Pocahontas, the real story

 This is a result of the best research I can muster about, perhaps the most significant person in American history, who made British colonies possible and USA.

Disney made a great movie about her but much of the legend isn’t true at all. The real story is much better! Her real name wasn’t Pocahontas.  That was a nickname which meant “Little Playful One”. Her real names were Amonute and Matoaka. But she liked Pocahontas. Daughter of Chief Powhattan of the Algonquin Indians’, they lived along the Virginia coast.  In 1607 when she was about 12, English settlers landed at Jamestown. She was curious and visited the new people, learning English.

            Why did the English want to settle in Virginia?  Columbus found America and then some other Spanish warriors-of-fortune conquered two huge Indian empires—the Aztecs and the Incas.  They found gold and silver, beans and corn and shipped it back home to Spain making the country very rich.  Other nations wanted to get rich too, so they tried to settle the Caribbean and North, what is now USA and Canada.  In those northern areas, they fished and traded for furs with the Indians. The first time the British tried to settle in America was Roanoke, a small group of people were left in North Carolina in 1584.  But a few years later, their settlement had disappeared.  The Carolina coast is a bad place to choose because a barrier bar reef island off the shore wrecks ships and hides the rivers necessary to find a settlement.  In 1607 the English tried once more, knowing that if they failed, the Spanish would expand into this area.  They settled  63 on the Virginia coast and claimed land from 35 to 45 degrees latitude.  It was named Jamestown after the king, James I.  Here were the Algonquins and Pocahontas.

            Most Indian women had little gardens where they raised vegetables and berries.  That way they didn’t have to go miles to gather these things.  Women did all the “farming”.  Men hunted and fished. There were no farm animals. But the Algonquin men helped a little with planting corn, squash and beans.  They grew these all together with the beans and squash climbing over the corn, called “3 Sisters” agriculture. The English men did the farming.  When they saw a new plant they dreamed of planting a big field. The Englishmen rotated crops, used manure and had iron tools like axes and hoes. This is a big reason why the Europeans succeeded in taking over much of America.

            Pocahontas was thrilled with what she learned.  The new people had cool stuff.  They had interesting food and clothes that would keep you warm in winter.  Algonquins wore nothing above the waist in summer and in winter wrapped themselves in a blanket.  For two years Pocahontas made new friends and learned English.  But Jamestown had troubles.  Most of the settlers were soldiers who guarded the village and they didn’t think they had to work at farming or building.  Only about 20 men and 6 women actually worked to raise crops or hunt.  A year later, Captain John Smith arrived and found the colony starving and idle.  He got tough and told everybody they must work.  He traded for food with the Algonquins, then left.  There is a myth that Pocahontas saved Smith by laying her head on his when the Indians were going to kill him, but it is unlikely, and wasn’t told until over a hundred years later. John Smith kept an official log and never mentioned it.  However, Pocahontas was a spunky girl who served as Smith’s translator.

            Matoaka disappeared from the settlement for 3 years.  The family’s oral story says she was married to another Indian man and had a baby girl.  The baby died and somehow tragically so did her husband.  In 1612 she suddenly appeared at Jamestown again, befriending the women there.  There were some violent disagreements between the Powhattan Algonquins and the English.  Fights broke out and the Indians took several settlers hostage.  In return, the settlers took Pocahantas hostage.  After almost a year, a peace was agreed to and all hostages were released.  But Pocahontas wanted to stay in Jamestown.  While she was under arrest as a hostage, she was guarded by the chaplain of the soldiers, Reverend Whitaker.  When he shared the gospel, that all people sin and that sin gives us a messed-up life, it resonated with the young widow and she deeply wanted to be a Christian, a believer in Jesus.  And on Jan. 14, 1614, she was baptized and took the Christian name of “Rebecca”.  She was the first native American in the lands north of Spanish America to become a Christian, the first Protestant (Anglican is Luther’s theology). Then she met John Rolfe, a young man who had lost his wife and child just as Rebecca had lost spouse and child.   We know that by about the time of Valentine’s Day, 1614, she and John Rolfe decided to get married.  They were married in April of that year.  And in 1615 she had a baby boy, Thomas. 

            Of course everyone knows what happens when a new baby is born.  The grandparents had to come see the new baby! So Powhattan and his two wives came to Jamestown for a visit.  The settlers put on a big feast and other Indians were invited warmly.  Thus began almost 20 years of peace and goodwill between the two peoples.

