[Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of cross-posts from The Lawson Trek, the website where Knight Science Journalism project fellow Scott Huler is chronicling his quest to retrace the journey of English gentleman-explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.]
I have the terrible duty today, anniversaries being as they are, to share the story of the death of John Lawson, which occurred 303 years ago, right around today. It wasn’t a super pleasant death.
Lawson’s journey, which we will be retracing beginning October 12 in Charleston, was transformational for him, for North and South Carolina – and for the original inhabitants of those states. The native population had been much transformed in the decades before Lawson arrived, and that transformation included the death by disease of most of the Native Americans and the enslavement of many others. Lawson himself says that “The Small-Pox and Rum have made such a Destruction amongst them, that, on good grounds, I do believe, there is not the sixth Savage living within two hundred Miles of all our Settlements, as there were fifty Years ago. These poor Creatures have so many Enemies to destroy them …