When the English landed in 1607, the chieftain Powhatan dominated the native peoples living in the James River area. He had asserted supremacy over a few dozen small tribes, loosely affiliated in what somewhat grandly came to be called Pow hatan's Confederacy. The English colonists dubbed all the local Indians, somewhat inaccurately, the Powhatans. Powhatan at first may have considered the English potential allies in his struggle to extend his power still further over his Indian rivals, and he tried to be conciliatory. But relations between the Indians and the English remained tense, especially as the starving colonists took to raiding Indian food supplies.
The atmosphere grew even more strained after Lord De La Warr arrived in 1610. He carried orders from the Virginia Company that amounted to a declaration of war against the Indians in the Jamestown region.
A veterinarian of the vicious campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr now introduced "Irish tactics" against the Indians.
His troops raided Indian villages, burned houses, confiscated provisions, and torched cornfields.
A peace settlement ended this first Angelo-Powhatan War in 1614, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist John Rolfe—the first known interracial union in Virginia.
A fragile respite followed, which endured eight years. But the Indians, pressed by the land-hungry whites and ravaged by European diseases, struck back in 1622.
A series of Indian attacks left 347 settlers dead, including John Rolfe. In response the Virginia Company issued new orders calling for "a perpetual war without peace or truce," one that would prevent the Indians "from being any longer a people." Periodic punitive raids systematically reduced the native population and drove the survivors ever farther westward.
In the second Angelo-Powhatan War in 1644, the Indians made one last effort to dislodge the Virginians. They were again defeated. The peace treaty of 1646 repudiated any thought of assimilating the native peoples into Virginia society or of peacefully coexisting with them.
Instead it effectively banished the Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands and formally separated Indian from white areas of settlement-the origins of the later reservation system.
By 1669 an official census revealed that only about two thousand Indians remained in Virginia, perhaps 10 per cent of the population the original English settlers had encountered in 1607.
By 1685 the English considered the Powhatan peoples extinct.
It had been the Powhatans' calamitous misfortune to fall victim to three D's: disease, disorganization, and disposability. Like native peoples throughout the New World, they were extremely susceptible to European-borne maladies. Epidemics of smallpox and measles raced mercilessly through their villages.
The Powhatans also-despite the appar ent cohesiveness of "Powhatan's Confederacy" lacked the unity with which to make effective opposition to the comparatively well-organized and militarily disciplined whites.
Finally, unlike the Indians whom the Spaniards had encountered to the south, who could be put to work in the mines and had gold and silver to trade, the Pohatans served no economic function for the Virginia colonists. They provided no reliable labor source and, after the Virginians began growing their own food crops, had no valuable commodities to offer in commerce.
The natives, as far as the Virginians were concerned, could be disposed of without harm to the colonial economy. Indeed the Indian presence frustrated the colonists' desire for a local commodity the Europeans desperately wanted: land.