            But Jamestown still had a problem.  They had no reason to exist since they couldn’t produce anything of value to sell back home.  No gold, no silver were found. Furs and fish were not very valuable.  Rebecca asked John what they could do.  He told her that tobacco was a pricey trade item back in England.  How to grow it? That was a no-brainer for an Algonquin woman! She showed him how to plant, harvest and cure the leaves.  So Rolfe raised a huge amount of tobacco and shipped it back to England where it brought a profit of 12,500%.  Suddenly Jamestown had something to sell and it saved the colony.  In 3 years John Rolfe and Pocahontas grew rich and others started raising tobacco as well.

            The Rolfes grew famous in England. In 1616 they sailed to Britain and were feated as the wonderful people who had made Jamestown profitable.  They met the king. And for the winter, they lived with Rolfe’s family in England.  The English were very interested in how she became Christian and wanted very much to convert the natives of America.  In March 1617, the Rolfes set sail for America but before they even got to the mouth of the Thames River, Pocahontas became very ill.  They stopped and took her ashore where she died of unknown causes.  She was just 21.  Her dying words were, “I am going to heaven but I still have my husband John and Thomas.” It was the tragic story repeated thousands of times as Indians died of Old World diseases when Europeans came.

            Meanwhile, in Jamestown, many things were happening. In 1619, a slave ship which had endured a terrible storm came floating into the bay.  The Jamestown people didn’t like slavery and helped the sailors repair the boat just so they would leave quickly.  As payment, the ship dumped 20 sick slaves for farm labor.  The settlers signed contracts with the Africans to be indentured servants, that is, someone who agrees to work for free for a time period, like a slave.  But things didn’t go well.  The winters were cold and all the Africans died tragically within a few years. 

            That same year, the British crown hit upon the idea that they could exile convicts to Jamestown. Many had mental problems but others were determined to turn their lives around with faith and farming.  A ship of poor women arrived as well, available for the price of 125 pounds of tobacco. Settler-families started to emerge.  And on July 30, 1619, the first General Assembly of Virginia met in the Jamestown Church.  The colony designed a miniature parliament.  There was nothing like it in all the Americas, the First Popular Legislature.  At a time when kings were thought to have divine rights, this was an important telling of America’s future.  And by the way, proud Rolfe descendants are numerous in Virginia today.  Do we know what Pocahontas looked like?  There were no cameras then and no one painted a picture of her.  But there is a picture painted of her niece with her little boy 50 years later.  Everyone said how much her niece looked like Pocahontas.  Here it is.

 

 

 

So how did Africa become black?

Black history month.  So, kids, if you want to stump your public school teachers ask , “How did Africa get to be black?”

            Black is a stupid label since you never see anyone the color of india ink.  Nor do you see anyone the color of snow yet we talk ‘white’ nonsense too.  All humans are some shade of brown.  If you look at a map of Africa you find Hamitic peoples north of Sahara who are Caucasians. It is believed all human races came originally from Africa (DNA and language group tracing). You find a mélange south of N. Africa which has previously been labeled Negroid. But consider, there are the dominant Bantus with dark brown skin and wide,flat noses throughout Africa, but there are also enclaves of pygmies who are reddish brown, rather like Native Americans, but only 4 feet tall.  There are Watusis who are well over six feet tall in South Africa.  Clearly these are not the same race.  There are San-Khoi (Hottentots and Bushmen) in SW Africa who have tightly coiled hair, small noses and yellowish-brown skin whose women tend to very large buttocks.  That’s clearly another race. Nilo-Saharans are an interesting dark brown skin but with facial features much like Europeans—Swedes with dark-skinned cousins in Sudan of strikingly similar DNA. Madagascar Island has natives closely related to Indonesians.  Each race has a distinct language group as well.  For example, the North Africans belong to the same language group as Semitics who wrote the Bible and practically invented commerce in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.

            But the Bantus dominate.  Most Afro-Americans came from a small area of West Africa which kept many slaves and traded them to Europeans who had just about eliminated slavery by the end of the Middle Ages.  Slavery had a re-emergence in the Americas. And the people traded were almost entirely Bantus.  So why did Bantus come to dominate Africa and lend their ‘blackness’ to the continent.  The answer is agriculture.

