The Siouan tribes of the East / by James Mooney.

  • James Mooney
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Siouan tribes of the East / by James Mooney. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    StOUAN “| MooneyJ MANAHOAC NEARLY HISTORY. 21 kindly and expressed his desire that the other chiefs in the party should go through the same ceremony, in order that the great king whose ser¬ vant he was might be their friend. It was no sooner demanded but performed, so vpon a low Moorish poynt of Land we went to the shore, where those fonre Kings came and roceiued Amoroleck: noth¬ ing they had but Bowes, Arrowes, Tobacco-bags, and Pipes: what wc desired, none refused to give vs, wondering at every thing we had, and heard we had done: our Pistols they tooke for pipes, which they much desired, but we did content them with other Commodities, and so we left fonre or hue hundred of our merry Manna- liocks, singing, dauncing, and making merry (Smith, 5). And so do we leave them for a hundred years. With the exception of an uncertain reference by Lederer to the ‘‘Maliocks,” apparently a hostile tribe living in 1670 about the upper James, there seems to be nothing more concerning the Manahoac confederates for more than a century. In this year Lederer made a journey from Rappahannock falls due westward to the mountains, through the center of the old Manahoac country, but as lie met no Indians it is probable that these tribes had already moved farther south, and that the Mahock found by him on the James in the same year were identical with the Mana¬ hoac of Smith. A wandering people, living remote from the white settlements along the coast and isolated from them by the intervening tribes of the Powhatan, they appear to have silently melted away before the attacks of their Iroquois enemies from the north, until in the beginning of the eighteenth century we find only the Stegarake remaining, the others having disappeared or consolidated with them. In 1711 Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, mentions the “Stuka- rocks” in connection with the Tutelo and Saponi (Burk, 1). Again, in 1722, the u Stenkenocks” are mentioned in the same connection as one of the tribes living near Fort Christanna, in Virginia, and which the colonial government desired to secure from the further attacks of the Iroquois (New York, 4). In 1728 Byrd speaks of the “Steuken- liocks” as a remnant of a tribe living with the Saponi and others at the same fort (Byrd, 3). This seems to be their last appearance in his¬ tory as a distinct tribe. The few survivors were merged with the Saponi and Tutelo, and thenceforward followed their wandering for¬ tunes, as will be related in treating of the Monacan tribes. After careful investigation, J.N. B. Hewitt makes the date of the for¬ mation of the Iroquois league about 1570. It was about forty years later when Smith learned of them from the Manahoac on the Rap¬ pahannock as making war on all the world. From this it would.seem that within the brief space of half a lifetime they had made their name terrible throughout a wide area. At this period the whole interior of Pennsylvania was an unoccupied wilderness. The Delaware did not remove from Delaware river and the coast lands to settle upon the Susquehanna until driven by the pressure of the whites a century later. The Conoy (Piscataway) did not move up the Potomac into Pennsylvania until about the same time, so that when Smith wrote,
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