POCAHONTAS (1595-1617), daughter of the Indian chief, Powhatan, is the heroine of one of the best-known traditions con nected with the beginnings of American history. The story is that Capt. John Smith, as head of a band of soldiers in search of food and exploring the Chickahominy river, was waylaid by Indians and taken prisoner by their chief, Powhatan. Smith had been forced to kneel down while his head was laid on a stone preparatory to having his brains crushed out with heavy clubs, when Pocahontas, a young daughter of the chief, sprang forward, seized his head in her arms, and saved his life. She is supposed to have come again to his aid a year later by revealing a plot made against Smith by her father. All this is said to have hap pened in connection with the expedition under Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold and others, who landed in Chesapeake Bay in 1607, ex plored the James river, and formed a settlement. Owing to the fact, however, that no mention of this experience is made in the minute personal narrative covering this period, written by Capt.
Smith at the time of the supposed occurrence and published im mediately thereafter, nor in the recollections of his comrades who usually gave him full credit for any of his exploits, doubts have arisen as to the authenticity of the tale. The first story
concerning Pocahontas appears in the Generall Historie, first pub lished in 1624, after she had been made much of in England as the attractive daughter of an emperor and the first convert of her tribe to Christianity, and it is to be feared that the temptation to bring her on the stage as heroine in a new character in con nection with Smith, ever the hero of his own chronicles, was more than he or the publishers of the Generall Historie could with stand. Among the many prominent Virginia families who trace their ancestry to the son of Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe, are the Bollings (Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt married Presi dent Woodrow Wilson in 1915), the Guys, the Robertsons, the Elbridges, and the John Randolphs. (See Lincoln Library of Facts and American Antiquarian Society Trans., vol. iv., p. 4o.)