Legends of Loudoun by Harrison Williams

Legends of Loudoun By Harrison Williams Legends of Loudoun by Harrison Williams CHAPTER I THE EARLIER INDIANS Loudoun County, Virginia The county of Loudoun, as now constituted, is an area of square miles, lying in the extreme northwesterly corner of Virginia, in that part of the Old Dominion known as the Piedmont and of very irregular shape, its upper apex formed by the Potomac River on the northeast and the Blue Ridge Mountains on the northwest, pointing northerly. It is a region of equable climate, with a mean temperature of from to degrees, seldom falling in winter below fahrenheit zero nor rising above the upper nineties during its long summer, thus giving a plant-growing season of about two hundred days in each year. The county exhibits the typical topography of a true piedmont, a rolling and undulating land broken by numerous streams and traversed by four hill-ranges—the Catoctin, the Bull Run and the Blue Ridge mountains and the so-called Short Hills. These ranges are of a ridge-like character, with no outstanding peaks, although occasionally producing well-rounded, cone-like points. The whole area is generously well watered not only by the Potomac, flowing for thirty-seven miles on its border and the latter's tributary Goose Creek crossing the southern portion of the county, but also by many smaller creeks or, as they are locally called, "runs"; and by such innumerable springs of most excellent potable water that few, if any, of the farm-fields lack a natural water supply for livestock. These conditions most happily combine to create a climate that for healthfulness and all year comfortable living is without peer on the eastern seaboard and, indeed, truthfully may be said to be among the best and most enjoyable east of the Mississippi. Before the advent of the white man, the land was covered by a dense forest of oak, hickory, walnut, sycamore, locust, ash, pine, maple, poplar and other varieties of trees— not by any means unbroken, for here and there the Indian tribes that roamed the area, had burned out great clearings for grazing-grounds to entice the wild animals they hunted and in which the native grasses then quickly and indigenously sprang up; attracting particularly the buffalo, in those days, and at least until as late as , to be found in vast numbers all through the Piedmont region and always in the forefront as an unending supply of flesh-food to their Indian hunters. With the buffalo were great herds of "red and fallow deer" and wolves, foxes in abundance, bears in the mountains, opossum, racoons, and, along the streams, otter and beaver (later to be so greatly valued for their pelts) and whose presence, with that of other fur-bearing animals, was to have its influence on the history of the region. When in the doughty Captain John Smith—in writing of any part of Virginia one sooner or later is certain to shake hands with that amourous hero—when Captain Smith made his first voyage to Virginia and came in contact with her aboriginees, the latter were, in a broad sense, of several stocks or nations, distinguishable principally by linguistic affinity and more or less common cultural idiosyncracies rather than by close alliances; and indeed frequently appearing to cherish their bitterest enmities among their own blood- kindred. Along the coast, in what we now know as Tidewater, the territory running from the Chesapeake to those rocky outcrops making waterfalls in all the great rivers flowing from Virginia into the Bay, the Indians were generally of the Algonquin stock, a tribe covering an enormous territory along the Atlantic seaboard from the neighborhood of Hudson's Bay southerly to at least the Carolinas but by no means monopolizing the regions where they were found. To the north, in what is now New York, centred the Iroquoian tribes, with ramifications as far south as Virginia and North Carolina. Among these more southerly Indians of the Iroquoian stock were the fierce and powerful "Susquehannocks" along the river we still call by that name who later were to play a prominent rôle in our Loudoun yet to be; the Nottoways, occupying a part of southeastern Virginia; the Cherokees, occupying the area in Virginia and North Carolina west of the Blue Ridge, extending north as far as the Peaks of Otter near the headquarters of the James; and the Tuskaroras of famous and bloody memory, who were paramount in North Carolina until their conquest and all but annihilation by the English in . What were left of the fiercest and most implacable of the Tuskaroras after that crushing defeat, retreated to New York where, as the sixth nation they joined the Iroquois Confederacy of their near kinsmen of the Long House. A few of the more friendly were removed to a local reservation in but gradually, in small parties, says Mooney, they too moved to join their kindred in the north. Both Algonquins