the Catawba having lived there. In 1721 the colonial governments of Virginia and New York held a council at Albany, New York, attended by delegates from the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) and the Catawba. The colonists asked for peace between the Confederacy and the Catawba. The Six Nations reserved the land west of the Blue Ridge mountains for themselves, including the Indian Road or Great Warriors' Path (later called the Great Wagon Road) through the Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia backcountry. This path was frequently traveled and was used until 1744 by Seneca war parties to pass through the Shenandoah Valley to raid in the South. In 1738, a smallpox epidemic broke out in South Carolina. Endemic for centuries among Europeans, the infectious disease had been carried by them to North America, where it caused many deaths. The Catawba and other tribes, such as the Sissipahaw, suffered high mortality in these epidemics. In 1759, a smallpox epidemic killed nearly half the Catawba. In 1744 the Treaty of Lancaster, made at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, renewed the Covenant Chain between the Iroquois and the colonists. The governments had not been able to prevent settlers going into Iroquois territory, but the governor of Virginia offered the tribe payment for their land claim. The peace was probably final for the Iroquois, who had established the Ohio Valley as their preferred hunting ground by right of conquest and pushed other tribes out of it. Tribes located to the west continued warfare against the Catawba, who were so reduced that they could raise little resistance. In 1763, a small party of Algonquian Shawnee killed the noted Catawba chief, King Hagler, near his own village. In 1763, the colonial government of South Carolina confirmed a reservation for the Catawba of , on both sides of the Catawba River, within the present York and Lancaster counties. When British troops approached during the American Revolutionary War in 1780, the Catawba withdrew temporarily into Virginia. They returned after the Battle of Guilford Court House, and settled in two villages on the reservation. These were known as Newton, the principal village, and Turkey Head, on the opposite side of the Catawba/Wateree River. 19th century In 1826, the Catawba leased nearly half their reservation to whites for a few thousand dollars of annuity; their dwindling number of members (as few as 110 by an 1896 estimate) depended on this money for survival. In