The Indians of Ashburn

Sometimes, traveling along Ashburn's carefully tended parkways, I try to imagine how this area might have looked 400 years ago, before the Europeans arrived. The land must have been, as now, partly wooded, with a gentle topography and abundant water, a mild climate, and plenty of wildlife. It must have provided an abundant good life for those early natives. Seventeenth century woodcarvings show that they lived in villages with log houses, raised corn and tobacco, and in the winters went into the western hills to fish and hunt game.

The historical record is ambiguous about exactly who they were. One tribe mentioned in the old documents is the Patowmacks, who, one account says, were “a sub-tribe within the Powhattan confederacy.” But Chief Powhattan – real name Wahunsenacawh – ruled mostly to the south and west. In fact, it seems our locals took his daughter Pocahontas prisoner when she came here to collect tribute, and sold her to the English. She rapidly embraced English ways, converted to Christianity, became known as Rebecca, married John Rolfe, and actually lived her last years in England. It must also be said, too, that John Smith, whom she supposedly saved from a head-smashing execution, was a notable storyteller who once claimed that his life was saved by another maiden in Ohio.

In any case, the Patowmacks were evidently a successful Algonquian-speaking people who were quite capable of fending off both the Sioux to the south and west and the migrant Iroquois passing through.

But where are those Indians now, and what are their relics?

The tale, as are so many in American Indian history, is a sad one. In 1722, advancing settlers may have found the local Indians troubling, so a treaty was signed in Albany, NY, of all places, in which the great tribes of the East Coast agreed to stop trading with the French and, among other matters, “not to pass over the great River of Patawmack, nor the Ridge of High Mountains that surround Virginia”; in other words, to get out of Loudoun County.

Another treaty, signed in Lancaster, PA, about twenty years later, made simply being Indian a capital offense in these parts: “We must now tell you what Mountains we mean that we say are the Boundaries between you and us. You may remember, that about twenty Years ago you had a Treaty with us at Albany, when you took a Belt of Wampum, and made a Fence with it on the Middle of the Hill, and told us, that if any of the Warriors of the Six Nations came on your Side of the Middle of the Hill, you would hang them; and you gave us Liberty to do the same with any of your People who should be found on our Side of the Middle of the Hill.”

So our local Indians moved west into the Blue Ridge Mountains almost three hundred years ago. All we have left are a few names: Potomac itself, which in Algonquian means “great trading place,” Catoctin, Sycolin, Tuscarora. Algonquian has become Algonkian. Goose Creek, by the way, was called “Cahongarooton,” which in Algonquian, means, naturally, “Goose Creek.”

From the high control tower at the Air and Space Museum at Dulles you can look north past rolling hills and almost glimpse the great river beyond. It is beautiful country, varied, peaceful, rich. On a hazy morning, it's good to imagine little villages with smoke rising, children playing in the compound, women gossiping in the sun. It has been too long, I think, since any scene like that was a reality here.