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eastern North Carolina in 1733 . In 1743 , a trader visiting the Catawba nation in South Carolina found an amalgamation of many Indian refugee groups , speaking as many as 20 different languages . Among these refugees were such Piedmont groups as the Saura (or Sara) and the Eno , who lived in a . section of the Saura town. By the 1740s and 1750s, some of the Saponi and Tutelo had moved to Pennsylvania and New York (Beaudry 1979 : 4 - 7 ; Alexander 1972 : 96- 97 ; Stine 1990 ; Swanton 1946 : 200- 201 , 178479 ; White 1982 : 62 - 65 ) . Not all of the Native Americans living in the Piedmont after contact with Europeans chose to leave . Some families apparently remained on their farmsteads , some quietly intermarried with settlers of European and/or African descent ( Stine 1990) . Remnants of the Saponi apparently remained in North Carolina. In the 1750s a report to North Carolina' s Governor Dobbs stated that a number of Saponis were living on the plantation of William Eaton of Granville County (now Vance and Warren counties) . In 1762 the Saponi, including about 20 warriors , still lived in North Carolina near the Roanoke River and survived mainly through hunting . By the 1780s, some of them had moved to southeastern North Carolina to settle in the Robeson County vicinity (White 1982 : 67-68 , 80, 8243 ) . A number of Sapom were also living in southern Virginia during the last half of the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, some of the Saponi had settled in northern Alamance and Orange Counties in a distinctive community called Texas or Pleasant Grove, which has survived into the late twentieth century (Hazel 1992 ) . i Historic Overview Interpretation of historic lifeways in the North Carolina backcountry is based on a combination of primary historic research ( e. g . , census records, diaries, tax records, maps) , secondary historic research (synthesizing overviews) , and the results of archaeological investigations ( e . g . , archaeological assemblages , changing site structure) . The historic overview that follows is divided into chronological sections ranging from initial . European/Native American contact to the modern era. Colonial Period- John Lawson ' s well-publicized journey and glowing descriptions of the flora, fauna, and Native customs of the Piedmont helped renew colonists ' interests in settling the interior of Carolina (Lefler 1967) . When they arrived they found that many of the Native Americans villagers encountered by Lawson and others had died or had dispersed to join other Native Americans outside the region (Stine 1990) . This left the sporadically spaced Native village horticultural lands open for exploitation. These previously cleared patches, especially along the Eno River and its tributaries ( floodplain soils) would have been readily turned by English, German, and Scotch-Irish plows . Late seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century in- migration was characterized by a slow trickle of settlers taking up their land grants . The Carolina Proprietorship system did little to promote colonization in the Piedmont . In the seventeenth century the English Crown had rewarded families of its supporters with huge land grants in the New World. They became known as the eight Lord Proprietors . Some of those grants included the Carolina Piedmont (Powell 1989 : 53 - 55 ; 84- 86) . Although the Crown later induced the . majority to sell back their grants to England in 1728 , Lord Proprietor Carteret, and later 11