For native peoples, the Chesapeake Bay was a source of sustenance, a transportation lifeline, and a home.
Traditional lifestyles revolved around the Bay’s natural resources. The waters teemed with life, the tall forests sheltered an immense variety of animals, birds, and plant, and the soil was rich and fertile. The beauty and bounty of the Bay made it an attractive place to live in the early 1600s, just as it does today.
Life changed with the seasons. Most of the year, the native people lived in towns or villages along the water’s edge. But twice a year, in spring and fall, they left these communities for hunting and fishing camps to enjoy the wild foods of the season.
The Indians moved their towns up and down the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay with regularity. Every few years, as old fields became depleted of nutrients, they would clear farmland. When the new fields were located a distance away from their houses, they would build new homes and over time, the whole town would move.
An ideal town site was on a waterway with a landing place for canoe launching, large stands of reeds for mats, plants for food, and good quality, level farmland. Streams or forest springs provided drinking water.
The locations of Indian towns recorded on Captain John Smith’s 1612 map represent a snapshot in time but not a permanent record of American Indian habitations. See maps of American Indian towns along the major rivers of the Bay.
The Bay’s waterways were used for fishing but also for transportation, migration, communications, and trade. In a land without roads, waterways were the fastest and easiest way to get around.
The Indians of the Chesapeake relied on large dugout canoes as their main form of transport. They felled huge cypress and Atlantic white cedar trees and hollowed them out by burning patches and scraping out the wood. A finished canoe could carry 10 or more people and their baggage from place to place.
The native people of the Chesapeake relied heavily on the canoe as their primary means of transportation. The most common canoe was the dugout, made from the trunk of a large, straight tree. These canoes could be quite large, up to 45 ft. long and 3 ft. deep, and could carry up to 40 people. They were not very maneuverable, and paddling them was very hard work, but they were highly valued by the Indians both because of their usefulness and the difficulty of their manufacture.
Once a good tree was located, it would be felled by burning a fire at its base and chopping with stone axes, then floated back home. The log was shaped by building small fires on its surface and then scraping away the charred wood with oyster shells. Mud was packed on the edges of the log to limit the extent of the burning. This laborious process of burning and scraping would be repeated until the trunk was hollowed out and the bottom flattened to make the canoe stable in the water.
Birch-bark canoes were sometimes seen on the Chesapeake in the hands of the Massawomeck, who lived farther north where the bark needed for canoe making was available. These canoes were faster and more maneuverable than the dugouts and were used by the Massawomeck to conduct very effective raids that were greatly feared by the Chesapeake people.
Did You Know?
Natives of the Chesapeake tracked time and seasons. Passing years were counted by the number of winters, or cohonks—the sound of migrating geese flying overhead.
Learn More about American Indians and the Chesapeake Bay