There was great excitement in that part of the American colony of Virginia where Edmund Porter lived. It was in the month of May, 1676, and the place was the country just below the settlement of Henricus, on the James River, as one went down-stream toward the capital city of Jamestown. The Porters had a plantation not very far from Curles, which was the name of the place where their friend Nathaniel Bacon lived; and Nathaniel Bacon seemed to be the centre of the exciting events that were taking place. Nathaniel Bacon was a young man, of a good family in England, who had come out to Virginia with his wife, and settled at Curles on the James. He had another estate farther up the river, a place called "Bacon Quarter Branch," where his overseer and servants looked after his affairs, and to which he could easily ride in a morning from his own home, or go in his barge on the James, unless he objected to being rowed seven miles around the peninsula at Dutch Gap. He was popular with his neighbors, and seemed as quiet as any of them until trouble with the Indians in the spring of that year made him declare that he was going to see whether the governor would protect the farms along the river, and if the governor wouldn't, then he had a mind to take the matter into his own hands. Now Edmund, who was a well-grown boy of sixteen, wanted to be wherever there was excitement, and so spent as much time as he could at Curles. He was out in the meadow back of the house, watching one of the men break in a colt, when a messenger came with news that Indians had attacked Mr. Bacon's other estate; killed his overseer and one of his servants, and were carrying fire and bloodshed along the frontier. The news spread like wild-fire, as news of Indian raids always did, for there was nothing else so fear-inspiring to the white settlers. Edmund jumped on his pony, and rode home as fast as he could to tell his father. Then father and son, each taking a gun, with powder-horn and bullet-pouch, dashed back to Nathaniel Bacon's. Other planters had already gathered there, armed and ready to ride on the track of the Indians. There was much talk and debate; some wanted to know whether Governor Berkeley, down the river at Jamestown, would send soldiers to protect the plantations farther up the James; others wondered whether the governor, who was not very prompt or ready in dealing with the Indians in this far-off part of the colony, would be willing to commission the planters to take the war into their own hands. In the midst of all the talk Bacon himself appeared, and the crowd of horsemen called on him to take command, it being known he had often said openly that he intended to protect Curles and his other farms from the redskins.