American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1628 Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation expressed his fear and outrage that local Indians were equipped with European muskets. "O, the horribleness of this villainy!" he wrote. "How many both Dutch and English have been lately slain by ... these barbarous savages thus armed with their own weapons." With powder, bullet-molds, and even replacement parts for their firearms, the Indians were, according to Bradford, "ordinarily better fitted and furnished than the English themselves." The militant first decades of seventeenth-century English America produced well-armed Indian forces among the Algonquians of coastal New England and the Iroquois further west, but a similar, if less well-known, phenomenon occurred in tidewater Virginia. Much sooner than most early American scholars have realized, the Powhatans desired, acquired, and used firearms-with lethal effect-against the English invaders of the James River basin. While Geronimo's Apache riflemen of the late 1805 have been recognized as the epitome of heavily-armed Indian warriors, few persons would associate the Native Americans' quest for equality in weaponry with the early Jamestown years. But in fact, no sooner had the English invaded the fertile lowlands of tidewater Virginia than the Powhatans adopted new technology and tactics and entered into a deadly arms race for cultural survival and territorial sovereignty.