Virginia: The hidden story of Native tribes who outsmarted Bacon's Rebellion

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Virginia
The hidden story of Native tribes who outsmarted Bacon’s Rebellion
A scene of conflict that was lost to the ages has been unearthed, assembling an indigenous perspective on events at the very root of America’s founding.


Allyson Gray, a member of the Pamunkey Tribal Council, strolls through Dragon Run, a swampy 40-mile landscape near Center Cross, Va. The Dragon was once inhabited by Indigenous tribes seeking concealment during Bacon’s Rebellion. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

By Gregory S. Schneider
September 20, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

NEAR CENTER CROSS, Va. — The brown waters of Dragon Run meander through shaggy banks of duckweed and arrow arum before melting into the forest. Insects clamor like city traffic. Noontime shadows are so deep, someone in a white shirt could be standing 100 yards away and you’d never see them. ... Aside from a lonesome paved road, the landscape looks much as it did 348 years ago when Dragon Run played a little-known part in an important chapter of American history. Now the Native people whose ancestors lived here are finally telling their side of an event known as Bacon’s Rebellion, in which Virginia settlers rose up against the Colonial government in 1676 and tried to wipe out all the Indigenous tribes. ... “We’re seeing our portion of the story, which had all been whitewashed and kept away from us,” said Chief G. Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock tribe.

Working with researchers, historians and archaeologists, the Rappahannock and Pamunkey tribes have spent the past two years piecing together details about how the Native residents of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula engaged and outfoxed the English rebels. Their efforts, led by St. Mary’s College of Maryland professor Julia King under a grant from the American Battlefield Protection Program of the National Park Service, have identified a scene of conflict that was lost to the ages and assembled an Indigenous perspective on events at the very root of America’s founding.

“A lot of the verbal history has been lost,” said Allyson Gray of the Pamunkey Tribal Council. “It’s kind of sad that we have to rely on so many European and English documents to kind of piece together our own history. But we’re able to read through the lines and really see what — what truly was for us, from a fresh set of eyes.” ... Bacon’s Rebellion has gone through many reinterpretations over the centuries. It was long idealized as another Virginia “first,” anticipating the American Revolution by exactly 100 years. A marble plaque behind the speaker’s rostrum in the Virginia House of Delegates proclaims honor to “the memory of Nathaniel Bacon … A great Patriot leader of the Virginia People who died while defending their rights.”

Today, scholars take a different view of Bacon and the movement he led, which resulted in the burning of the Colonial capital at Jamestown and a harsher turn in Virginia’s approach to not only Native Americans, but slavery. ... “In this day and age, two things really pop out,” said James Rice, a historian at Tufts University who wrote the book “Tales from a Revolution” about Bacon’s Rebellion. “One, he’s this populist leader who blows past established norms and has some success … by sort of doubling down on the things that made him unacceptable to the existing political leadership.” ... And the other, Rice said: “the power of rumor and misinformation.”

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Rappahannock Chief G. Anne Richardson is part of an effort to write a history of Bacon's Rebellion from the Indigenous point of view. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

By Gregory S. Schneider
Greg Schneider covers Virginia from the Richmond bureau. He was The Washington Post's business editor for more than seven years, and before that served stints as deputy business editor, national security editor and technology editor. He has also covered aviation security, the auto industry and the defense industry for The Post.follow on X @SchneiderG