Draft Interpretive Plan Join the adventure! - Captain John Smith ...

military power - resulted in changing alliances and enemies among the
native peoples. Although Smith’s relationships with the tribes were
important and real, much about them has been romanticized into modern
myths.
Chesapeake Bay tribes have often struggled to survive, yet have endeavored to
retain and protect their identities.
• European colonization in the Chesapeake region created conflict that led to
the severe disruption of native lifeways, and culminated in displacement and
removal of native peoples from their homelands.
• Chesapeake Bay Indians continue to live in the region, employing diverse
strategies for retaining their cultural identities and traditions in an everchanging
natural and social landscape. They are strongly interested in
conserving and restoring sites that are historically important to them.
During the 17th century, Captain Smith encountered a verdant and varied
ecosystem in the Chesapeake Bay region and though much has changed during
the intervening centuries, there are still places where such beauty and diversity
endure, and efforts are underway to conserve and restore aspects of the Bay’s
integrity.
The Chesapeake Bay of the 1600’s was intensely robust and fertile; a “veritable
Garden of Eden.”
• Chesapeake Indians embraced the region’s abundance by harvesting the
rich land, marshes and waterways for plants, wood, clay, fish, shellfish,
fowl and mammals to use for food, clothing, building materials and other
essentials. English explorers described the Bay region as a “fruitful and
delightsome land” with “fair meadows and goodly tall trees” that left
observers “ravished at the first sight thereof.”
• Nearly 95 percent of the Chesapeake drainage was blanketed in a deep,
sometimes ancient forest with chestnuts, oaks, hickories, poplars, bald
cypress, and other tree species that grew to immense size. Forest-dwelling
animals abounded, including deer, elk, raccoons, squirrels, bears, wolves,
bobcats, beavers, otters and more; even bison (grass-eaters) were present,
though meadows were not plentiful.
• The marshes and vast meadows of underwater grasses attracted wintering
migratory waterfowl – ducks, geese, and swans – in flocks massive
enough to “darken the skies.” Populations of fish and shellfish were so
robust, oyster reefs posed hazards to navigation, and Atlantic sturgeon
were numerous enough to be corralled and wrestled to shore by the native
peoples.
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