Nacotchtank Erotic

The Nacotchtank were an Algonquian-speaking people who lived along the lower Anacostia River, in and around what is now Washington, D.C., until the late 1600s. By then violence, disease and English settlement had pushed their survivors to join the neighboring Piscataway. A town and its location set them apart. Their main village stood on the east bank of the Anacostia near where it meets the Potomac, just below the Potomac's fall line, and John Smith put it on his map after sailing up the Potomac in 1608. The name is usually translated as something like town of traders, and the site fit the name: goods moving between the Chesapeake Bay and the interior passed close by, and English traders soon learned that furs and corn could be had there.

Daily life followed the pattern of the Chesapeake Algonquians. They grew maize, beans and squash, fished the spring runs of shad and herring, gathered shellfish and hunted the surrounding woods. Very little of their language was written down, but it was probably a dialect of Piscataway, one of the Eastern Algonquian languages spoken along the Atlantic coast. Politically they seem to have answered to the Piscataway paramount chief, the tayac, and they had to watch for Iroquoian-speaking raiders from the north. Their religious life went mostly unrecorded. The Englishmen who met them cared more about trade than belief.

Contact turned violent quickly. In 1623 a Virginia trading party led by Henry Spelman was attacked at the Nacotchtank town. Spelman was killed and Henry Fleet was taken captive. Fleet lived among his captors for several years and learned their language. After his release he worked as an interpreter and fur trader on the Potomac, and his journal is one of the few firsthand accounts of the river from that time. After Maryland was founded in 1634, English settlement moved steadily upriver, and colonial writers, Jesuit missionaries among them, wrote the name as Anacostan.

By the end of the seventeenth century the Nacotchtank no longer appear in the records as a separate people. Most of their survivors are thought to have joined the Piscataway, who were in turn forced out of their Maryland towns. Many Piscataway moved up the Potomac and later north to Pennsylvania, while other families stayed in southern Maryland. Descendants of those who stayed make up today's Piscataway communities, which the state of Maryland recognized in 2012. The clearest trace of the Nacotchtank is on the map: the Anacostia River and the Anacostia neighborhood of Southeast Washington both carry an English form of the old trading town's name.