Patt Boon

Patt Boon’s son Lewis Boone (1757-1844) was bound out in 1774 in Bertie County. He then appears in the 1800 census for Northampton County, NC and in the 1810, 1820, and 1830 censuses for Halifax County (his household was enumerated in every census as “free colored”). Lewis filed a Revolutionary War pension application (excerpts found here) in 1843 in Halifax County which confirmed that he was born in Bertie County and lived a short while in Northampton County before relocating to Halifax County. The pension application includes some very important details about Lewis Boone’s service which further verifies the Boone family’s origins with the Tuscarora at Indian Woods.

Lewis Boone enlisted via the draft in 1778 in Bertie County with Uriah Dunning and served under Captain James Blount of the 10th Regiment. Lewis Boone also indicated that Captain William Williams marched him from Bertie County to Halifax which is where he enlisted under Captain Blount. This Captain William Williams is the same William Williams who was appointed as a commissioner of the Indian Woods reservation in 1778 and whose name appears on several Indian Woods land leases with previously mentioned Thomas Pugh. Captain James Blount who commanded Lewis Boone’s regiment, was from the Blount family who was the namesake for Tuscarora chief - “King Blount”. It was not uncommon for Native Americans to adopt the names of “friendly” colonists. The pension application did not list the names of Lewis Boone’s wife or children. However through the rejected Cherokee Dawes and Eastern Cherokee/Guion Miller applications that were filed by Lewis Boone’s descendants, we know who some of his children were. Many non-Cherokee Native American families from North Carolina were often mislabeled and sometimes self-identified as Cherokee, which resulted in these families applying for Cherokee status. This will be a subject of a future blog post. Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas, who did fieldwork in the mid 1970s to investigate the claims of many of the self-identified “Cherokee” communities of the Southeast, had this to say about the Tuscarora heritage of the Haliwa-Saponi (the tribal community of Lewis Boone’s descendants):

They do not accept the term Haliwa and refer to themselves as Cherokee although the term Haliwa is gaining more acceptance as time goes on. This tribe appears from the research I have done, to be the remnants of the North Carolina Tuscaroras. When the Tuscaroras fled north in the early 1700s they left a large body, of so-called neutral Tuscarora, on a reservation just to the east of the modern Haliwa country near Windsor, North Carolina. There were several hundred Indians left on that reservation after the “hostile” Tuscaroras fled north and became part of the Iroquois League in New York. Slowly throughout the 1700’s, parties of Indians left that reservation and joined their brethren in New York. In the first decade of the 1800’s the few remaining Tuscarora sold their lands at Windsor, North Carolina. It appears they simply moved west a few miles to the present Haliwa area. There were a few other Indians, possibly Tuscarora, already living in that area. In any case, it appears that the Haliwa are remnants of the neutral Tuscarora.

Source: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=r... https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/the-boone-fami...