Plain Paths and Dividing Lines

Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

Jessica Lauren Taylor

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780813949345
• eBook ISBN: 9780813949369
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay.

In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland's planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon's Rebellion.

Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Connections and Borders in the Chesapeake
• 1. The Moving People and Places of the Powhatan Chiefdom
• 2. Watching Carefully in the Bay, 1607–1614
• 3. New Borders, New Connections, New Fractures, 1615–1644
• 4. Sailors and Rumors in the Bay, 1622–1644
• 5. Trade, Property, and the Meaning of Algonquian Places, 1650–1660
• 6. Neighbors, Local Authority, and Local Violence, 1660–1666
• 7. Rebelling by the Bay, 1670–1680
• Epilogue: Native History at Dividing Lines
• Notes
• Index