Of these the two former might be called highland or mountain Indians, because they occupied the hill country east of the Alleghany ridge, while the Powhatan nation inhabited the lowland region extending from the seacoast westward to the falls of the rivers and from the Patuxent southward to Carolina. Mr. Jefferson, in his "Notes on Virginia," estimates that the Powhatan confederacy at one time occupied about eight thousand square miles of territory, with a population of about eight thousand people, of whom twenty-four hundred were warriors. When it is remembered that there were thirty tribes in this coalition, and that this estimate is less than one hundred warriors to the tribe, it seems moderate enough, especially since it is recorded by an early writer that three hundred warriors appeared under one Indian chief in one body at one time and seven hundred at another, all of whom were apparently of his own tribe. Moreover, the Powhatan confederacy inhabited a country upon which nature bestowed her favors with lavish profusion. Their settlements were mostly on the banks of the James, Elizabeth, Nansamond, York and Chickahominy rivers, all of which abounded with fish and fowl. The forest was filled with deer and wild turkey, while the toothsome oyster was found in great abundance on the shores of the Chesapeake and its numerous inlets. Indeed, the whole region seems to have been a veritable paradise for hunter and fisherman. Vast quantities of corn, too, yearly rewarded even the crude agriculture of the Indians, bestowed as it was upon the best portion of a fertile soil. Captain John Smith, the hero and historian of early Virginia, informs us that at one time "the rivers became so covered with swans, geese, ducks and cranes that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia pease, pumpions (pumpkins) and putchamins (a wild plum), fish, fowl and diverse sorts of wild beasts so fat as we could eat them." He might have added, "And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness," but at first were ready to divide with them their ample store, for on one occasion when Smith undertook an exploring tour into the interior late in the season a violent storm obliged him and his men to keep Christmas among the savages. "And we were never more merry," he relates, "nor fed on more plenty of good oysters, fish, flesh, wild fowl and good bread, nor ever had better fires in England."