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

Date Scanned: 2017-11-10 08:56:20 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:53:18 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:53:18

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

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44 POWHATAN FOREIGN RELATIONS periods than Europeans could with lietle or no food. Proud of their foraging capabilities, they ate up their supplies and then withstood periods of want, confident that the hungry time would not last. The Powhatans are known to have done that, and so were many other Indian peoples. The “queen” of Tuckabatchee escaped from the Chickasaws and made her way home; she “was 17 days in the woods...and.. . was like to perish” before she reached home, One man, a “king” of some of the “southern Indians,” decamped from Fort Christanna in Virginia and made his way home, being on the trail for two weeks in March without provisions.** A lack of food for a couple of days was nothing worth mentioning; hunters’ activities would go on as usual. But during a prolonged hungry spell, Indian tempers did become frayed and they allowed themselves to be out of sorts, especially toward any prisoners they might have with them.” : Commodities to Trade A wide variety of goods are known to have been traded among the Indians of the Eastern Woodlands, even after subtracting the European goods that so many of the records mention. Listing the goods that were transported gives a more vivid picture of the general directions of Indian contacts among themselves in peacetime. As a sample of the variety, among the peoples of the Deep South the inland tribes could furnish mica, copper, pipe stone, flint for arrows, and angelica roots, while the coast tribes had sea shells, dry fish, lex vomitoria, and salt. This last commodity was also obtained from the trans-Mississippi tribes by chose on the eastern side. When William Bartram was on the Suwanee River, Fla., he learned that the Indians of that region went trading and hunting in their cypress canoes all along the coast as far as the southern end of Florida and even to Havana. He himself encountered a party which had just returned from the latter place. He states that they carried thither in trade “deer skins, furs, dry fish, bees-wax, honey, bear’s oil, and some other articles.” °” Angelica sylvestris (atropurpurea?) was an up-country plant that Indians of the Deep South considered “a Luxury in Smoking and Chewing.” ** The species atropurpurea is edible and has a celerylike taste. It occurs in rich river bottoms, such as the Ohio River in West Virginia; it is rare in Maryland and North Carolina and not found at all in Virginia, If it was the almost magically efficacious “hunting root” that John Clayton saw used in eastern Virginia, then it had to be imported.” The Powhatans as Travelers 45 Antimony particles in an earthen ore were mined by the Patawomeck Indians near the head of Aquia Creek, and then the silvery particles were extracted and sold all over the Powhatan area, if not farther afield. Buffalo hides were reported in the possession of the people of Roanoke Island in the 1580s." However, since no buffalo are proven to have existed in either Virginia or North Carolina, the hides, if buffalo they were, must have been traded in from a very long distance away. Copper, the coastal Indians always said, came from somewhere inland (for Virginia piedmont locations, see map 4.2), and they had to trade co get it. Because of the difficulty in obtaining it, as well as the rarity of ore pure enough for the cold-hammering the Indians used, copper was to Indian people as gold was to the Spanish. Its use was entirely ornamental (fig. 1.5) and mercenary; it usually was among the Possessions of (or changing hands between) high-ranking persons, !°2 Deerskins were items of weaith and therefore were traded on a moderate scale before the English stepped up the trafficking in the seventeenth century. Many people offered European explorers deerskins for barter, and Powhatan himself collected deerskins as part of his cribute."? Indian people who were really well dressed had robes made of many deerskins, only some of which they would have shot and tanned themselves. Feathers, especially unusually colorful ones, may have been a trade item though historical accounts rarely mention them. Feathers were most — ularly used in making mantles. Some of these in the Carolinas were executed with figures in various contrasting colors, using both feathers and bird skins such as pelts from the heads of mallard drakes. Others were of one color like the satiny “deepe purple” hip-length garment worn by a Quiyoughcohannock chief's wife. That wife’s mantle is an enigma: no purple bird occurs in Virginia. The only possible candidates are several varieties of ducks (mallard, American black duck, wood duck), which have an iridescent blue or violet patch (speculum) on their wings. (Wigeons, reals, and shovelers have a green patch, equally usable in featherwork.) Each bird has only about ten such feathers, each one with purple only on one side of the quill (the feathers overlap and make the speculum seem a solid color). One would have to accumulate—or trade for—thousands of speculum feathers to make a mantle for a grown woman. Flint, really fine flint, was valuable to Indian people because it could be knapped into nearly razor-edged projectile points. It does not occur on the coastal plain of eastern North America except in rare outwash nodules; instead coastal people had to import it from certain places in the piedmont and, for the very best grade, farther west in Tennessee."