Watercolor, by English artist John White, Recreation of an Algonquian village
One of Martha & George Washington’s 5 outlying farms at Mount Vernon, Dogue Run Farm, shares the name of a local indigenous tribe. The Doeg or Dogue tribe of Virginia were part of the coastal Algonquian language group.
Dogue is the English spelling for the Doeg/Tauxenent people who lived in Virginia since ancestral times. The Doeg built in villages & settlements along the Potomac & Occoquan Rivers. As their lands were encroached upon by colonists to expand tobacco production, they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. Today Prince William Forest Park is a diverse natural & cultural area located near Washington, D.C. The park sits on is 15,000 acres of secondary growth forest managed by The National Park Service where the Doeg Peoples once flourished.
Today, there are 7 federally recognized tribes by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Pamunkey, Nansemond, & Monacan.
Native American Prehistory
(10,000 – 3,000 Years Ago)
The National Park Service tells us that thousands of years ago, Prince William Forest Park was part of the great forest that spanned most of eastern North American. Oak, hickory, chestnut, & other trees covered the hills. Under the trees, ancient Native Americans hunted, fished, camped, & traveled. In what archeologists call the Archaic period, between 10,000 & 3,000 years ago, Native Americans lived by hunting & gathering. They roamed the forests, marshes, & shores of the Potomac & other rivers searching for food & necessities. They did not stay long in one place but moved frequently. They traveled along or in small groups, but sometimes may have come together in gatherings of a few hundred people. We know Archaic people had a rich spiritual life as elaborate burials from this period have been found in some places, but it is hard to know what they believed about the world from the artifacts left behind.
In the Archaic period, Native Americans made tools of wood, bone, & stone, but in most places only stone tools survived the ravages of time. As such, spear points, knives, axes, & other stone tools are what tell us where Archaic peoples wandered & camped. Small stone flakes left behind from making tools are the most common artifacts found by archeologists. They were left by Native Americans wherever they camped. Small flakes of quarts & other stones are scattered across the ridge tops overlooking both branches of Quantico Creek. From these flakes we know that people camped on these ridges, & from their tools we can learn something about what they were doing on the site. Spear points tell us they were hunting large game, & we can sometimes tell if knives & other tools were used for scraping hides or cutting wood.
Where are the sites?
It is not difficult to find evidence of native Americans from the Archaic period in Prince William Forest Park. Professional archeologists can go to any level ridge top overlooking either branch of Quantico Creek, place a shovel in the soil, & most likely turn up small flakes of quarts & other stones. These stone flakes, which archeologists call debitage, are the discarded remnants of stone left by people making stone tools. People who relied on stone tools left them behind whenever they camped, & we can get a general idea of how a camping spot was used by Native Americans from the numbers of flakes we find. On most of the small Native American sites in the Park, archeologists have found only a few flakes. In a few places they have found many more pieces of debitage along with stone tools & other traces of Native Americans. These larger camps are mostly on the lower reaches of the streams, within an easy day’s walk of the Potomac River.
The Williams Branch Site
The Williams Branch site is one of a group of Archaic period sites on hills that surround a swampy floodplain along the South Fork Quantico Creek. These hills are strewn with evidence of ancient campsites. Archeologists found more than 4,500 artifacts during test excavations of the Williams Branch Site. Most of this material was flakes of quartz left by people making stone tools from cobbles; in all, 3,690 flakes were recovered. One part of the site must have been a quarry & stonecraft shop, where people collected quartz cobbles & made them into spear points & other tools. We also found cobbles broken by heat, known to archeologists as fire-cracked rock, showing us that fires were built in stone-lined hearths on the site. Several stone tools were found including spear points & scrapers. These spear points were manufactured between 4,500 & 500 BC.
The archeological work conducted at the Williams Branch Sites tells us that the site was not permanently occupied, but rather, it was a camping place. These types of sites are quite common. Follow almost any stream that flows into the Potomac up to where it forks, & if there is a suitable camping spot nearby, you will find sites similar to Williams Branch. Add to these large sites the thousands of smaller sites that dot the countryside, & you begin to understand that the hunter-gatherers of the Archaic period have left an enduring record of their presence all across the landscape. These Archaic period people did not invest a great deal into any single site; instead, they spread their activities throughout the woods, swamps, & waterways of their homeland. It is clear they returned often to certain favored locations, such as at the meeting places of major streams & rivers, near groves of nut-bearing trees, or stands of plants with medicinal roots & bark. Still other sites may be way stations along well-used trails. When all we find are flakes & a few stone tools, we can say very little about why people came to a particular spot, but the broad patters of these sites in the landscape provides us with important clues about how these people lived.
