Mary Musgrove was quietly laid to rest in a now-lost grave on St. Catherines Island in 1763. With her passing, a tumultuous era of Georgia colonial history also came to a close - its dramatic events eclipsed only by the soon to erupt Revolution that birthed America. Who was this remarkable half-breed Indian Princess and why does her legend live on?

She was born in the Indian town of Coweta - near present-day Macon, Georgia in 1700. This daughter of a Scottish trader and Creek mother was given the name "Cousaponokeesa". To learn the ways of her father's people, she was sent to live near Charles Towne to attend the white man's school that imbued in her the tenets of Christianity and a command of the English language. Baptized and given the name Mary, these influences of her early childhood were to shape not only her destiny, but that of Georgia as well.

With the onset of the Yamassee War of 1715, Mary returned home to her Indian roots. The uniqueness of this intuitive young girl, reinforced by her position as niece of Brim, Emperor of the Creeks and accented by her beauty, did not go unnoticed. She soon attracted the attention of a suitor, John Musgrove Jr., a well-educated member of the Charleston gentry. The half-breed son of a Carolina Indian agent, he wooed and married the Indian Princess Mary when she was only fifteen and he in his early twenties.

The young couple lived among Mary's people for seven years, where she became well known and respected among the Creek settlements. After the birth of their first child, they moved to the Musgrove estate at Pompon, South Carolina. Soon John and Mary established a trading post, "The Cowpen", near the mouth of the Savannah River. Neither realized they had placed themselves squarely before the vanguard of English expansion into what was to become the colony of Georgia.

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