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Chapter 2: Exploration and Early Settlements
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Explorations and Early Settlements An Unknown West For about one hundred and twenty-five years after English colonists landed at Jamestown, settlements in Virginia did not extend beyond the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. %rginians kept busy with the burdensome tasks of taming a wilderness and with transplanting and adapting essential political and social institutions. Culturally, they remained tied to England, and English demand for their tobacco and furs formed the economic underpinnings of their colony. In spiteof more immediateconcerns, seventeenth-centuryVirginianshad a deepcuriosityabout the unknown West. Someenvisionedthe discoveryof gold, silver, and other treasuressuch as the Spaniardshad found in Mexicoand Peru. Others, with an optimism born of erroneous concepts of North American geography, entertained hopes of following one of the interior waterways a few hundred miles to the South Sea, as they calledthe Pacific Ocean, and openinga shorterroute to China and the Indies. For some, the sheerjoy of adventure was enough to lure them into the depths of the great forests. Indian wars in 1622 and 1644, brought on by the relentless pressure of settlementsupon tribal lands, dashed dreamsof riches, discoveryof the elusive passage to the Pacific, and high adventure. Following appalling massacres of settlers in 1644, Virginia established forts at the falls of the James, Pamunkey, Chickahominy, and Appomattox rivers. Completed in 1646, they guarded the trails by which hostile Indians gained accessto exposed settlements.Each fort was erected by a contractor known as an undertaker, who received the fort property, sixhundred acres of landadjoiningit, and importanttax exemptionson the condition that he maintainten armed men there for three years to defend the frontiers. FurTradeandSeventeeth-CenturyExploration.The defenseposts built by the undertakers became key centers for the expansion of the fur trade in Virginia. In August 1650AbrahamWood, the builder of Fort Henry at the falls of the AppomattoxRiver, setout forthe westerncountryin the companyof three gentlemen,their servants,and an Indianguide. Wood's party passed through the land of the Occaneechi Indians, who had acted as middlemen in the fur trade, 12 West Virginia: A History and beyond the point where the Staunton and Dan rivers unite to form the Roanoke. Although remote tribes evinced some hostility, Wood foresaw possibilities for a profitable trade and placed orders in England for trading goods, including guns, powder, shot, hatchets, and kettles. Edward Bland, a member of the expedition, wrote an account entitled "The Discovery of New Brittaine," later published as a pamphlet in London. It aroused much interest, but unsettled political conditions in England precluded further advancement of the fur trade in the 1650s. The growth of the Virginia fur trade in the quarter of a century following the Stuart Restoration was part of a great territorial and commercial expansion that absorbed English energies. In three wars between 1652and 1674,England dealt the Dutch, her old commercial rival, staggering blows, and in a series of navigation acts, particularly those of 1660, 1663, and 1673, she moved the center of European commerce from Amsterdam to London. In 1664 she acquired New Netherland, which controlled the heart of the American fur country. Other evidence of the importance of furs in the British economy stemmed from the organization of the Hudson's Bay Company, the world's largest fur-trading corporation, in 1660. Spearheading the fur trade and western exploration in Virginia was Sir William Berkeley, who returned to the colony as governor in 1664, and several planter-traders, including Abraham Wood and William Byrd. Their interest in furs resulted in expeditions that later pointed the way toward West Virginia. When King Charles I1 denied him permission to lead an expedition into the Indian country, Berkeley engaged a young German, John Lederer, then in Virginia, to undertake three journeys into the backcountry. On the third of his expeditions, in 1670, Lederer followed the Rappahannock River to its headwaters , ascended the wooded slopes of the Blue Ridge, and from a point near Front Royal became the first white person of record to gaze upon the Shenandoah Valley. Lederer's accounts suffer from misconceptions and exaggerations, but they quickened interest in the fur trade and exploration. Of far greater importance to West Virginia history was the expedition dispatched from Fort Henry by Abraham Wood in the summer of 1671. Known for Thomas Batts, its leader, and Robert Fallam, who kept a journal of its progress, it proceeded to the junction of the Staunton and Dan rivers and continued westward until it reached a stream, which, unlike others of the Virginia Piedmont, flowed toward the west rather than into the...