The Long Canes was a human settlement of colonial South Carolina in North America that was peopled by squatters around 1756. It was located southwest of the Waxhaws colony. Both places were predominantly settled by Irish immigrants of the Presbyterian faith.^[1] The Long Canes settlement was in the Upcountry of South Carolina, centering on Long Cane Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River, with the Saluda–Congaree River system bounding it on the northeast.^[2] In 1747, whites had traded ammunition valued at £189 to "the headmen of the Lower Towns...for the Cherokee lands between Long Canes and Ninety Six, defining the new boundary as extending along Long Cane Creek to its head, thence to the head of the nearest tributary of the Saluda, along that stream to the river, and from that point north to the Catawba-Cherokee path."^[3] The settlers of 1756 were five brothers Calhoun, Alexander Noble and wife (a Calhoun), John Luckey, and the Swearingin family.^[4] One of the brothers was a father of future U.S. Senator and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun.^[4] Long Canes was the site of the Long Canes massacre of February 1, 1760, in which Cherokee attacked and killed and scalped a number of white squatters and their black slaves living there, at the cost of 21 of their own.^[5] There was another Cherokee attack in 1763 on the Long Canes in which "fourteen people in one house" were killed.^[1] These events triggered two retaliatory campaigns by the British.^[6]

The name Long Canes refers to a type of landscape common to the U.S. South called a canebrake.^[5] The region is now part of the Long Cane Ranger District of Sumter National Forest.^[2][7]