"You may think of him as Pocahontas' husband, He was rather more than that and his seed still lives, And we would do well to fence the small plot of garden, Where, in hose and doublet, he planted the Indian weed."[1] For all of his practical ability, fate allowed him neither to take care of her nor of himself. He met violent death at the hands of her people, dying in her country just as she had gone first in his, for neither was able to survive an alien way of life. Although Smith adventured valiantly for God, and Rolfe persuaded himself that he had married the Indian maid to save her soul more than her heart, Pocahontas, the purer spirit, transcends both. The spirit of Pocahontas broods yet on her own side of the great salt waters. Her dust rests out of place at St. George's Church on the Thames, even if it is named the "Chapel of Unity" for all faiths, because of her peaceable heart. "Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a paw-paw in May ..." mused the poet Carl Sandburg. "Did she wonder? Does she remember ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?"[2] She lives, believed the poet Vachel Lindsay, in the waving corn, and in her spiritual descendants, the American people. She lives still in the blood of some Americans, but for longer in her poignant tale, whose true red hue has not paled through the years. _Historical Background_ The story of the rescue of America's prime folk-hero, John Smith, by Pocahontas, America's most appealing heroine, fills such a patriotic need that it would have been fabricated had it been untrue. It passed for sure history for two hundred and thirty-six years, except for the feeble denial of Thomas Fuller in his _Worthies of England_.[1] Smith held his own word to be the first and last about history and himself. Yet now the howling squabble over his merits, never hushed in his time, flairs again after three centuries. In 1860 Charles Deane of Massachusetts asked why Smith had concealed the story for sixteen years.[2] Henry Adams, while he bowed to Pocahontas as the most romantic figure in American history, and as the visiting celebrity of 1616 in England, stepped up to Deane's standard,[3] as did William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay,[4] and the Southern scholar, Alexander Brown.[5]