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PappyDick wrote: …Askekesky doesn’t ring any bells with me — should it? I searched the forums here, also Googled that word, and nothing (apart from your post today) came up.
My interest stems from their proximity to Blackfoot Town or Dagsboro.
That is the name of the town of the Indian River Indians, briefly mentioned by Rountree in EASTERN SHORE INDIANS OF MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA, as one of the “poorly known tribes of the seaboard side.” They apparently wandered a bit before settling at the head of Indian River [near the swamp?]. She notes that they started selling off their land after the aborted plot of 1742….. We know them as the Indian River Indians. Stumbling through the land records of the confusing at times Maryland Archives, I found one of the tracts of 1,000 acres spelled Askecksy, 1714, Weacomocomes & other Indians, County: NOW Sussex, Del, Certificate in the name of William Whittington, Liber E. E., #6, Folio 32, Liber E. E., # 6, Folio 33, & also Liber P. L. #3, folio 477, Maryland Land records.
When I see it as Askecksy, it doesn’t seem very similar at all to Akenatzy…
In the dispute ca 1757 over succession to Nanticoke cheifdom between George Pocatyhouse & Peter Monk, Peter Monk was disparged as not Nanticoke, but a descendant of the Indian River Indians….[ Maryland Archives & Rountree.] So, although they seemed to drift away after 1742, some were still around.
When they are mentioned in the Maryland Archives, they are usually represented by Robin, their interpreter, although they have the above mentioned “Queen”.
[It has been awhile, but I believe I found some AOFP Monks in an early census in western Maryland close to some Mounts, Cresap, etc. folks.]
Here is a google result from an interesting discussion a few years ago on the location of Winnasoccum. I haven’t studied the whole thread yet, but it looks worthwhile for this area.
[From: RootsWeb LOWER-DELMARVA-ROOTS-L Re [LDR] Further thoughts on Wimbesaccum Neck]
“…As an aside, the Weslager-supportive anecdote from AOMOL mentions, of course,
the presence of the Askecky Queen and others at the secretive meeting. They
lived relatively nearby at the head of the Indian River. This native
settlement was the only one which actually went under conventional MD patent [for
ASKECKEKY (ASKECKSY, later aliases for parts ASKEQUESSAME and ASKRESON)] to the
Indians, who were named in the 1714 instrument of patent: “the Indians living on
the head of Indian River, called by themselves Askecksy (viz., Weacomoconus
their Queen; Robin, their interpreter and ambassador; and Robin his son;
Matchontoun; Naspason; Toungacon; Hucktawicom; and Keuctaghcom)”. Their annual
quitrent was unique: 5 otter and 3 beaver skins.”
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/LOWER-DELMARVA-ROOTS/2004-04/1083373200
Not sure where Rountree got her spelling of Askekesky….
Ned Heite identified the Indian River Indians as
Assateague. I don’t think Rountree did so…..?
From:The Winnesoccum Disaster
by Ned Heite
http://www.mitsawokett.com/Winnesoccum.htm
“…The story which Robin probably told is one which history has verified in detail in the Maryland Archives, and is of great importance to our story of the Delaware mixed-bloods.
Robin said that his forefathers lived in what is now the seaboard part of Worcester County, Maryland, south of the Delaware state line. They were called Assateagues and were friendly with the Nanticoke, Choptank, and other Eastern Shore tribes. The Assateague tribe was strong and numerous and exercised jurisdiction over at least eight smaller bands….”
“….Sometime after 1686, when white pressure became unbearable, one of the Assateague bands, then occupying a place in Maryland called Buckingham (between present Berlin and Newark in Worcester County), was forced to cede its lands to the English. The Indians packed up their belongings and moved north to a place called Assawoman on Dirickson Creek, leaving some of their kin behind. This wandering band sojourned at Assawoman until the influx of white settlers forced them further north. With other Indians who had joined them, they moved to Indian River in Delaware where they became known as the Indian River Indians. Finally in 1705 they settled at the head of Indian River near present Millsboro. They lived undisturbed only for a short time until the white man settled on Indian River in increasing numbers and began to confiscate their lands.
Robin may have reminded his listeners that in 1705 he had directed a petition to the Maryland authorities humbly requesting that the Indian River Indians be permitted to remain on the land where they then lived. The authorities, recognizing the injustice that had been done, received the petition favorably. They set aside a thousand acres on Indian River called Askecksy as a reservation for the Indian River Indians. The Indians were required to make an annual token payment of five otter and five beaver skins to the Maryland government…..”
