n, the full-bunched grapevine, the
juicy melon, and the big-leafed tabah, or tobacco.

The field work was performed by the women, not from any necessity of a
slavish condition or an enforced obedience, but because, where the men
and boys must be warriors and hunters, the women and girls felt that it
was their place and their duty to perform such menial labor as, to their
unenlightened nature, seemed hardly suitable to those who were to become
chiefs and heroes.

These sturdy forest-folk of old Virginia, who had reached that state of
human advance, midway between savagery and civilization, that is known
as barbarism, were but a small portion of that red-skinned, vigorous,
and most interesting race familiar to us under their general but
wrongly-used name of "Indians." They belonged to one of the largest
divisions of this barbaric race, known the Algonquin family--a
division created solely by a similarity of language and of
blood-relationships--and were, therefore, of the kindred of the Indians
of Canada, of New England, and of Pennsylvania, of the valley of the
Ohio, the island of Manhattan, and of some of the far-away lands beyond
the Mississippi.

So, for generations, they lived, with their simple home customs and
their family affections, with their games and sports, their legends and
their songs, their dances, fasts, and feasts, their hunting and their
fishing, their tribal feuds and wars. They had but little religious
belief, save that founded upon the superstition that lies at the
foundation of all uncivilized intelligence, and though their customs
show a certain strain of cruelty in their nature, this was not a savage
and vindictive cruelty, but was, rather, the result of what was, from
their way of looking at things, an entirely justifiable understanding of
order and of law.

At the time of our story, certain of these Algonquin tribes of Virginia
were joined together in a sort of Indian republic, composed of thirty
tribes scattered through Central and Eastern Virginia, and known to
their neighbors as the Confederacy of the Pow-ha-tans. This name
was taken from the tribe that was at once the strongest and the most
energetic one in this tribal union, and that had its fields and villages
along the broad river known to the Indians as the Pow-ha-tan, and to us
as the James.

The principal chief of the Pow-ha-tans was Wa-bun-so-na-cook, called by
the white men Pow-hatan. He was a strongly built but rather stern-fac