{"id":206,"date":"2016-04-21T15:39:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T19:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/?p=206"},"modified":"2019-04-26T14:59:04","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T18:59:04","slug":"exploitation-and-destruction-a-brief-history-of-the-james","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/2016\/04\/21\/exploitation-and-destruction-a-brief-history-of-the-james\/","title":{"rendered":"EXPLOITATION AND DESTRUCTION: A Brief History of the James"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An<\/a>

An artist’s depiction of the Indian Massacre of 1622<\/a> on Jamestown Island, Virginia. Source: Brown University\/John Carter Brown Library.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

By Hunter Ross<\/p>\n

SPEND A FEW HOURS walking the banks of the James River, as I recently have, and you will easily see the degradation humans have caused. Local college students nonchalantly throw their empties onto the banks, cigarette butts are strewn\u00a0over\u00a0rocks, and the water is noticeably polluted in many places. This pattern of disrespecting the river is not a novel phenomenon; it began centuries ago.<\/p>\n

While there have been many cleanup efforts on the James River in past decades, the pattern of\u00a0exploitation goes further back in history than most realize, beginning with the Native American\u00a0tribes of modern-day Virginia in the late 1500s.<\/p>\n

Native Americans\u00a0used the river for transportation, paddling upstream from the Chesapeake Bay west to the rapids at Richmond and beyond. They depended\u00a0on massive amounts of migratory fish that used the river\u00a0as a hatching site; they harvested and planted the seeds brought to the banks by floods, and they\u00a0grew tobacco along the river.\u00a0Although\u00a0the Indians\u00a0exploited\u00a0the river, they had\u00a0a great respect for\u00a0it\u00a0and its\u00a0place in the\u00a0natural\u00a0order. Most tribes followed the modern-day rule of \u201cleave no\u00a0trace,\u201d as\u00a0the scant\u00a0archeological\u00a0evidence of\u00a0habitation amounted to\u00a0a few arrowheads and\u00a0buried fish carcasses.<\/p>\n

Tribes only assigned the river to describe particular places, for doing\u00a0anything more\u00a0would imply\u00a0ownership\u2014something that was contradictory to the relationship between humans and nature,\u00a0said\u00a0Ann Woodlief, a\u00a0James River historian at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of “Heritage of the James.”<\/p>\n

\u201cThe river could not be possessed or tamed, but instead lived with, respected, and held in\u00a0stewardship for future generations,\u201d Woodlief said. They\u00a0regarded\u00a0the river so highly that many performed religious rituals in honor of the flowing\u00a0masterpiece. One tribe, regardless of tidal\u00a0conditions, would bathe as a group in the river at\u00a0sunrise and sunset each day,\u00a0casting tobacco leaves\u00a0over\u00a0its waters.<\/p>\n

Then, in 1607, English settlers arrived and changed the fate of the James forever. A mere three\u00a0ships created the settlement of Jamestown, and saw the river as\u00a0a\u00a0way\u00a0to become\u00a0extremely rich, Woodlief said.<\/p>\n

First, the long tradition of the unnamed river was broken in honor of the English\u00a0monarch, James I<\/a> (1566-1625), as the colonists\u00a0\u201cwasted no time in naming the river and claiming it for their king,\u201d Woodlief said.\u00a0Jamestown\u00a0settlers saw the large populations of sturgeon and oysters, both of which are struggling on the\u00a0James today, as cash cows. This endeavor eventually failed:\u00a0The fish were impossible to keep\u00a0fresh on the voyage to England, and the rudimentary fishing techniques made it very difficult to\u00a0catch the fish.<\/p>\n

From 1607 to 1624 the settlers remained on Jamestown\u00a0Island when tides\u00a0were\u00a0low and\u00a0the James, a source of fresh water,\u00a0became salty and acidic. Native American populations recognized the danger and\u00a0moved away from the river.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn\u00a0summer,\u00a0the\u00a0water was low and the salt zone moved up to Jamestown,”\u00a0Woodlief said. “White\u00a0men had to drink from the water that was salty when the tide was in\u2014and slimy and turgid,\u00a0full of\u00a0sewage, when the tide was out. They\u00a0became ill and died, very likely from typhoid and\u00a0salt poisoning more than malaria.\u201d<\/p>\n

The settlers eventually used the river as a passageway\u00a0to deliver goods and services to\u00a0upriver\u00a0plantations on its tributaries, while also recognizing the river\u2019s\u00a0value for shipping\u00a0goods out of the west on\u00a0their\u00a0way to Europe.\u00a0George Washington\u00a0even\u00a0attempted to\u00a0build\u00a0a canal\u00a0connecting\u00a0the river to states as far\u00a0west as Ohio, a\u00a0project\u00a0that eventually failed.\u00a0Yet a\u00a0pattern of exploitation was set.<\/p>\n

In 1781,\u00a0in an attempt to destroy Colonial munitions during the Revolutionary War,\u00a0British\u00a0forces dumped more than five tons of gunpowder into\u00a0the James, pressing the river into military service. It later became an important battleground in the Civil\u00a0War,\u00a0and was the route that Union armies used to advance on Richmond, the Confederate capital, which fell in 1865.\u00a0Dynamite was produced\u00a0in factories\u00a0on the\u00a0James\u00a0in the\u00a020th\u00a0century, and fuel rockets\u00a0for NASA\u00a0were produced\u00a0here\u00a0in the 1950\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Walking along\u00a0the river today, with all\u00a0its\u00a0pollution, struggling wildlife populations, waste, litter and\u00a0cleanup efforts, it is easy to see\u00a0what\u00a0history\u00a0has contributed\u00a0our current situation.\u00a0The Indians\u00a0used the river, yet caused little damage.\u00a0When the\u00a0British arrived in the 1600s, their\u00a0river,\u00a0\u201cThe James,\u201d\u00a0became a\u00a0means to make money.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey saw the land and its river as a wilderness which must be conquered,” Woodlief said\u2014”an\u00a0unlimited supply\u00a0of resources to send back to England for profit.\u201d<\/p>\n

By Hunter Ross<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Hunter Ross SPEND A FEW HOURS walking the banks of the James River, as I recently have, and you will easily see the degradation humans have caused. Local college students nonchalantly throw their empties onto the banks, cigarette butts are strewn\u00a0over\u00a0rocks, and the water is noticeably polluted in many places. This pattern of disrespecting Read more about EXPLOITATION AND DESTRUCTION: A Brief History of the James<\/span>[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2934,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[51870],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-river-city"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7o53H-3k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2934"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}