Tutelo & the Totteroy

They lived above the Fall Line in what is now Virginia and West Virginia.

British maps of 1755 to 1776, by Evans, Mitchell and Pownall, label the Big Sandy River, on the Kentucky–West Virginia line, "Totteroy." Anthropologist James Griffin wrote in 1942 that there is "no historic evidence that the Tutelo ever lived on the stream." He suggested the name may have come from the Walker or Gist exploring parties, or from the river's use as a route toward Tutelo country.

The documented record begins in Virginia. In September 1671 the Batts and Fallam expedition left its horses with the Totero, probably near present-day Salem; the exact site is disputed.

The Tutelo then joined the Saponi on the Roanoke River. In 1701 John Lawson found them on the Yadkin in North Carolina, and after 1714 they lived near Fort Christanna in Brunswick County, Virginia.

In 1753 the Cayuga adopted the Tutelo, who settled at Coreorgonel near present-day Ithaca, New York. The Sullivan Expedition destroyed the village in 1779, and the Tutelo moved to Canada with the Cayuga.

For Kentucky, historian A. Gwynn Henderson's 1992 article in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society lists the Tutelo among the peoples living at Lower Shawneetown, at the mouth of the Scioto, in the mid-1700s. No source documents a separate Tutelo village in Kentucky.