and Iroquois were to be classed as barbarians rather than savages. The former have been described as having generally "found locations in permanent villages surrounded by extensive cornfields. They were primarily agriculturists or fishermen, to whom hunting was hardly more than a pastime and who followed the chase as a serious business only in the interval between the gathering of one crop and the sowing of the next." The Iroquois, who found their highest development in their confederacy of the Five Nations of the Long House in central New York (the Massawomecks so dreaded by the Powhattans and Manahoacs of Smith's narratives) were even further advanced. Described by historians as the Romans of America, they led all other Indians of what is now the United States in their powers of organization and extraordinary political development. They lived in cleverly and strongly palisaded villages and their agricultural activities, falling to the women's share of tribal work, were probably further advanced than those of any other Indians north of Mexico. Our earliest knowledge places them on the banks of the St. Lawrence, in the neighborhood of the present Montreal, whence they were driven by the neighboring Algonquins. Their defeat and expulsion to the south bred in them a deep determination for revenge. In the New York wilderness they developed and cultivated a passion for ruthless warfare and forming their famous Confederation somewhere about the year , they rapidly became the most powerful Indian military force east of the Mississippi and a sombre threat and terror to the other Indian tribes far and wide. In contrast to both Algonquins and Iroquois, the Siouan tribes who ranged the Piedmont country from the Potomac south, were primarily nomads—and nomads, observes Mooney, have short histories. Modern scholarship inclines to place the origin of the great Siouan or Dakotan family possibly amidst the eastern foothills of the southern Alleghanies or at least as far east as Ohio, whence, after a long period, they probably were driven by the Iroquois and other enemies beyond the Mississippi. Being essentially nomadic, without permanent villages and relying on constant hunting for their food, following their game wherever it might lead, they necessarily ranged widely and covered broad areas. From the days of the earliest European invasion, locations of the Iroquois and Algonquin stock were known, but as the earliest English scouts and adventurers found no such long established villages in the Piedmont country, their tendency and following them, that of the early writers and historians, was to loosely assume that the Indians found there were, in common with their neighbours, either Algonquins or Iroquois. Later antiquarians and ethnologists seem to have followed their lead; with an exasperating paucity of record, tradition or material remains, there was but little on which to base knowledge of language, whence racial stock might be deduced. It was not until Horatio Hale announced, sixty years ago, his discovery of a Siouan language bordering the Atlantic coast and James Mooney, in , published his Siouan Tribes of the East that these Indians of the northern Virginia Piedmont, known to be members of the Manahoac Confederacy, were identified as of the Siouan stock. They "consisted of perhaps a dozen tribes of which the names of eight have been preserved. With the exception of the Stegarake," writes Mooney, "all that is known of these was recorded by Smith, whose own acquaintance with them seems to have been limited to an encounter with a large hunting party in ." As Smith's narrative, after its wont, paints a vivid picture of the Manahoacs, a picture which almost stands alone in the mist of conjecture and deductive reasoning making up what is left to us of them, it is well to quote it in full, bearing always in mind that while these people were found on the upper Rappahannock, we have excellent reason to believe that they also occupied all the land now within the bounds of Loudoun. As allied bands, without fixed habitation, they wandered over the lands between Tidewater and the Blue Ridge, from the James to the Potomac. The story is contained in Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia which states on its title page to be "by Captaine John Smith sometymes Governor in those Countryes & Admirall of New England." Chapter VI of the book, from which we quote, is however apparently signed by Anthony Bagnall, Nathaniel Powell and Anas Todhill who were three of Smith's companions on this adventure. Bagnall and Powell were among the six listed as "Gentlemen" in distinction to an additional six listed as "Souldiers," among the latter being Todhill. On the th July, , Smith and these twelve men set out on this second voyage of discovery along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

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