SIOUAN 

 MOONEY 



.] MANAHOAC RARLY HISTORY. 21 



kindly and expressed bis desire tliat the other chiefs in tlie party slionld 

 go through the same ceremony, in order that the great king w hose ser- 

 vant he Avas might be their friend. 



It was IK) sooner deiuauded but perforiiied, so vpon ;i low Moorish poynt of Land 

 we wont to the shore, where those fon re Kings canie and recciuod Amorolefk: noth- 

 ing they had but IJowes, Arrowes, Tobacco-bags, and Pipes: what wo desired, none 

 refused to give vs, wondering at every thing we had, and heard we ]ia<l done: our 

 Pistols they tooko for pipes, which they much desired, but we did content them 

 with other Commodities, and so wo left foure or hue hundred of our merry Mauua- 

 hocks, singing, daunciug, and making merry (Smith, 5). 



And so do we leave them for a hundred years. With the exception 

 of an uncertain reference by Lederer to the ''Mahocks," apparently a 

 hostile tribe living- in 1G70 about the upper James, there seems to be 

 nothing more concerning the Manahoac confederates for more than a 

 century. In this year Lederer made a journey from Eappahannock 

 falls due westward to the mountains, through the center of the old 

 Manahoac country, but as he met no Indians it is probable that these 

 tribes had already moved farther south, and that the Mahock found 

 by him on the James in the same year were identical Avith the Mana- 

 hoac of Smith. A wandering i)eople, living remote from the white 

 settlements along the coast and isolated from them by the intervening- 

 tribes of the Powhatan, they appear to have silently melted away 

 before the attacks of their Iroquois enemies from the north, until in 

 the beginning of the eighteenth century we find only the Stegarake 

 remaining, the others having disappeared or consolidated with them. 



In 1711 Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, mentions the "Stuka- 

 rocks" in connection with the Tutelo and Sapoiii (Burk, 1). Again, 

 in 1722, the '' Stenkenocks" are mentioned in the same connection as 

 one of the tribes living near Fort Christanna, in Virginia, and which 

 the colonial government desired to secure from the further attacks of 

 the Iroquois (New York, 4). In 1728 Byrd speaks of the "Steuken- 

 hocks" as a remnant of a tribe living with the Saponi and others at 

 the same fort (Byrd, 3). This seems to be their last appearance in his- 

 tory as a distinct tribe. The few survivors were merged with the 

 Sajwni and Tutelo, and thenceforward followed their wandering for- 

 tunes, as will be related in treating of the Monacan tribes. 



After careful investigation, J.N. B. Hewitt makes the date of the for- 

 mation of the Iroquois league about 1570. It was about forty years 

 later when Smith learned of them from the Manahoac on the Rap- 

 pahannock as making war on all the world. Froiu this it would.seem 

 that within the brief space of half a lifetime they had made their name 

 terrible throughout a wide area. At this period the whole interior of 

 Pennsylvania was an unoccupied wilderness. The Delaware did not 

 remove from Delaware river and the coast lands to settle upon the 

 Susquehanna until driven by the pressure of the whites a century 

 later. The Conoy (Piscataway) did not move up the Potomac into 

 Pennsylvania until about the same time, so that when Smith wrote. 



