6 BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY. 



of the people, while John Bsten Cooke and his kind kept their memory 

 bright with the lamp of literature. So the native king Powhatan, the 

 ill-starred princess Pocahontas, and the people and the land over which 

 they ruled, are well known, and the Powhatan confederacy has ever 

 been prominent in history and literature. 



The leading tribe of the Powhatan confederacy was that from which 

 Pamunkey river in eastern Virginia takes its name. Strongest in 

 numbers, this tribe has also proved strongest in vitality; a few trifling 

 remnants and a few uncertain and feeble strains of blood only remain 

 of the other tribes, but the Pamunkey Indians, albeit with modified 

 manners, impoverished blood, and much-dimmed prestige, are still rep- 

 resented on the original hunting ground by a lineal remnant of the 

 original tribe. The language of Powhatan and his contemporaries is 

 lost among their descendants; the broad realm of early days is reduced 

 to a few paltry acres; the very existence of the tribe is hardly known 

 throughout the state and the country; yet in some degree the old pride 

 of blood and savage aristocracy persist — anditisundoubtedly to these 

 characteristics that the present existence of the Pamunkey tribe is to 

 be ascribed. 



By reason of the prominent and typical place of the Powhatan con- 

 federacy in history and literature, it seems especially desirable to ascer- 

 tain and record the characteristics — physical, psychical, and social — of 

 the surviving remnant of the race. It was with this view that John 

 Garland Pollard, es<|., of Richmond, a former attache of the Smithson- 

 ian Institution, was encouraged to make the investigation recorded in 

 the following pages; and it is for this reason that the record is offered 

 to the public. 



