Cofitachequi

A Mississippian chiefdom that occupied the South Carolina piedmont and coastal plain at the time of contact with Europeans in the 16th century, Cofitachequi survived several invasions by Spanish entradas (newcomers) into their territory only eventually to disintegrate under the pressure of demographic collapse caused by the introduction of diseases from the Old World.

At its height the chiefdom of Cofitachequi possibly controlled a territory that extended from the coast of modern-day South Carolina to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in modern-day North and South Carolina. Primarily a Muskhogean-speaking people, the Cofitachequi may have first encountered Europeans in 1526, when they met a Spanish contingent headed by Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, who called them the Duhare. Hernando de SoTO’s expedition provided the first detailed description of Cofitachequi after he led the invasion of the chiefdom in 1536. Soto forced the Cofitachequi to provide food, shelter, and porters to support his campaign and looted their temples for animal furs and freshwater pearls. After resting and finding no evidence of GOLD or silver wealth in the Cofitachequi chiefdom, the Soto campaign then proceeded to move into the Appalachian Mountains in search of the heralded Coosa chiefdom. Juan Pardo’s entrada next made contact with Cofitachequi in 1566. Pardo attempted to establish a permanent post there, but the Cofitachequi eventually forced its abandonment. From 1562 to 1564, the French tried to establish a post in South Carolina and encountered a powerful Indian nation known to them as the Chiquola, almost certainly the Cofitachequi chiefdom. Cofitachequi last appears in the historical record in 1672, when its chief visited the newly established English colony at Charles Towne, and later when the chiefdom was briefly mentioned in Carolina records of 1681. By 1701 the Cofitachequi no longer inhabited the South Carolina region.

Further reading: David G. Anderson, The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997);

-, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 1997); Chester B. DePrat-ter, “The Chiefdom of Cofitachequi,” in The Forgotten

Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704, eds. Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tes-ser (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 197-226; Charles Hudson, The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-68 (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

—Dixie Ray Haggard