Stories of American Life and AdventureEggleston, Edward
History
Stories of American Life and Adventure
Eggleston, Edward
Readers -- History; United States -- History -- Juvenile literature
Many hundreds of people came at the same time that Henry Spelman did.
Captain John Smith was then governor of the little colony. He was
puzzled to know how to feed all these people. As many of them were
troublesome, he was still more puzzled to know how to govern them.
In order not to have so many to feed, he sent some of them to live
among the Indians here and there. A chief called Little Powhatan asked
Smith to send some of his men to live with him. The Indians wanted to
get the white men to live among them, so as to learn to make the
things that the white men had. Captain Smith agreed to give the boy
Henry Spelman to Little Powhatan, if the chief would give him a place
to plant a new settlement.
Spelman staid awhile with the chief, and then he went back to the
English at Jamestown.
But when he came to Jamestown he was sorry that he had not staid among
the Indians. Captain John Smith had gone home to England. George Percy
was now governor of the English. They had very little food to eat, and
Spelman began to be afraid that he might starve to death with the rest
of them. Powhatan--not Little Powhatan, but the great Powhatan, who
was chief over all the other chiefs in the neighborhood--sent a white
man who was living with him to carry some deer meat to Jamestown. When
it came time for this white man to go back, he asked that some of his
countrymen might go to the Indian country with him. The governor sent
Spelman, who was glad enough to go to the Indians again, because they
had plenty of food to eat.
Three weeks after this, Powhatan sent Henry Spelman back to Jamestown
to say to the English, that if they would come to his country, and
bring him some copper, he would give them some corn for it. The
Indians at this time had no iron, and what little copper they had they
bought from other Indians, who probably got it from the copper mines
far away on Lake Superior.
The English greatly needed corn, so they took a boat and went up to
the Indian country with copper, in order to buy corn. They quarreled
with the Indians about the measurement of the corn. The Indians hid
themselves near the water, and, while the white men were carrying the
corn on their vessel, the Indians killed some of them. About this
time, seeing that the white men were so hungry, the Indians began to
hope that they would be able to drive them all out of the country.
Powhatan saved Spelman from being killed by the Indians; but, now that
the Indians were at war with the white men, who were shut up in
Jamestown without food, they wished to kill all the white people in
the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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