lves' heads brought in by the Indians, the King or great man of
the Indians should have a cow delivered to him at the public charge.
"This will be a step to civilizing them and to making them Christians,"
the act went on; "besides it will certainly make the comanding Indians
watch over their own men that they do us no injuries, knowing that by
theire default they may be in danger of losing their estates." The
Assembly also attempted to make the lands possessed by the Indians under
the seal of the colony inalienable to the English. Otherwise, constant
pressure on the Indians by the settlers would force them over and over
again to dispose of their lands.

Many people fail to realize that the Indians of Virginia lived in
well-defined towns or settlements. It was, indeed, the Indians who lived
an "urban" life in the seventeenth century while the English settlers
were usually scattered about the countryside. The conventional picture
of the Indian roaming the forests, living solely by hunting and fishing,
is mistaken. The Indian did hunt and fish, as many of us do today. But
his support came in large measure from the corn and vegetables growing
in the fields which adjoined every Indian town. The Indians had a
close-knit and harmonious community life. They were only indirectly
touched by the white man's money economy and were usually content to
raise only what food they needed for their own consumption. They were
not infected with the restless, individualistic spirit of the white
settler who constantly worked to accumulate a monetary surplus from the
returns on his single cash crop, tobacco.

Like later attempts to destroy the group-centered society of the Indians
in favor of a self-centered society, this attempt of 1656 was not
completely successful.

INDIAN TROUBLES, 1656-1658

Early in 1656 word was received that six or seven hundred strange
Indians from the mountains had come down and seated themselves near the
falls of the James. The March Assembly, considering how much blood it
had cost to "expell and extirpate those perfidious and treacherous
Indians which were there formerly," and considering how the area lay
within the limits "which in a just warr were formerly conquered by us,"
ordered the two upper counties under Col. Edward Hill to send 100 men to
remove the intruders peacefully, making war only in self-defense.
Messages were sent to obtain the aid of the Pamunkeys, Chickahominies,
and other neighboring India