No one is quite sure of when, but the Yesą́ were eventually pushed into the Piedmont area of Virginia and North Carolina.  These pressures were very likely due to the Iroquois, sometimes referred to as "The Romans of the West" due to their penchant for conquering and consolidating other tribes within the Six Nations.  Their motivations for such actions have never been directly addressed, but they were among the first people to have met Europeans when the French from Canada attempted to profit from the fur trade in the 1550's.  Interactions with these European colonizers may very well have planted the desire in the minds of Iroquois leadership to defend their lands and people through strength, and that strength would be best developed through alliance when possible - and dominion when not.

Perhaps the first mention of the Yesą́ was the mention of the Monasuccapanough to John Smith by Powhatan in 1608.  The Avoca Museum, among other scholars, agree that the Monsuccapanough were likely the Saponi and were closely related to the Monaccan People, a belief supported both by the existence of the Saponi-Monaccan Tribe of Hico, Virginia and that the Saponi were members, at one point, of the Monaccan Confederacy.

Powhatan warned Smith not to trifle with the Monasuccapanough, as they were very capable warriors when the need arose.  This martial prowess would come to be recognized again and again by explorers, such as when Lawson referred to us as "Tall and robust" and when the Iroquois, in the 1722 Treaty of Albany, remembered us thusly:

"and tho' there is a Nation amongst you, the Toderechrones against whom we have had so inveterate an enmity, that we thought it impossible it could be extinguished, but by a total Extirpation of them, yet since you desire it we are willing to receive them into this Peace & to forgive all that is past"

Scholarly works abound with information regarding our time in the Piedmont, mostly because this is where the Yesą́ were located at the time of contact and so better records exist, at least as far as locations.  Aboriginal Intersite Settlement System Change in the Northeastern North Carolina Piedmont During the Contact Period, a 1992 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  doctoral dissertation by Daniel L. Simpkins, is an extremely in-depth survey of the settlements found in the Eno, Uppder and Lower Dan, Haw, Little, Flat, and New Hope River drainage areas.  Other works include the National Historic Register information kept for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources on the Wade site, The Evolution of Siouan Communities in Piedmont North Carolina by R. P. Stephen Davis Jr. and H. Trawick Ward, Second Phase Investigations of Late Aboriginal Settlement Systems in the Eno, Haw, and Dan River Drainages, North Carolina by Daniel L. Simpkins and Gary L. Petherick, and the Siouan Project, Seasons I and II Edited by Roy S. Dickens, Jr., H. Trawick Ward, and R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr. (an especially robust work).  These works show a continuity of the People through these areas as well as provide explanations of the construction methods used in these sites which show definitive correlations to construction methods used by the Ohio Hopewell and Fort Ancient cultures, such as palisade walls around settlements among other similarities.