Pocahontas and Settler Memory in the Appalachian West and South

Abstract

Abstract This article utilizes the Pocahontas coalfields in West Virginia and the Indian River Farms Company settlement of Vero Beach Florida as case studies of settler memory. As late as the nineteenth century, setters considered these two very different, but connected, Southern spaces as frontiers. Settlers in both places constructed fantasies about Native peoples that focused primarily on the idea of the Native woman Pocahontas. These are imaginative creations that both attempt to create a settlement and to hearken back to fantasies of the past that never fully existed. With selective constructions of memory, both settlements chose Pocahontas because the name evoked a settler dream of the good Indian yielding to conquest, just as they sought a pliant and willing landscape that would yield mineral and agricultural riches. In fact, both places have longer and deeper Native histories that settler and booster histories have obfuscated and hidden in favor of more “romantic” national narratives such as the Pocahontas myth, in order to sell a place and a product.