Patuxent Erotic

The Patuxent were an Algonquian-speaking people of the western shore of Chesapeake Bay, living along the river that still carries their name in what is now southern Maryland, from before English contact until the late 1600s, when land loss and forced consolidation folded them into their neighbors. They did not vanish so much as merge: their descendants are counted among the Piscataway communities of Maryland today.

What put them on the early colonial map was a cluster of towns on the lower Patuxent River. John Smith sailed up it in 1608 and recorded three, Pawtuxunt, Acquintanacksuak and Mattapanient, reckoning about two hundred fighting men among them. He noted that they lived closer together than other bay peoples and called them the most civil hosts of his voyage. Each town answered to a werowance, a hereditary chief, and the group sat at the edge of the Piscataway paramount chiefdom on the Potomac, tied to it by language, kinship and alliance, though not clearly subject to it. Their speech belonged to the Eastern Algonquian branch, close to Piscataway and Nanticoke, and almost none of it was written down.

Life ran on the estuary's calendar. Women farmed corn, beans and squash in fields cleared by burning, men hunted deer and fished, and everyone worked the oyster bars and the spring fish runs. Houses were longhouses of bent saplings covered in bark or woven mats, and towns shifted as the soil tired. Religion centered on a creator and on lesser spirits that needed placating, with priests and healers holding real authority alongside the chiefs.

When Maryland's colonists arrived in 1634, the Patuxent chose accommodation. Their werowance Maquacomen gave the Jesuits land at Mattapany for a mission storehouse, and priests lived and preached along the river in the years that followed, winning some converts. Goodwill bought little. Tobacco planters spread up the river within a generation, free-ranging hogs and cattle wrecked unfenced cornfields, and disease thinned the towns. In 1651 the colony set aside a tract near the head of the Wicomico River for the Patuxent and several neighboring groups, a reservation in everything but name. After that the records mention them less and less, and by the century's end the survivors had been absorbed into the Choptico and Piscataway.

The name outlasted the polity. It is attached to a river, a naval air station, a federal wildlife refuge and a state park, which means most Marylanders say Patuxent regularly without knowing it once meant a people. The Piscataway tribes that Maryland formally recognized in 2012 carry that ancestry forward.