From a post by Coharie Roy in the BLACKFOOT TOWN & INDIAN RIVER INDIANS thread:
“..The map-maker lists ASKECKEKY as an Indian town where present day Millsboro, Delaware is, yet doesn’t list BLACKFOOT TOWN, even though Blackfoot Town is less than 5 miles away in present day Dagsboro. So, my question is, did the map-maker simply locate Blackfoot Town incorrectly? (As well as name it incorrectly ?) OR, is ASKECKEKY a different Indian town altogether? OR, is ASKECKEKY an earlier name for Blackfoot Town? “
http://www.saponitown.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1744&page=3
Y’all might try this link for a Google map (with the satellite photo) that shows what I guess must be Lake Saponi, referred to in one of my earlier posts on this thread. There shouldn’t be any spaces in the url if you paste it into your browser. As you will see, it’s a dammed up creek, and not a very big one either.
PappyDick,
Is the lake near the following in Albemarle County? The site might have originally been Sapponey/Saponi Creek? A migration/location marker? (I have seen a Sapponey Creek further south in the old southside area….)
Swanton article-
“The earliest known location of the Saponi has been identified by Bushnell (1930) with high probability with “an extensive village site on the banks of the Rivanna, in Albemarle County, directly north of the University of Virginia and about one-half mile up the river from the bridge of the Southern Railway.” This was their location when, if ever, they formed a part of the Monacan Confederacy. (See also North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York.)”
http://www.saponitown.com/Saponi.htm
Dear Brenda and Pappy,
A while back,I put a post on regarding an historical marker that would be
placed on US29,Albemarle County,VA,several miles north of Charlottesville
where 29 crosses the Rivanna.Said marker reportedly is near the former location of Monasukapanoh,a Saponi/Monacan town.
Lake Saponi is in Greene County,VA,which is just north of Albemarle.Don’t
have a map handy,but I don’t think it’s deathly far from Monasukapanoh.
Roca
I guesstimate that the pond now called Lake Saponi is about eight miles NNE of the historic Monacan village of Monasukapanough. It’s a little hard to pin down the latter because it’s an archaeological site, otherwise known as 44AB18, and I guess they want to discourage “pot hunters” or whatever. Not that there are any pots left; anyhow the serious dig sponsored by UVA found about two chips of the rims of pots there.
I found the earlier post on this by Roca, it was Jan. 12, 2006. I still haven’t figured out how to link one Saponitown thread or post to another. Deirdre has also expressed an interest in the Saponi or Monacan sites near Charlottesville. And there was a thread started by Brenda Collins Dillon Aug. 15, 2001 (just five years ago) about this same vicinity.
There is a lot of good information about the Monacans at this url:
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/lewisandclark/students/projects/monacans/Monasukapanough/index.html
This is a pretty rich web site, with many links to other useful info, photos etc., especially about the Monacan people. If you click on their Glossary, you will find that Saponi and Tutelo are treated more or less as synonyms for Monacan. One might quibble with that and a few other things, but it’s overall a very well done project, and needs to be referenced here in the Sources thread.
One of the unusual features at Monasukapanough was the mass burial (over a long period) of somewhere between 1,000 and 2,700 sets of disarticulated human bones. It is assumed that the dead were kept above (or very near) the surface of the ground for months or a few years, and periodically these remains were brought to Monasukapanough for reburial together in a large (and ever growing) earthen mound. There’s quite a bit of information about this mortuary custom, here and elsewhere (mainly in the south and east), in the late Woodland and early historic period. That may be the source of a recent comment (on some other thread) that the Saponi were “mortuary people.”
I want to start by pasting in something Techteach posted about a year and a half ago, on the Material Culture forum (under a Skin Markings thread):
techteach wrote: I went to the native American art exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute yesterday. It included copies of those early European pictures of Indians who were tatooed that we discussed earlier. There were also a series of pots in the shape of heads that were also tatooed. Wonderful work! There were displays of Hopewell pipes there too. Amazing to look at. One was a beaver with pearl inlaid eyes and front teeth done with shell. Amazing detail considering that they had no metal for working the stone. My Hopewell racoon is more detailed than some that were displayed. I bought a book on the exhibit.
Speck’s papers seem to state that the Hopewell were the ancestors of the Tutelo.
Techteach
For pretty dissimilar reasons, I recently bought the catalog of that Chicago exhibition, also. It is much, much more than the record of an art show. This one had a rationale, and the catalog consists of nearly twenty essays by specialists in many fields, approaching from varied perspectives a couple of thousand years’ worth of (broadly defined) art of many people. Most were in some sense “mound builders,” though often separated by many miles or years, and culturally distinguished one from another in the literature of archaeology. The title is Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (Yale University Press, 2004).
Whether Speck did or didn’t relate the Hopewell folks to the Tutelos (and whether that was or wasn’t right), there is much to be learned here, about the extent to which motifs of ancient art are reflected in mythology still preserved — mostly in Oklahoma, mostly in groups that were removed from the southeast. There is also good information from Creeks and others who didn’t move. I haven’t read anywhere near all of it, yet.
