Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: The Powhatans and other Woodland Indians as Travelers Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Helen C. Rountree # of Pages: 17 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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22 POWHATAN FOREIGN RELATIONS Knowledge of Other Peoples Some of the earliest questions the English asked the Powhatans in Virginia, and other Europeans asked {ndians wherever they met them, concerned what lands lay beyond the horizon. The foreigners were asking because they hoped to find a northwest passage to the Orient, not because they wanted to know about Indian cosmology. Thus most of the questions concerned lands to the westward, and that created a bias in the historical record against documenting Indian knowledge of lands in other directions. English accounts about the Powhatans’ knowledge are a case in point. Explorers found in 1607~8 that the Virginia Algonquians knew what peoples dwelt in the piedmont of what is now Virginia and North Carolina, though for tactical reasons they were very cautious about giving out information on their Siouan-speaking enemies in the Virginia piedmont. They also knew what peoples lived along the northern waterways of the Chesapeake region; there was enough contact with the Algonquian-speakers at the head of the Chesapeake Bay that one person among the Tockwoghs could speak “the language of Powhatan.” The Powhatans further knew that their [roquoian enemies, the Massawomecks, came from a mountainous area to the northwest.2 Significantly, the English recorded the Powhatans being attacked by Massawomecks, but they never mentioned Powhatans traveling across the mountains to attack the Massawomecks. Given the warlike and vengeful character of the Powhatans,? it is likely that they returned the Massawomecks’ raids with interest. Europeans often got the impression of put-upon local Indian people harassed by distant enemies (for that was frequently the Indians’ view of themselves) at the same time that they often found out those same local people were avid travelers. The Europeans and the scholars who read them failed to make the connection. The English were intent on a passage to the Orient, so any Powhatan knowledge of the North Carolina coastal plain other than the Algonquianspeaking Chowanocs and Iroquoian-speaking Nottoways and Meherrins went almost unrecorded. It is a pity that John Smith did not himself go southward with the search parties looking for survivors of the Lost Colony, for then he might have written something about that region in his Map of Virginia. The Chesapeakes, a related but hostile group eventually exterminated by Powhatan, were known to be allies of the Chowanocs and Pamlico Sound people in the mid-1580s.* The surviving documents indicate clearly that Englishmen wrote down what they wanted to hear about the West, rather than exactly what Indian informants told them. Waters beyond the mountains The Powhatans as Travelers 23 were a sea, not lakes or a large river, and mentions of salt referred to salty waters, not to Indian salt-gathering operations.’ On one occasion, when John Smith reiterated his story, this time to Powhatan himself, about wanting to avenge an Englishman killed beyond the mountains on a salt sea, Powhatan said flatly, “For‘any salt water beyond the mountaines, the Relations you have had from my people were false,” and he began to draw a map on the ground by way of correction.® Not surprisingly, the Powhatan chiefdoms south of the James River knew at first hand about peoples living to their south and southwest and had heard of people living farther away, Warraskoyacks, Quiyoughcohannocks, Weyanocks, and Appamattucks were all enlisted by Englishmen at one time or another as guides for those countries. The chief of Weyanock traveled reguJarly as an ambassador for Powhatan to the “Anoegs” (possibly Tuscaroras) to the southwest, bringing back “their Commodityes ... [and] Presents to Powhatan.” Later in the century the Weyanocks considered themselves middlemen between the Tuscaroras and the English. Sometime before 1650 the chief of Powhatan town, at the falls of the James, fell our with the Chowanocs, and the paramount chief Opechancanough fought with other people in the vicinity.” It was not until a little later in the colony's history thar longer-distance knowledge was recorded for the Virginia natives, and then it concerned the Patawomecks, who had easier access to the much-used trails (including the Great Indian Warpath) that ran up the Valley of Virginia. An English lieutenant saw “a China Boxe” made of palmetto and lined with taffeta, which its chiefly Patawomeck owner said had been given him by mountain people living far to the southwest. They in turn had gotten it from more distant people a total of thirty days’ journey from Patawomeck and only four days’ journey from “the Sea,” on a river into which “Ships come.” " The ships were probably Spanish, and the “river” may have been Mobile Bay. Apparently no one thought to ask whether the mountain people came to the Patawomecks or some Patawomecks went to the mountain people. The knowledge of other mid-Atlantic Indians was similarly far-flung and ill recorded. A Mannahoac man from the Virginia piedmont gave John Smith an account similar to those Smith had already heard from the Powhatans: Powhatans on one side, Massawomecks on the other. The North Carolina Algonquians of the 1580s knew their coastal plain in detail from having paddled along its waterways; their knowledge of the southern Chesapeake region was more vague, although a chief who was supposedly rich in pearls from that region had visited the Chowanocs in 1584. They held somewhat con-