were poisoned and then the Jamestowners killed “some 50 more” and
“brought home part of their heads”—that is, scalps.
To ensure the extirpation of the natives, the governor declared a white-
only zone in a triangle formed by the York and James rivers and the
Virginia fall line. Indians could enter this zone only by official permission.
Two years later, each settler was ordered not to talk to or trade with the
Indians without special permission. Twenty years later, after the second
war between whites and Indians, Virginia ruled that no Indians could enter
its white-only zone “upon paine of death.” If any unauthorized Indian wan-
dered in, it was lawful “for any person to kill” him. Also, it was a capital
offense for any colonist to entertain or conceal an Indian.
To keep the Indians under observation, Virginia adopted the system then
being used by the British in Ireland: reservations on which Indians would be
confined. Reservations would typify whites’ policy regarding Indians for the
next four centuries. But, since powerful groups still remained outside the reser-
vations, warfare continued. When they could, the Indians resisted. When they
could not, they retreated. As the Powhatan told the resident secretary of the
Virginia Company, Ralph Hamor, “I am now olde, and would gladly end my
daies in peace, so as if the English offer me injury, my country is large enough, I
will remove my selfe farther from you.” To retreat beyond the next hill, moun-
tain, or river seemed a hopeful strategy: the Indians thought that surely the
whites would finally get enough land and be satiated. Well into the eighteenth
century, Indian societies tried to buy peace with land. But of course that strategy
did not work. Ship after ship arrived with colonists hungry for land. So, begin-
ning in Jamestown shortly after the colonists arrived, war after dreadful war
punctuated the calendar of early American history. Indians, driven to the wall,
tried to fight for their land; the colonists retaliated in growing fury.
When the whites realized that they could not fight the Indians on their
own terrain, the forests, they adopted the practice of annihilation: they
would starve the Indians by burning their corn fields, carrying away or
destroying their stored grain, preventing them from fishing in the rivers,
burning down their villages and driving away or massacring their women
and children. These tactics, already begun in Jamestown as early as 1610,
soon spread to other colonies and became standard in the long series of
confrontations that followed.
Whites, Indians, and Land 197