Produced by Mark C. Orton, David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE POCAHONTAS-JOHN SMITH STORY The Pocahontas-John Smith Story _By_ Pocahontas Wight Edmunds JAMES H. BAILEY, PH.D., _Editor_ THE DIETZ PRESS, INC. RICHMOND, VIRGINIA PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT © 1956, BY POCAHONTAS WIGHT EDMUNDS Quotes from _Cornhuskers_ by Carl Sandburg. Copyright, 1918, by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Copyright, 1946, by Carl Sandburg. By permission of the publishers. Quotes from _Western Star_ by Stephen Vincent Benet. Copyright, 1943, by Rosemary Carr Benet. Published by Rinehart & Company. FROM THE PRESSES OF THE DIETZ PRINTING COMPANY Introduction When my _Tales of the Virginia Coast_ was published in 1950 the _New York Times_ (Book Review) page "In and Out of Books" asked the Dietz Press: "Do you really have an author named Pocahontas Wight Edmunds?" Before the printer's ink was dry a reporter rushed in to tell him that his grandmother had that name. I hastened to write that my great-grandmother was named Pocahontas as was my mother, my niece and several cousins. Besides we had two Matoacas in our family and all of us are descendants in two lines, since first cousins married about a century ago. The name of the present first lady of Virginia is Anne Pocahontas Stanley, and Pocahontas was that of her mother. If ships, hotels, camps, counties and commercial products appropriate the name, why not descendants? To be named "Pocahontas" is to borrow glory and to attract excitement as surely as dark flannel attracts lint. When I was five our family visited the Croatan settlement near Red Springs, North Carolina, and my father imprudently revealed the Indian names of his wife and daughter. Mother blushed and I bawled as the drunken crowd of Sunday afternoon clasped us to their bosoms so tenaciously that Father could scarcely extricate us from their clutches. Later in the week, Chief Locklear came calling in a golden, yellow surry with yellow fringe, bearing tribute of native scuppernong grapes. They were offered red and sweet, for red, sweet Pocahontas's sake rather than ours. I was usually given the Indian role in school plays. In 1923 I was asked to take the Pocahontas role in the mammoth Virginia pageant in Richmond. In 1925 the Fox News-Reel introduced me: "Descendant of Chief Powhatan Opens the Biggest Book in the World." This volume was Dr. Matthew Page Andrews's _Story of the South_, which had stood ten feet tall on the stage of the Strand Theater when I had played "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia" on my violin in front of the illustration of my ancestress.