Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

Abstract

Plain Paths and Dividing Lines follows the people who moved across the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region, foremost a Native place. Algonquians over centuries had built political and economic networks by river, their connected towns and communication lines both a draw and a threat to Virginia and Maryland English colonizers at Jamestown and St. Mary’s City. English military men, fur traders, and tobacco planters surveyed, fenced, mapped, surveilled, and plotted as they added geographical boundaries to their claims on Native land and resources. Yet Native people continued to travel the same networks, and bound and enslaved people relied on these networks and Native knowledge about space in order to resist enslavement and oppression. Escaped unfree laborers and Native people who flouted attempts to break rivers and shorelines, and later land, into territories, administrative units, and private property only highlighted the futility of halting mobility in this connected, riverine environment. The book tells the stories of the violent consequences of trespass and transgression over these boundaries, from the Anglo-Powhatan Wars through Bacon’s Rebellion, battles over boundaries but also over authority, freedom, and profit.