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The Monacan Indians of Amherst County Karenne Wood, Project Director, Monacan Indian Nation When the first colonists arrived at Jamestowne in 1607, they immediately met with Indian people on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. These Indians belonged to a vast Powhatan autocracy and spoke Algonquian languages. In the Piedmont and mountain regions of this area lived Siouan Indians of the Monacan and Mannahoac tribes, arranged in a confederation ranging from the Roanoke River Valley to the Potomac River, and from the Fall Line at Richmond and Fredericksburg west through the Blue Ridge Mountains. At this time, the Virginia Siouans numbered more than 10,000 people. They were an agricultural people who grew the "Three Sisters" crops of corn, beans and squash, and they had domesticated a wide variety of other foods, including sunflowers, fruit trees, wild grapes and nuts. They lived in villages with palisaded walls, and their homes were dome-shaped structures of bark and reed mats. These Monacan ancestors hunted deer, elk and buffalo, and they would leave their villages every year to visit hunting camps known to have plenty of game. The Monacans traded with the Powhatans to the east and the Iroquois to the north. They mined copper, which they wore in beaded necklaces, and which the Powhataos prized greatly. The Monacans also buried their dead in mounds, a tradition that differentiates them from neighboring Indian nations. Throughout the Piedmont and mountain regions, thirteen known mounds have been identified and many excavated, yidding interesting information about the lives of these First Americans, whose ancestors inhabited this region for more than 10,000 years. Even before the English arrived, the Indians had encountered sweeping epidemics of disease, carried to this land by Spanish explorers in the 1 500s. Such diseases as smallpox and influenza wiped out entire tribes, because the Indians had no immunity to the bacteria. With their numbers reduced and whole villages gone, the tribes were greatly disadvantaged when the colonists landed in Virginia. Unlike the Powhatans, who maintained an appearance of friendly relations with the colonists, the Monacan people appeared to want little contact with the English. A number of explorers visited their towns and described them, but none remained to learn the Monacan languages, and thus the historical record of these people is poor in contrast to Powhatan history. Between 1607 and 1720, a series of encounters are recorded, and the Monacans gradually moved westward, away from the advancing settlers. Some stayed for several years at Fort Christanna, in Brunswick County, and these people eventually moved into Pennsylvania and finally to Canada, where they were adopted by a division of the Iroquois Confederacy. Tuscaroras from North Carolina, who had fought a disastrous war with the English and were decimated as a result, joined them. However, some of the Monacan people stayed in Virginia, entrenched in their ancestral home in the mountains, a place that became known as Amberst County. Other members of their confederacy, such as Saponis, Occeneechis, and Tutelos, joined these remaining Monacans, and the Monacan people adopted the few Tuscaroras who chose to remain in Virginia.In toe 1720s, these Monacans of Amherst were living in the Madison area, along with the remnants of tribes they had adopted. A great trading road wound along the route now used for Route 29, and another road (Route 130) connected it with the Warrior's Road (Route 11) that ran through the Valley. A Scottish trader, named Hughes, built a trading post near this trail, close to Otter Creek He married an Indian woman named Nicked, the daughter of the famous Powhatan Chief, Opechancanough. Hughes was the first white man to live in toe area and the first to make any real contact with the Monacan people near present-day Lynchburg. It is thought that he was not harmed by the Indians because of his wife's heritage. |
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