SWANTON] INDIANS OF THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES 175 



POWHATAN 



This confederation of tribes was in the tidewater country of Vir- 

 ginia on both sides of Chesapeake Bay in 1607 when the colony of 

 Virginia was established. Most of the tribes had been brought under 

 one control by the chief Powhatan. No considerable number of 

 Powhatan Indians seem ever to have removed from the locality. They 

 gradually died out or retired into one or two reservations where a few 

 mixed-blood descendants still live. The principal events in their early 

 history were the unsuccessful attempt made by Spanish Jesuits in 

 1570 to establish a mission among them, the founding of Jamestown, 

 the subsequent relations between the colonists and the great chief who 

 bore the same name as the confederacy and his noted daughter Poca- 

 hontas, and the two uprisings of the Indians under Opechancanough, 

 in 1622-36 and 1644-45, after the last of which the Indians were placed 

 upon reservations. In 1654 the Pamunkey chief Totopotomoy and 

 100 of his warriors joined the Virginians in an attack on some of the 

 Siouan tribes who were threatening the settlements, but they were 

 defeated with great loss. In 1675 they were falsely accused of depre- 

 dations actually committed by Conestoga Indians, and were attacked 

 by a force of whites headed by Nathaniel Bacon. In August 1676, 

 Bacon stormed a fort near Richmond into which a large number of the 

 Indians had gathered, and massacred nearly all of its occupants of both 

 sexes and all ages. A treaty made at Albany in 1722 put an end to 

 attacks upon these Indians by the Iroquois, but from this time on they 

 sink into obscurity. Most of those on the eastern shore, who had mean- 

 while become much mixed with negroes, were driven away in 1831 

 during the excitement occasioned by the slave rising under Nat Turner. 

 There are still in existence mixed-blood descendants of the Pamunkey, 

 Chickahominy, Powhatan, Mattapony, Werowocomoco, Nansemond, 

 Rappahannock, Potomac, Tappahannock, Wicocomoco, and Acco- 

 hanoc, though only the first two are of any considerable size. The 

 best picture of an ancient Powhatan Indian, discounting the European 

 dress, is that of Pocahontas (pi. 41). 



Powhatan population. — In 1607, when the Virginia settlement was 

 made, there were more than 200 villages, and in the first Powhatan up- 

 rising Governor Wyatt defeated a force of more than 1,000 Indians. 

 Mooney estimates that there must have been a population of 9,000 at 

 this time. In 1669 a census of the Powhatan showed 528 warriors, 

 which perhaps indicates a population of 2,000, the Pamunkey then 

 having 50 warriors and the Wicocomoco 70. About 1705 the historian 

 Berkeley reported that there were 12 villages, of which 8 were on the 

 Eastern Shore and the only one of consequence, Pamunkey, had 150 

 inhabitants. Jefferson, in 1785, represents them as reduced to 2 