One thing that interests me in particular is the treatment, throughout the volume, of native cosmology — notably in the essay by George E. Lankford (pp. 207-217). I don’t think it stretches the imagination too much to relate that discussion to “our emblem,” the shell gorget or object found at the Occaneechi Town dig. If you compare it to the top, right gorget on p. 159 (a type, of which there are many similar examples), you will see many of the same elements. To me it looks as if the Occaneechi folks had lost a lot of the skills involved in the precise engraving of shell; but had not dropped the custom, nor forgotten the cosmology. (Our Eastern Siouan example is anywhere from 250 to 700 years newer than the one in the catalog.)
Anyway, I recommend this book, they did a beautiful job.
Thanks, Pappydick, for posting this. Now I will have to dig my copy out to check the pages.
I remember seeing gorgets that were similar to ours, if not even that very one.
One of the sources I investigated online a couple of years ago, identified the Hopewell as Siouan. It was a web site covering the mounds at Newark, Ohio. I could not point you there; that was a couple computer crashes ago with subsequent loss of bookmarks. Google would probably get you there if the site still exists.
Techteach
Has anyone determined the location of Sapon Town on Otter Creek circa 1650? It was probably near the Campbell/Bedford County line.
Thomas Batts came to “Sapiny Indian Town” on Sept. 4, 1671 at 2 o’clock and “traveled south and by west course till about evening and came to Saponys west.” On Sept. 5, they marched “from the Sapiny’s and “about eleven of the clock we set forward and that night came to the town of the Hanathaskies which we judge to be twenty-five miles from the Sapenys, they are lying west and by north, on an Island on the Sapony River.”
A year earlier, John Lederer came to the same area. By following the “Rorenock alias Shawan (River)” (Roanoke/Staunton) on 1671 Lederer map, up to the mountains, you are shown the town Akenatzy and to the northeast Sapon and a branch which I believe is the Otter River. Most references say that Akenatzy is Occaneechee Island, but at this time Lederer is quite some distance from the Bugss Island area. The first mountain that I know of up the Roanoke is Smith Mountain. There was a large village below the Smith Mountain gourge. I have some nice artifacts from the site.
Let me know what you think. Most people use Occaneechee and Akenatzy interchangeably, but Lederer describes the inhabitants of the island as “fix’d here in great securtiy, being naturally fortified with fastnesses of Mountains, and wate of every side (which is a common feature of an island). I don’t believe there are mountains in the area of Occaneechee. Leder says that “Sapon is within the limits of the province of Carolina,” which I think might mislead people. Back near the mountains, at that time, no line between Virginia and Carolina existed. Not so long before this both were shown on maps as Virginia.
The work I have cited several times (including on this thread) by Alan V. Briceland, Westward from Virginia: the Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frntire, 1650-1710 (Univ. Press of VA, 1987) discusses this in depth on pp. 115-119. If one accepts (as I do) that Briceland in 1987 was better aware of geological and geographical reality than Lederer was in 1650, one might discount the decorative but rather silly maps of Lederer’s immediate successors, and might then tend to agree with Briceland, who says on p. 116 (though not quite in this sequence):
Sapon… was on the north-eastern side of the Staunton River on the eighty-foot bluff overlooking the river. [It was in] the hairpin bend of the Staunton River west of Charlotte Court House in Charlotte County [VA]… Although the island is now under water, there can be no doubt that Lederer’s “Akenatzy” were the Occaneechee at Clarksville [VA].
Among other problems Briceland has found with Lederer’s original narrative, his compass seems to have had about a 37 degree error to the west of true north. I have worked with other sources from this time, and that was an extreme example, but a common phenomenon. There may have been something wacky going on with the earth’s magnetic field around 1650-60. (Solar flares, or other disturbances of the Van Allen belt — that Bermuda Triangle sort of thing.) Or maybe his compass was made 37 degrees east of a big iron lode. Whatever.
I neglected to mention that the Occaneechi town located by archaeologists in 1987 and thereafter, at which “Our Emblem” of the Material Culture forum was found, is pretty well dated and is about four to six decades later than Lederer’s visit. By the turn of the century (1700, maybe a few years before) the main Occaneechi settlement had moved to the vicinity of present Hillsborough, NC. But in Lederer’s time, that was Eno country.
roca wrote: A while back, I put a post on regarding an historical marker that would be placed on US29, Albemarle County, VA, several miles north of Charlottesville where 29 crosses the Rivanna. Said marker reportedly is near the former location of Monasukapanoh, a Saponi/Monacan town.
I passed that new marker twice this weekend — barely saw it at 55 mph (the next light was green) Friday; but today I actually went a mile past, so I could turn around, and snuck up on it to take a photo. Which, in the fullness of time, I’ll post here. (At the moment, my image handling software is scrambled.)
Anyway, it’s seen from the southbound lanes, just before you get to the intersection of Polo Grounds Road. And then you cross the South Rivanna River. There’s another (older) marker immediately behind it, about the Civil War skirmish at nearby Rio Hill.
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