "History Of The Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania", (Harrisburg, 1876) state librarian of Pennsylvania, William H. Egle figured that the Massawomeke is the tribe later known by the name of "Mohawk". Much earlier, however, Captain Henry Fleet arrived on the Potomac River after 1623. Later, William Claiborne, Sir John Wolstenholme, Clobery & Company and the Baltimores established a trading post at Kent Island (1631) on the upper Chesapeake Bay. They hired Fleet familiar with "Anacostia Valley Naturalls" as a guide and interpreter. Leonard Calvert's letter to Sir Richard Lechford, dated May 30, 1634, "The nation we trade withal at this time a-year is called the Massawomeckes. This nation cometh seven, eight, and ten days journey to us—these are those from whom Kircke (a Canadien) had formerly all his trade of beaver."[22] John Smith wrote of the Susquehannock, "They can make neere 600 able and mighty men, and are pallisadoed in their Townes to defend them from the Massawomekes their mortall enimies." John Lederer, for colonial governor of Virginia Sir William Berkeley, made expeditions into the Appalachians between 1669 and 1670 and reached the Mouth of the Kanawha River. With the Cherokee Nation, he reported no hostilities on the Kanawha Valley. He settled in the Maryland area and traveled to the upper reaches of the Potomac River of today's Mineral County, West Virginia.[23] This was a major trade route of the "Massawomeck". Like the other mysterious protohistoric people of the region, identifying the Massawomecks is a best educated guess due to lack of solid documentation. The Powhatan called the Iroquois the Massawomeck (Sultzman). Virginia's Native Americans said of these, "People beyond the Mountains."[24][25]
"One of the big myths in West Virginia is the association of Fort Ancient sites with the Shawnee," said Robert Maslowski. "Among cultural differences between the Fort Ancient people and the Shawnee are burial practices."[26] He added, "The Fort Ancient people lived in villages surrounded by log stockades while the Shawnee lived in non-fortified, widely dispersed sites throughout the east." The Tomahitans houses were built within log stockaded villages. The Tomahitans King, himself, clearly calls the Monetons the derivative people of the "Great Water". Growing consensus says the Monetons of West Virginia were culturally similar to Virginia's Monacan and Tutelo.
