Sign up for Genealogy Pointers »

In the wake of the Walt Disney animated feature about the legendary Indian heroine, this little book will satisfy the curiosity of those, young and old, who wish to separate fact from fantasy.

Mr. Brown, the author of three volumes on the descendants of Pocahontas, has here assembled all that is known about the famous Powhatan Indian princess who reputedly saved the life of Captain John Smith, the leader of the Jamestown expedition. Diminutive in size, the book transports the reader back to 17th-century Virginia by weaving the quotations of people who knew the Indian maiden with reproductions of more than a dozen contemporary etchings, drawings, or maps. In this way, we are able to appreciate the romantic legend we first heard in grade school while, at the same time, being reasonably confident that we know all that can be known about actual incidents of the story.

Thus, we learn that it was while on a hunting expedition up the Chickahominy that Captain Smith was captured by an Indian hunting party, that Pocahontas (whose real name was Matoaka) was one of many daughters sired by her father Chief Powhatan, that it was Pocahontas who warned the colonists about a planned raid upon the Jamestown settlement and who was herself abducted by the settlers and used as a bargaining chip to thwart yet another attack, that it was Pocahontas who married John Rolfe in 1614 and returned with him to England, that Pocahontas bore Rolfe a son, Thomas, in late 1614 or early 1615, that John Smith visited Pocahontas in 1616 or 1617, prior to her death in March of 1617, and that her son, Thomas Rolfe, returned to Virginia in 1635, where he married for a second time and sired a daughter Jane, who, in 1675, married Colonel Robert Bolling, producing numerous and prominent descendants.

This is the unembellished Pocahontas story, the only story that can possibly be developed from historical fact. It is clearly not Disney.