The Lands of Tsenacommacah
At the start of the seventeenth century, the Doeg people residing near today’s Prince William Forest Park lived on the northern fringes of Tsenacommacah, the Powhatan paramount chiefdom. The Powhatan chiefdom was one of the largest & most powerful tribal bodies encountered by European colonists in Virginia during the late 1500s & early 1600s. At its zenith, Powhatan paramountcy encompassed over thirty tribes & nearly 6,000 square miles (15,500 square kilometers), from the Nansemond River in southern Virginia to the Potomac River in the north.
Civilization on the Coastal Plain
In what became Virginia, Algonquian-speakers such as the Doeg lived in the coastal region from today’s Hampton Roads to the Potomac River. Monacan peoples, whose languages were Siouan, & the Patuxent, another Algonquian-speaking group, lived to the west & north of the Doeg. Relations between the Powhatan & Monacan were often hostile, but Powhatan relations with the Patuxent were generally friendly. Around 1600, between 14,000 & 25,000 people lived in eastern Virginia.
The Doeg (also written as Douge or Tauxenent) lived on the west bank of the Patawomeck (Potomac) River, in modern Fairfax & Prince William counties. A chief known as a weroance (male) or, more rarely, a weroansqua (female), meaning “commander,” governed Doeg tribes.
Doeg lands & people were remote to the Powhatan chiefdom, which was centered between the York & James rivers to the south. Its chief was Wahunsonacock, popularly known as Powhatan. He was mamanatowick (paramount chief) of nearly thirty vassal tribes. He did not directly govern most of these groups. Instead, tribes gave him various goods as tribute, & it is likely that for a brief time in the early 1600s, the Doeg provided such tributes. In 1624, Englishman John Smith recollected that tributes vassal tribes paid to Powhatan included “skinnes, beades, copper, pearle, deare, turkies, wild beasts, & corne.” As the Powhatan chiefdom collapsed, it lost the minimal power it held over its most distant tribes, which regained their autonomy.
Weroances inherited their status through their mothers. They had multiple roles in society as social & political leaders & accumulated greater personal wealth than most tribal members; they could afford to support several wives. Villages also had war-chiefs, responsible for leading warriors in battle. Councils of tribal leaders advised their weroance.
Life Near the Patawomeck
The Doeg used the area of today’s park for hunting expeditions, camping on the banks of the Quantico Creek. Villages were closer to large bodies of water such as the Potomac; a settlement with fifty buildings was large. Doeg diet reflected the seasons. The Doeg cultivated a variety of vegetables - including the staples of squash, maize, & beans - & foraged for nuts & berries in local forests. Agriculture was the responsibility of women; men hunted, fished, & gathered shellfish.
Homes & outbuildings were made of woven mats or bark attached to pole frames. A central opening in ceilings allowed smoke from cooking fires to escape. Fire was also an important agricultural tool; the Doeg used it to clear land, girdling trees & burning ground cover to prepare soil for planting. Everyone in a family had a role in the large wintertime hunts near the fall line. These hunts occurred far from villages to avoid depleting animals hunted during other times of the year.
Hunting also provided clothing, as most Doeg garments were made of deerskin. Women & men wore belted loincloths that reached the knee. Leather leggings & moccasins were worn during forest treks. Fur cloaks provided warmth in the depths of winter. Men kept their hair on the right of the head short to facilitate archery & for religious reasons, while women wore symbolic tattoos.
Religious beliefs differed slightly among the Powhatan tribes, but for all groups beliefs were intricately connected with daily life, especially medicine. Priests treated serious illnesses when other cures failed. Temples were mysterious buildings that also stored tribute & gifts; lay people did not enter them. The Powhatan were polytheists & believed in many gods, including Ahone, the beneficent creator of the world, & Okeus, a severe god who caused illness, crop loss, or other misfortunes if angered. John Smith wrote that “Blood, deare suet, & Tobacco” might be presented as offerings to the gods to give thanks or request assistance.
English & Powhatan Relations
The motives of the London Company merchants who sponsored Virginia’s colonization were primarily commercial, though they also believed their colonists would bring ‘civilization’ to the ‘wilderness.’ The English asserted that Virginia’s native peoples were childlike, requiring English governance to escape ‘heathenism’ & live ‘civilized’ lives. Like children, they would implicitly obey the English & their teachings. Europeans were not unknown to the natives; Spanish & French missions encountered coastal tribes from the 1500s. Moreover, native contacts with Europeans in other parts of the Americas affected Powhatan civilization even before the London Company launched its ships. Europe’s diseases travelled with its sailors, infecting indigenous Americans who then infected others in areas distant from European contact.
