They supplemented their diets by diving for oysters, fishing for sturgeon, and wading into the freshwater marshes to pull tuckahoe, a carbohydrate-rich edible plant. Led by a paramount chief named Powhatan (Wahunsonacock), they farmed in small villages during the summer and, during the winter, traveled deep into the forests to hunt deer and gather nuts. They lived mainly along the James, York, and Rappahannock rivers in a land they called Tsenacomoco. In 1600, Tidewater Virginia was occupied by 15,000 Algonquian-speaking Indians.
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And while Virginia’s ruling men did not encourage women to be independent, they nevertheless fought for their own independence, taking full part in the American Revolution (1775–1783). Women who married and worked at home were considered “good wives” those who refused such “proper” roles were considered troublesome. Nearly all power was in the hands of white male landowners, who ran the government and, by law, belonged to the Church of England. For most of the 1600s, white indentured servants worked the colony’s tobacco fields, but by 1705 the Virginia colony had become a slave society. That same year brought the first enslaved Africans to Virginia. In 1619, a General Assembly convened, bringing limited self-government to America. Salvation came to the colony in the form of smoking tobacco, or what King James I called a “vile and stinking custom,” when John Rolfe cultivated a variety of tobacco that sold well in England.
The English colonists, meanwhile, just barely survived, suffering through summer droughts and winter starvation. Although a thriving Indian society had existed for thousands of years before the English arrived, war with the European settlers and the introduction of new diseases for which the Indians had no resistance spelled disaster for it. The colonial period in Virginia began in 1607 with the landing of the first English settlers at Jamestown and ended in 1776 with the establishment of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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