Dead and Gone

IN 1622 fifty-eight White settlers, all from England, were massacred by Indians about ten miles north of Jamestown, which had been founded by Captain John Smith fifteen years earlier.

It was what the old records called a “fatal Friday morning.” It was only one of several attacks that day.

One of the dead was Richard Kean, a tall lieutenant, whose remains, discovered by a Colonial Williamsburg Foundation dig more than 350 years later, revealed that he had been scalped and his skull smashed with a heavy object. Nearby, the bones of forty-seven White victims of an epidemic of bubonic plague were unearthed.

John Smith related in his History of Virginia that after a period of uneasy peace partly due to the racially-mixed marriage of John Rolfe and the Amerindian Pocahontas, braves of the Powhatan “came unarmed into our houses with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits, and other provisions to sell us.” The Powhatan then grabbed any tools or weapons available and killed all English settlers they found, including men, women, and children of all ages. Chief Opechancanough led a coordinated series of surprise attacks by the Powhatan Confederacy that devastated the unsuspecting English.

During the one-day surprise attack, the Powhatan tribes attacked many of the smaller communities, including Henricus and its fledgling college for children of natives and settlers alike. At Martin’s Hundred, they killed more than half the population of Wolstenholme Towne, where only two houses and a part of a church were left standing. The Powhatan killed about four hundred colonists (a third of the White population) and took 20 women captive. The captives lived and worked as Powhatan Indians until their deaths or ransom. The settlers abandoned the Falling Creek Ironworks, Henricus, and Smith’s Hundred.

Kean and his fellow Englishmen, many of whom were working off their seven years of indentured labor, made the US possible — so possible and so taken for granted that they have now been forgotten utterly! No memorials for them! No docudramas about them! The memorializing nowadays is for non-Americans who died of typhus on foreign soil and for alleged victims of mostly imagined atrocities whose bodies have never been found — non-Americans and non-Whites, whose descendants are anti-Americans and anti-Whites, who never lifted a finger for America.

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Source: based on an article in Instauration magazine, July 1980