Pocahontas for President

   Friday greetings from Chairman Joe.

   On this day in 1614, the Native American woman Pocahontas married the Englishman John Rolfe. She was 17 years old.  Pocahontas is mostly famous for saving the life of the English adventurer John Smith. This saving of Smith may have been a misunderstanding on Smith's part. According to some historians, Chief Powhatan may only have been pretending to kill Smith as part of an adoption ritual. Someone would intervene, the prisoner would be freed and then adopted into the tribe.
     Powhaten may have adopted Smith so he could better control Smith and his fellow colonists. Smith records in his history that Pocahontas, who was 11 at the time, was the one who intervened on his behalf. Smith and Pocahontas remained friends and she used her influence to bring food to the starving colonists.
   After Smith retuned to England, war broke out between the Indians and the English. Using trickery, the English captured Pocahontas and held her to ransom English captives and weapons. During the lengthy negotiations she stayed with an Anglican minister who baptized her and gave her the name Rebecca. Soon after, she met and fell in love with Rolfe who ran a tobacco platation. Some people thought the marriage was wrong because she was a princess and he was a commoner. Others said that just because her father was paramount chief over an alliance of thirty Virginia tribes, that didn't make her any more royalty than say a U.S. president's daughter.
   The year after their marriage, their son Thomas was born. The colony at Jamestown was a commercial venture and relied for support on the patronage of the king back in England and for investments from the aristocracy. The Virgina Company brought the Rolfe family to England to show that the Indians could be civilized and Christianized. In fact the marriage between Rolfe and Pocahontas had brought an end to the wars in Virginia, at least for a few years.
   Pocahontas arrived in England with a dozen fellow Indians. They met King James I at a banquet, but the king was so old shoe, they didn't realize he was the king till after the event. Smith had written to the queen pushing the princess angle and Pocahontas was treated as royalty by some, while to others, she was a mere curiosity.
   Pocahontas and Rolfe remained in London for about a year. In March of 1617, the family boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but Pocahontas fell sick before they reached the sea. She was taken ashore and died from smallpox, tuberculosis, or pneumonia. She was 21. Husband John and son Thomas remained in England until Thomas returned to Virginia at age 21.  He married an English woman there and acquired land and a position in the militia. He remained in contact  with his Indian relations.
   Many Americans claim descent from Pocahontas through Thomas. Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Boiling is one. She pretty much was acting president for a year and a half after Wilson's stroke at the end of his presidency. Another descendant is Jeanne Shaheen, former governor and U.S. Senator from New Hampshire. Shaheen was on Al Gore's short list for vice-president, but said she didn't want the job.

First Native American on a postage stamp, 1907.