Pocahontas

She had three names before the English handed her a fourth. Amonute was the formal one, announced to the community at birth. Matoaka was the secret one, which the historian William Stith said her people concealed from strangers for fear that knowing it would let them do her harm. Pocahontas was a child's nickname, which the colonist William Strachey glossed as little wanton. Her father was Wahunsenacawh, the Mamanatowick who held together a network of tributary tribes across the Virginia Tidewater, and she was born around 1596 at Werowocomoco on the York River. No surviving English record names her mother, which suggests low rank, and one line of scholarship holds that she died in childbirth.

In March 1613 Samuel Argall pressured a Patawomeck leader into helping him take her aboard the ship Treasurer, and held her a year against the return of English prisoners, weapons and tools. She spent the captivity at Henricus, where the minister Alexander Whitaker taught her English and Christianity and baptized her Rebecca. She married the tobacco planter John Rolfe on April 5, 1614, and bore their son Thomas in January 1615. In 1616 the Virginia Company shipped her to London with 11 other Powhatans as living proof that the colony worked, seated her at a Ben Jonson masque in front of King James on January 5, 1617, and let the engravers title her the daughter of a most powerful prince. At Brentford she met John Smith again and turned her face away.

The one thing everybody knows about her is the least supported thing in the record. Smith's 1608 account of his own capture does not mention her. The rescue at the execution block appears eight years later, in a letter he wrote to Queen Anne while Pocahontas was crossing the Atlantic and useful to him. Karen Ordahl Kupperman reads it as embroidery. Frederic Gleach reads it as a garbled adoption rite. Rolfe, for his part, wrote that he married her not out of the unbridled desire of carnal affection but for the good of the plantation and the glory of God. Mattaponi tradition holds that she had a first husband, Kocoum, killed after her capture, and that she was raped in custody. Helen Rountree disputes both. The only English source for Kocoum is a single sentence of Strachey's.

She got as far as Gravesend on the voyage home in March 1617 before she was carried ashore dying of something nobody identified — pneumonia, smallpox, tuberculosis, dysentery and poisoning have all been argued. The parish buried her on March 21 beneath the chancel. The church burned in 1727 and took the grave's location with it, so what stands in the yard is a 1958 copy of a 1907 Jamestown bronze. The romance came later: the first claim that she and Smith were lovers is in John Davis's travel book of 1803. Her son's line ran through the Bollings into a good deal of the Virginia gentry. In 1907 she became the first Native American on a United States stamp.

Pocahontas's life against the full span of the corpus.

• c. 1596 aged ~0 Born at Werowocomoco, daughter of the Mamanatowick Wahunsenacawh
• 1608 aged ~12 Meets the Jamestown colonists as a child John Smith's account written that year does not mention her at his capture. The rescue story surfaces in 1616.
• March 1613 aged 16 Taken hostage by Samuel Argall aboard the Treasurer Held a year against the return of English prisoners, weapons and tools.
• 1614 aged ~18 Baptized Rebecca during her captivity at Henricus
• April 5, 1614 aged 17 Marries the tobacco planter John Rolfe Rolfe wrote that the match was for the good of the plantation and the glory of God.
• January 1615 aged 18 Bears a son, Thomas Rolfe
• June 12, 1616 aged 19 Lands at Plymouth with 11 other Powhatans Among them the holy man Tomocomo, sent by her father to count the English.
• January 5, 1617 aged 20 Presented to King James at a Ben Jonson masque in Whitehall Smith wrote that the king was so unprepossessing that neither she nor Tomocomo realized whom they had met.
• March 21, 1617 aged 20 Buried at St George's, Gravesend, aged about 21

• Powhatan 1547–1618
  Paramount chief whose confederacy confronted the first permanent English colony at Jamestown. daughter of
• Sacagawea 1788–1812
  Shoshone woman who guided the Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Louisiana Territory. cast in the same role by later Americans
• Tecumseh 1768–1813
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• Sitting Bull 1831–1890
  Hunkpapa Lakota leader and spiritual figure who resisted U.S. expansion and defended tribal sovereignty. later resistance to the same expansion
• Wilma Mankiller 1945–2010
  First woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, known for institution-building and community development. later Native leader who reclaimed the narrative