Food and supplies had been stored.
A protected redoubt strengthened the entrance area.
People inside expected a serious attack.
The battle began in March 1713.
Moore’s force surrounded the position.
The attackers used methods closer to formal siege warfare than frontier raiding.
They dug.
They approached the defenses.
They tried to break or burn sections of the fort.
Native allies fought at close range.
Defenders resisted from prepared positions.
For days, the fighting continued.
March 20–23, 1713
North Carolina’s historical marker gives the decisive dates.
March 20 to March 23, 1713.
The fight lasted three days after the main assault began.
Eventually attackers penetrated the defenses.
Parts of the fort burned.
The losses were enormous.
Official North Carolina historical sources state that around 950 Native people were killed or captured at Neoheroka.
NCpedia gives a more detailed traditional breakdown.
It reports 392 Tuscarora burned or killed and another 558 killed or captured.
Different historical accounts describe the final toll in somewhat different ways, but all agree that Neoheroka destroyed the military power of the southern resistance.
The battlefield victory opened much of the interior Coastal Plain to faster European settlement.
That consequence matters.
The war had begun in large part because settlement was pressing into Native land.
The Native defeat made that settlement easier.
The War Did Not End Neatly on March 23
Military resistance did not disappear in one morning.
Some fighting continued.
Different treaties followed.
Native groups moved.
Others remained.
But the destruction of Neoheroka changed the balance so completely that large-scale resistance in eastern North Carolina could no longer continue as before.
By the end of the Tuscarora War, North Carolina historical sources estimate roughly 200 colonists and around 1,000 Native people had been killed.
Another 1,000 Tuscarora were sold into slavery.
More than 3,000 were forced from their homes.
Numbers from early eighteenth-century wars should always be treated as estimates.
Records were incomplete.
Colonial writers sometimes exaggerated enemy losses.
Native records survive differently.
Captives could be counted as dead in one source and separated in another.
But the scale is clear.
The war transformed eastern North Carolina.
Many Tuscarora Went North
After defeat, many Tuscarora left North Carolina.
Migration happened in stages.
Some moved through Pennsylvania.
Others eventually reached communities connected to the Haudenosaunee in New York.
The Tuscarora spoke an Iroquoian language and had older cultural and linguistic ties with the nations farther north.
By the early eighteenth century, those connections offered a path away from the expanding Carolina frontier.
The migrants eventually became recognized as the sixth nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
North Carolina histories commonly date formal incorporation to 1722.
That migration changed the map of Native North America.
A nation deeply rooted in the Carolinas now had a major population hundreds of miles to the north.
The route north was not simply voluntary migration in the ordinary sense.
War, enslavement, and loss of territory had made remaining in the old homeland increasingly difficult.
Some Tuscarora Stayed
The story did not become “the Tuscarora left North Carolina.”
Many remained.
Tom Blount’s communities had taken a different path during the war.
Colonial authorities eventually recognized reserved land for Tuscarora who stayed.
In 1717, approximately 40,000 acres were established in the Indian Woods area near the Roanoke River for the remaining Tuscarora under Blount.
That reservation later shrank under continuing pressure and land transactions.
The existence of Indian Woods is another reminder that the Tuscarora War did not produce one single Native outcome.
Some migrated north.
Some stayed.
Some lived on reservation land.
Families continued in North Carolina.
The political geography changed, but Native presence did not disappear.
The National Archives Preserves the Later Tuscarora Story
The documentary trail continues long after 1711.
The U.S. National Archives lists later federal treaties involving the Tuscarora, including a December 2, 1794 treaty involving the Oneida, Tuscarora, and Stockbridge at Oneida, New York.
The National Archives also preserves the federal treaty record connected to the Six Nations at Canandaigua in November 1794.
In describing the Canandaigua gathering, the National Archives says more than 1,600 Haudenosaunee people, including Tuscarora, met representatives of the United States to discuss “peace and friendship.”
That phrase came more than eight decades after Lawson entered Catechna.
By then the political world had changed completely.
Britain’s mainland colonies had become the United States.
The Tuscarora had become part of the Six Nations in New York.
Yet the same questions remained.
Land.
Boundaries.
Sovereignty.
Treaties.
Who had the right to decide where people could settle.
Those were already at the center of the Catechna council in 1711.
The Map of the War in Words
The easiest way to understand the whole conflict is to travel the map from east to west.
Begin at the Atlantic coast.
Move into Pamlico Sound.
Follow the Pamlico River west.
Bath sits near its northern side.
Farms and plantations spread along its banks.
Now move south toward the Neuse River.
At the joining of the Neuse and Trent Rivers stands New Bern, founded in 1710.
From New Bern, follow the Neuse inland.
The river bends through forest and swamp.
Smaller creeks feed into it.
Contentnea Creek comes down from the northwest.
Near that system was Catechna, the Tuscarora town connected with Hancock.
A few miles and river routes away were other Native towns and fortified positions.
Narhantes lay along the Neuse corridor.
Farther inland stood Neoheroka.
Now look north.
The Upper Tuscarora towns were farther from the greatest concentration of European settlement around New Bern and the lower Neuse.
Tom Blount’s political world therefore faced different immediate pressures than Hancock’s.
Now look south.
Beyond the main war zone lay South Carolina.