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the whole dominion of
Powhatan, which had the
tribes of the Eastern Shore as its dependencies, and included all the villages west of the
Chesapeake, from the most southern tributaries of
James River to the
Patuxent.
The power of the little empire was entirely broken in the days of
Opechancanough; and after the insurrection of
Bacon, the confederacy disappears from history.
The
Shawnees connect the south-eastern Algonquins with the west.
The basin of the
Cumberland River is marked by the earliest French geographers as the home of this restless nation of wanderers.
A part of them afterwards had their ‘cabins’ and their
‘springs’ in the neighborhood of
Winchester.
Their principal band removed from their hunting-fields in
Kentucky to the head waters of one of the great rivers
of
South Carolina; and, at a later day, an encampment of four hundred and fifty of them, who had been straggling in the woods for four years, was found not
far north of the head waters of the
Mobile River, on their way to the country of the Muskhogees.
It was about the year 1698, that three or four score of their
families, with the consent of the government of
Pennsylvania, removed from
Carolina, and planted themselves on the
Susquehannah.
Sad were the fruits of that hospitality.
Others followed; and when, in 1732, the number of Indian fighting men in
Pennsylvania was estimated to be seven hundred, one half of them were
Shawnee emigrants.
So desolate was the wilderness, that a vagabond tribe could wander undisturbed from
Cumberland River to the
Alabama, from the head waters of the
Santee to the
Susquehannah.
The
Miamis were more stable, and their own traditions preserve the memory of their ancient limits.
