American Indian Villages and Captain John Smith

On June 16, 1608, Captain John Smith and fourteen other men from the Jamestown colony entered the Potomac River in a two-ton open barge searching for a glistering metal that native people said came from Patowmeck, and they explored upriver as far as the Great Falls. Along the way, Smith recorded many American Indian villages and later included them on his Map of Virginia. The first three villages below the falls on the right bank of the Potomac stood on lands now part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Their names, as Smith heard them and spelled them in Elizabethan English, were Namoraughquend, Assaomeck, and Namassingakent, and translated from Eastern Algonquian into English they mean "fishing place," "middle fishing place," and "fish - plenty of." The village of "fishing place" was probably between present-day Theodore Roosevelt Island and the Pentagon. From late winter through August, anadromous fish such as herring and sturgeon swam upriver to the falls to spawn in fresh water. Because Smith first observed these three villages in late June, after native peoples had planted their crops, they were very likely seasonal fishing camps rather than more-permanent agricultural towns. Smith's Map of Virginia, first published in 1612, became one of the best known maps of colonial America, identified these three seasonal fishing camps, marked the Great Falls as the farthest limit of his exploration with a Tuscan cross, and oriented "up" to the west rather than north, reflecting the seventeenth-century practice of drawing maps from the perspective of a sailor approaching land from the sea.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States