Telling the story of Native Americans and colonial Virginians is a complex challenge clouded by centuries of mythology. The history of early settlement is dominated by the story of a preteen Pocahontas...
Powhatan tribes, led by Opechancanough, launched a coordinated attack against English settlers in an effort to drive them out of Virginia. Nearly 350 colonists were killed.
Opechancanough launched another assault on English colonists in Virginia. At least 400 colonists were killed, and Opechancanough was captured and killed.
Like the Iroquois League, this confederation of Algonquian-speaking peoples in what is now Virginia seems to have formed in response to the effects of the Little Ice Age. Oral testimony suggests that it began forming around 1550—the time that the climate reached its severest stage. Consisting initially of six villages in the area that is now Richmond, it expanded significantly toward the end of the sixteenth century under the influence of the dynamic leader Wahunsunacock, called the Powhatan. Over a twenty-year period, Powhatan drew in...
Opechancanough (cc. 1545–1646) was a Powhatan Indian chief who led a series of attacks on English colonists in Virginia in 1622 in an attempt to force them from the region. After leading the Powhatans for more than twenty years, Opechancanough was captured and killed by English forces in 1646.