Eno (people)

The Eno or Enoke, also called Wyanoak, was an American Indian tribe located in North Carolina during the 17th and 18th centuries that was later absorbed into the Catawba and/or the Saponi tribes.

The Enos were first mentioned in historic documents by William Strachey (the first secretary of the colony of Virginia) in his early-17th century book The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia. Strachey mentions the "Anoeg" to the southwest of the Powhatan Confederacy (centered near present-day Richmond, Virginia) "whose howses are built as ours, ten daies distant from us...” Another early mention is in a May 1654 letter from Francis Yeardley (an Indian trader from Virginia) to John Ferrar (deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company, in Huntingdonshire, England); the letter was published in 1911 in Narratives of Early Carolina (1650–1708) by Alexander S. Salley as Francis Yeardley's Narrative of Incursions into Carolina, 1654. In his letter, Yeardley wrote that a Tuscaroran had described to him a “great nation" called the “Haynokes” who had “valiantly resisted the Spaniards further northern attempts”.

The village of “Œnock” in the Piedmont of North Carolina was visited by John Lederer in 1670. Lederer reported that the Eno's town

...is built round a field, where in their Sports they exercise with so much labour and violence, and in so great numbers, that I have seen the ground wet with the sweat that dropped from their bodies: their chief Recreation is Slinging of stones. They are of mean stature and courage, covetous and thievish, industrious to earn a peny; and therefore hire themselves out to their neighbours, who employ them as Carryers or Porters. They plant abundance of Grain, reap three Crops in a Summer, and out of their Granary supply all the adjacent parts. [They] build not their houses of Bark, but of Watling and Plaister. In Summer, the heat of the weather makes them chuse to lie abroad in the night under thin arbours of wilde Palm. Some houses they have of Reed and Bark; they build them generally round: to each house belongs a little hovel made like an oven, where they lay up their Corn and Mast, and keep it dry. They parch their Nuts and Acorns over the fire, to take away their rank Oyliness; which afterwards pressed, yeeld a milky liquor, and the Acorns an Amber-colour’d Oyl. In these, mingled together, they dip their Cakes at great Entertainments, and so serve them up to their guests as an extraordinary dainty. Their Government is Democratic; and the Sentences of their old men are received as Laws, or rather Oracles, by them.

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