Women in American History
Grace Humphrey
9781465515254
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
One cold stormy day, more than three hundred years ago, a group of Indians was sitting around the fire in a “long house” on the James River in Virginia. Warriors and young braves, squaws and maidens, were listening to stories, while the children played about boisterously. Some of them were wrestling, some racing with dogs, and others turning somersaults in the long narrow passageway. Suddenly the deerskin curtains parted and in dashed an Indian runner. He spied the chief at the far end of the room near the fire and started toward him; but one of the children, a little girl named Mataoka, who was turning hand-springs, collided with him and knocked him down. A little girl she was, ten or eleven years old, with swarthy skin, black eyes and long straight hair, like all the other Indian girls; but she was distinguished among the group, for she was the daughter of the chief. “Child,” said her father, “in your rough play you have knocked down your brother, the runner who has come with some message. That is not play for a girl. Why will you be such a little tomboy?” At this all the Indians present took up the word tomboy and repeated it in the guttural Algonquin speech—pocahuntas,pocahuntas. And that nickname stayed with her all her life long. “I have news,” said the runner, when he could get his breath. “I have great news,” and he paused dramatically. “The white captain is caught!” What an excitement this created in the long house! Warriors and squaws crowded around the tired runner, eager to have the details of his story—how two hundred Indians, with the chief’s brother at their head, had watched from behind the trees as the white captain, with an Indian guide, left his two men in the boat and went ashore; how stealthily they lay in wait to attack him, in the heart of the deep woods; how they shot their arrows thick and fast, when the right moment came, till they saw the white captain seize the Indian and use him as a shield, while he slowly made his way back toward the boat; how the Indians were afraid they would lose their prey after all, but fortune favored them when the white man stumbled into a bog and was held fast by the slippery ground and the icy water; and how, after he was nearly dead with the cold and had thrown away his arms, they took him prisoner. At first, said the runner, the braves wanted to kill him, but later thought it would be a better plan to lead him to the village where the whole tribe could rejoice in this triumph. All this Pocahontas, the little daughter of the great chief Powhatan, heard, and was deeply interested. For the plucky captain had saved his life by a device that was almost an Indian trick. So you may be sure she was there, the next day, when the noted prisoner was brought in. She was very proud of her father, who ruled over a league of nearly forty tribes, numbering some eight thousand people, as she looked up at him, sitting in state on a raised platform, dressed in raccoon skins, with all the tails left on, and wearing his splendid crown of red feathers. Proud, too, she was to be his favorite daughter.
