Word: indianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...created a general assembly to advise the Governor--including "burgesses," or representatives, elected by property owners--on the theory that "every man will more willingly obey laws to which he has yielded his consent." The general assembly first met for five days in the summer of 1619. It discussed Indian relations, church attendance, gambling, drunkenness and the price of tobacco. It sounds like the Iowa caucuses: war and peace, social issues, bread and butter. From this seed would grow the House of Burgesses, the elective house of Virginia's colonial legislature and the political academy of George Washington and Thomas...
...neighbors became alarmed. Trading posts were one thing, permanent farms another. On March 22, 1622, the new leader of the Powhatan, Opechancanough, launched dawn raids on 28 plantations and settlements along the James River, killing 347 colonists, a quarter of the total population. Jamestown itself escaped, warned by an Indian boy who had converted to Christianity. "Besides them they killed," a survivor lamented, "they burst the heart of all the rest." Dispirited and disorganized, hundreds more colonists died the following winter, the second "starving time...
...attack was a brilliant tactical stroke, but it sealed the fate of the attackers. The survivors responded with all-out war. In July 1624, some 800 Indian warriors risked a two-day battle with 60 armored and well-armed colonists and lost. Twenty years later, Opechancanough, nearly a century old, was captured and shot in the back in a Jamestown jail. This too set a pattern: of conflict and expulsion, which lasted until the last Indians were beaten and settled on reservations in the late 19th century...
...help the Jamestown settlers. When a winter fire ravaged their colony in 1608, Pocahontas paid a series of calls, accompanied by braves bearing beaver meat, venison and other delicacies. And it was Pocahontas who was sent to Jamestown one year to negotiate the release of half a dozen Indian prisoners...
Perhaps the most unexpected discovery is evidence that Indians, whom the settlers assumed would be uniformly hostile, actually lived in the fort for some period of time. Trash pits, for example, yielded fragments of an Indian reed mat as well as shell beads favored by the Indians and the type of stone tool that they would have used to drill them. The Indian artifacts were found mixed in with English ones in an undisturbed layer of soil and in greater concentrations than have ever been found in Virginia Indian villages. That, and the fact that the Indians bothered to carry...