When colonists from the Susan Constant, Godspeed, & Discovery established the Jamestown settlement in May of 1607, the Powhatan treated them as potential trading partners, not expecting them to remain permanently. In subsequent years, as additional colonists arrived (and as poor planning by the colonists required them to purchase or commandeer food from the Powhatan), the relationship between the two peoples became increasingly antagonistic. While English trade goods & arms appealed to the Powhatan, English customs & faith did not. Few Powhatan wished to discard their customs & live as the colonists lived; they did not consider themselves uncivilized or heathens, or of lower social status than the English. Moreover, few colonists made significant efforts to understand Powhatan perspectives to their new neighbors, as multiculturalism was not an important value among the seventeenth-century English. There was little cross-cultural assimilation through marriage. John Rolfe’s 1614 marriage to the kidnapped - & already married - Matoaka (Pocahontas) was a highly unusual diplomatic union & an attempt at peacemaking.
In the summer of 1608, John Smith led an expedition up the Potomac & met the Doeg, who gave his party a friendly welcome. However, Virginia’s native residents soon realized that the English did not intend to leave & attacked Jamestown in 1610. European weapons repulsed the superior Powhatan numbers, presaging future conflicts. Even a 1622 Powhatan attack that killed nearly 25% of the colonists could not halt European immigration. Meanwhile, violence & disease drastically reduced the Powhatan population & the cohesiveness of the paramount chiefdom. It ceased to exist after the 1646 assassination of Opechancanough, Wahunsunacock’s brother, although the individual tribes of the chiefdom persevered.
The Legacy of the Doeg & Powhatan
The Doeg population of today’s Prince William County dropped rapidly during the 1600s. Powhatan populations to the south also fell precipitously due to intertribal wars, wars with the English colonists, & the introduction of European diseases, to which the native Virginians lacked defenses. During the 1660s, some Doeg relocated to Piscataway territories on the east bank of the Potomac; others moved south to the north bank of the Rappahannock. There they integrated with other groups & eventually lost their Doeg identity.
The sociopolitical power of the tribes of Virginia declined greatly in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries as the European population of the colony of Virginia grew. By the late 1660s, nearly 30,000 colonists lived within its borders.
The colonial government of Virginia signed treaties with several native tribes between the 1650s & 1670s. These treaties, the oldest valid pacts between a tribal government & a colony, established several reservations; while many Powhatan tribes lost their reservations, those for the Pamunkey & Mattaponi still exist & are among the oldest reservations in the United States.
Recent archaeological studies within the Park found campsites & areas near the Quantico Creek where the area’s native peoples crafted tools from stone outcroppings over thousands of years. These studies show that the relationship between people & the land in today’s Prince William Forest Park is an ancient & ongoing series of interactions that predates the great empires of Europe, the Americas, or Africa.
In the 1650s, as English colonists began to settle the Northern Neck frontier, then known as Chicacoan (Secocowon), some Doeg, Patawomeck & Rappahannock began moving into the region as well. They joined local tribes in disputing the settlers' claims to land & resources. In July 1666, the colonists declared war on them. By 1669, colonists had patented the land on the west of the Potomac as far north as My Lord's Island. By 1670, they had driven most of the Doeg out of the Virginia colony & into Maryland—apart from those living beside the Nanzatico/Portobago in Caroline County, Virginia.
Tensions between English colonists & the Doeg on the Northern Neck continued to grow. In July 1675, a Doeg raiding party crossed the Potomac & stole hogs from Thomas Mathew, in retaliation for his not paying them for trade goods. Mathew & other colonists pursued them to Maryland & killed a group of Doeg, as well as innocent Susquehannock. A Doeg war party retaliated by killing Mathew's son & two servants on his plantation.
A Virginian militia led by Nathaniel Bacon entered Maryland, attacked the Doeg & besieged the Susquehannock. This precipitated the general reaction against natives by the Virginia Colony that resulted in "Bacon's Rebellion". Following this conflict, the Doeg seem to have become allied with the Nanzatico tribe, who paid for the release of some Doeg jailed for killing livestock in early 1692. The Doeg maintained a presence near Nanzatico at "Doguetown" (around Milford in Caroline County) as late as 1720.
