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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46 POWHATAN FOREIGN RELATIONS Fig. 1,5. John White's 1585 painting of a chief wearing a copper gorget. (Courtesy of the University of North Carolina Press and the British Museum) Fish and shellfish, when dried for storage, were sometimes traded to people with less abundant supplies of them. The sixteenth-century Indians of coastal South Carolina are known to have sold fish to interior people, and John Lawson recorded the Indians of his time catching and selling quantities of smaller, inferior shellfish called “blackmoors tecth” to “the remote Indians, where they are of great Value.” These were probably the marginella shells that archacologists find in inland Indian sites. The first English expedition to the James River falls encountered people transporting “basketes full of Dryed oysters” in a canoe,'"* Ilex voniitoria (yaupon holly or cassina) is a low-growing tree whose leaves contain caffeine in considerable quantities. When strong tea made The Powhatans as Travelers 47 from the leaves is drunk rapidly in large amounts, nausea results. The leaves, pounded and parched and finally dried, were therefore in strong demand over a wide area for use as a frequent and rather ceremonial purge. The Powhatans used it in the springtime only. Yaupon is a southern sandbanks plant; found all along the Gulf coast, it occurs as a native no farther north on the Atlantic coast than Virginia Beach and the southern end of the Eastern Shore.'*”? Therefore, only truly coastal people, such as the Chesapeakes and Accomacs in Virginia, had access to it, and anyone farther inland or farther north had to barter for it. Medicinal roots and berbs probably were traded actively in Woodland Indian times, but Europeans rarely mentioned it. An exception is a record of the Otrawa, who dealt in those as well as other commodities. The only record of such trading by the Powhatans is the chief Opechancanough’s sending in 1621 to the Eastern Shore for a deadly poisonous plant that grew particularly abundantly there; he wanted to feed it to his English enemies. The plant was probably Cicuta maculata (poison hemlock), a plant which within Virginia only occurs plentifully on the Eastern Shore; a walnut-sized piece of the root can kill a cow.'* Pearls from either oysters (Crassostrea virginica) or freshwater mussels (Anodonta spp.) were uncommon, unusual with their pearlescent appearance—though often burnt in cooking before discovery—and therefore considered valuable. Any Indian people with salt or fresh waterways in their territories could find a few pearls. Powhatan chiefs collected pearls in tribute, and the paramount chief and his brothers were seen to have a great many. The Chowanocs’ report of a visit by the chief from the lower Chesapeake region in 1584 specifically noted his many pearls. Gabriel Archer wrote that the Weyanocks’ territory had “an abundance” of pearl mussels. The only really productive mussel, however, is Margaritifera margaritifera, the eastern river pearl mussel. In its natural distribution it is a boreal species that occurs only in the Atlantic drainage but not south of Pennsylvania; the colder period of the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1430-1850) may have pushed its distribution somewhat farther southward.” Pearls therefore remained a rare commodity, available only to powerful people, in the rest of the Eastern Woodlands. Pigments which were rare and highly prized were eminently tradable. There were probably several such substances, based upon minerals, in eastern North America, though historical sources about them are vague. The Powhatans placed the greatest value on a powder made of red root they called “puccoon,” which seems to have been Lithosperntnt caroliniense (still called puccoon). That species grows in only one county in Virginia—Sussex