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ii. powhatan’s daughter ‘‘Pocahuntus, a well-featured but wanton young girl . . . of the age of eleven or twelve years, get the boyes forth with her into the market place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning their heels upwards, whom she would followe, and wheele so herself, naked as she was, all the fort over.’’ powhatan’s daughter: In a letter to Otto Kahn, Crane says that Powhatan’s daughter, the legendary Pocahontas, is ‘‘the mythological nature-symbol chosen to represent the physical body of the continent, or the soil’’ (September 12, 1927). He adds that Pocahontas in this role resembles the Teutonic earth goddess Hertha. This use of the Native American as a means of ‘‘finding,’’ or rather creating, America is mirrored by other early-twentieth-century writers, including Crane’s friend the journalist and social philosopher Waldo Frank. In his The Rediscovery of America, Frank asserts that ‘‘Our root is in the red men, and our denial of this is a disease within us.’’ Crane’s conception of Pocahontas is close to that of Vachel Lindsay in the latter’s 1917 poem ‘‘Our Mother Pocahontas’’: John Rolfe is not our ancestor. We rise from out the soul of her Held in native wonderland, While the sun’s rays kissed her hand, In the springtime, In Virginia, Our Mother, Pocahontas. (ll. 1–7) Powhatan was the ruler of the Algonquin Indian tribe in Tidewater, Virginia. His chiefdom covered nearly all of eastern Virginia when Jamestown was founded in 1607. Pocahontas (1595–1617) was regarded as a peacemaker between the Native Americans and the English. Much of the narrative around her has been too embellished and mythologized to sort out fact from fiction with confidence. epigraph: Quoted from A Historie of Travaile into Virginia, by William Strachey, an English colonial historian and secretary for the Virginia Company who spent time in the colonies starting in 1610. According to R. W. B. Lewis, Crane took the quotation from Kay Boyle’s review of William Carlos Williams’s The American Grain, which quotes Strachey at length. It is doubtful whether Strachey ever saw Pocahontas. His description of her clearly mirrors the account of Captain John Smith, from whom Strachey may simply have lifted his portrait. Crane essentially borrowed a mythic record for his own mythic use. ...

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