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Southwest Virginia has own Pocahontas story
Monday, Nov 13, 2006 – 12:00 AM
http://www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/news.apx.-content-articles-TRI-2006-11-13-0011.html
BRISTOL HEARALD COURRIER
“Pocahontas might be the most famous Indian princess to marry a European in Virginia, but she wasn’t the first.
The first came from right here in Southwest Virginia.
Around 1568 – nearly 40 years before the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America – an American Indian woman from what’s now Saltville married a Spanish soldier.
Her name was Luisa Menendez.
“It’s a great story, and we don’t hear about this,” said Jim Glanville, a retired chemistry professor at Virginia Tech and amateur historian who has studied the 16th century Spanish presence in the region…..
……………Few records of the story remain. Just a handful of firsthand accounts stored in Spanish archives relate to the Spanish sortie into present-day Virginia and this local Pocahontas story.
In 1600, the governor of Spanish Florida asked to hear testimony from people who’d seen the interior of the country so he could tell the king what it was like.
Testifying during this inquiry, Menendez described her home, a place where salt was made called Maniatique………………………….”
Brenda
If you search for Saltville, VA on Google Earth, you will find Collins Hollow just to the southwest of the town and the spring…
This james Town stuff always gets a chuckle from me, it’s always pushed as “THE” first Town etc. The powers that be never tell you that the Mayflower amonst many other ships replenished their supplies on what is today New Foundland Province Canada, a population that had been there since the 1500’sand earlier is was the Norse (Vikings) who were the first non native people there.
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