            The Sahel region of sparse grass and rivers is just south of Sahara.  Here, we know that the natives learned to do agriculture.  In order for a hunter-gatherer to start doing agriculture, they have to see an advantage to raising things and staying in one place, rather than hunting and gathering.  Hunter-gatherers can only support a sparse population, never more than 4 to a square mile. The Sahel farmers found they could raise African sorghum, watermelon, cow peas, pearl millet, cattle, and guinea fowl. It beats the heck out of running around trying to spear dangerous water buffalos. The husbandry of birds like chickens and guineas breeds diseases that spread to humans.  Agriculture allows denser poplations and specialized skills, like warriors and weapon-makers.  In short, the Bantus spread their agriculture south through the rest of Africa, killing off many of the other races by war or by diseases they brought.  The same thing happened when Western Europeans met the natives of the Americas, or when the Chinese spread into SE Asia and Indonesia.

            Thus Africa was overrun by Bantu “black” leaving the other races as small enclaves of race and language in certain remote, desert or jungle or highland places. And this happened about 2000 years ago, rather recently historically, and is strongly marked by language and culture.  Ironic, given our politics of today: a Superior Black Race took over Africa, killed off and subjugated the others.  The best lesson to be learned is that these kinds of racial genocides have happened throughout human history.  Indeed until the American Experiment and British Enlightenment gradually changed people to be of a more accepting heart for others, this supplanting was completely common. Thank Christianity for the change.

            Ask your school teacher if they knew this. 

Ken Burns burns the Dust Bowl

 In the PBS special “Dust Bowl” Ken Burns impresses with his anecdotes and photos, but leaves out so much explanation that we are left wondering how the dust occurred and what the lessons were.  According to the narrative, farmer greed and climate change were the culprits.   Billed as 'one of the Worst Man-made Disasters' the continual insinuation is that the prairies should have never been plowed, and that climate could once again ruin us.  Nice political correctness, but poor facts.

I taught a class about the Dust Bowl for NOC and North Central OK Historic Assoc. a dozen years ago.  Here are some facts that are quite relevant as we go into our third year of drought here in Oklahoma.  Summer-Fall plowing is a time-honored technique farmers use to mellow a seedbed and this was a major fault of the 1930’s dust.  It simply works too well here.  Daily winter freezing and thawing yields a fine dustbed by spring. If it’s too dry for the wheat to grow, the land lies barren and windswept.  Windspeeds in the Great Plains are the highest in N. America.  18 inch annual rainfall, normal for the panhandle, dropped by half in 1931-1938 for reasons that are still under debate.  We know the area is subject to droughts.  All over western Oklahoma and other states are ancient stabilized dune fields of small hummocky hills and no apparent drainage system.  The closest one to Ponca City is between Tonkawa and LaMont on the north side of US 60.  The soils west of Guthrie/Ponca City/Wichita are alkali because the dry climate doesn’t leach organic matter and minerals  much.  This makes a delightfully rich grassland.   But it is also makes a “friable” soil.  Pick up a clod, squeeze, and it turns to dust easily.  The soils of Western Kansas and SW Nebraska are some of the richest in the world, in places with over 30 feet of topsoil—blown-in naturally from the north as the last glaciers retreated.

Why does soil blow?  Soil particles first begin a hopping, fracturing regime called saltation which is enhanced by flat barren dirt.  Saltation creates particles so small they can go airborne. Burns did make a good point about a few speculative farmers who didn’t live on the land, but had the acreage plowed.  These “suitcase farmers” abandoned their lands during the Dust Bowl adding to the problem.  There were others who realized how to fix the farming practices, but  having neighbors who were clueless, they were powerless to stop the havoc.  Contour strip farming was the first attempt to control the dust and it helps a bit.  Emergency contour tillage works temporarily.  In the 40’s the better practice of fallowing became widespread. Land is left in stubble with minimum tillage to control weeds for a year.  This augments soil moisture and stops the blowing. Today, no-till agriculture is practiced.  And with irrigation the Great Plains has become a new world.

 Yet we know that prolonged droughts are likely, where desert threshold rainfall is less than 15”.  Even with modern farming practices, a 20-year drought would lead to a lot of blowing dirt.  We saw it blow one wild windy day in October this year aided by construction west of Blackwell.  But the likelihood of another Dust Bowl is not large. So then what was the dust bowl--man-made disaster, or yet another example of how learning leads to success?  I’d prefer the latter. "Manmade Disaster" is like blaming the first guy who tried to catch petroleum from a seep with a blanket for the oil spills.  Learn how to drill a well!