as being mixed Tuscarora/white. More than 150 years before, a large number of the Tuscarora people, who spoke an Iroquoian language, migrated north to New York to join their Iroquois cousins. The Tuscarora tribe in New York considers the migration complete by the year 1722; all the Tuscarora who remained in North Carolina are not considered under the same council fire, or tribal fraction. The large migration of Tuscarora people was a result of their defeat by the Carolina colonists and their Indian allies in the Tuscarora War. In February 1872, shortly after a raid in which he robbed the local sheriff's safe of more than $28,000, Henry Berry Lowrie disappeared. It is claimed he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his double-barrel shotgun. As with many folk heroes, the death of Lowrie was disputed. He was reportedly seen at a funeral several years later. Without his leadership, all but two members of the Lowrie gang were subsequently hunted down, and either captured or killed. State recognition as Indians During Reconstruction, the legislature established public education for the first time, providing for white and black schools. All children of color were assigned to black schools, which were dominated by the children of freedmen (freed slaves). The Indian people of Robeson County had always been free and did not socially associate or interact with Blacks. They refused to send their children to school with the free Blacks and demanded for separate Indian schools. In the 1880s, as the Democratic Party was struggling against the biracial Populist movement which combined the strength of poor whites (Populist and Democrats) and blacks (mostly Republicans), Democratic state representative Hamilton MacMillan proposed to have the state recognize these Indian people of Robeson County as the "Croatan Indians" and to create a separate system of Croatan Indian schools. By the end of the 19th century, the "Indians of Robeson County" (as they then identified) established schools in eleven of their principal settlements. An Indian school system In 1887, the Indians of Robeson County petitioned the state legislature to establish a normal school to train Indian teachers for the county's Indian schools. With state permission, they raised the requisite funds, along with some state assistance, which proved inadequate. Several tribal leaders donated money and privately held land for schools. Robeson County's Indian Normal School eventually developed as Pembroke State University and subsequently as the University of North Carolina at