but you have to what they look like at various seasons, as the women and the girls travelled about. you're always looking at where things -- i watch for indian hemp plants myself. they grow on the farm where i live and i'm always watching to see where they are this year, where they might be next year. but you also want to know exactly when is the best time to go get them. and i'm learning the hard way about indian hemp. you want to get it during hurricane season. the latter part of the hurricane season is best. learn where they grow, learn the season to use them in. and then how you actually prepare them is something else you've got to do. and i'm no good at making string yet. but stream valleys made up tribal territories for the obvious reason. everything in the valley, including the marshes, was useful. in a marsh like this, this is part of jamestown island, it is not a fully fresh water marsh. it's got a little too much salt in it. but look at those reeds.

if you're going to use reeds to make mats and mats to make houses, you're going to wind up going into those marshes. lucky though it is. so you want all sorts of things. all eco zones got used for something. the eco zone with the least use, ironically, back then was beaches. you can't get food on them. but you can put off a canoe from them if you have to, and it's usually around beaches or even little pocket beaches that you start your fence out, your hedging, to make a fish trap in the estuaries. so you use beach for traveling through, if nothing else. but marshes are useful. english didn't understand this. ironically, in parts of england, of course, they were, and they still do raise exactly that species, fragmentmitis for that muching houses.

but the settlers here wering this can't sell any reeds. definitely swaps. swaps were extremely useful. the english were going to call them deserts. to the indians, this is where you might find a bread basket. there are higher grounds that will have trees, including oaks, which will have acorns, which in turn will attract some deer. and in the waters themselves, you can see a turtle in there. i think it's actually a marsh plant, but i'm going to call it a turtle. this is where you want to eat terrapin for supper. it's exactly where you go. you go to a swamp. this is a major reason why swamps became refuge areas for indians. there are often high enough grounds, just high enough within them hammocks, where you can clear some trees and actually do a little farming. it's why indian refugee communities oftentimes wound up there after the whites had taken all of their water front land. you go to a swamp. and white is not going to want the swamp. and until he learns to drain it,

you're safe. parting shots. parting shots. this kind of use of all ecological zones, largely from necessity, aided by great ingenuity and wonderful memories, no ipods, no computers to help, this kind of thing meant certain things for indian life, which the english very, very often misunderstood. all mothers were working mothers. they all had to go out of the town to get the stuff they were supposed to come back and process. daddy did not gather reeds in the marshes. daddy did not dig tuckahoe. daddy had other things he was supposed to be doing. so the women and girls were coming and going all of the time. and the house-building was apparently women's work. the saplings had to be gotten. you had to go where you got the right species of tree, ironwood is one of the best. and as you got to go out and get

a lot of them, so you're going to be out in the woods quite a while. and then you've got to hump them back, giddyup, ma. and as for the reeds for the mats -- and the women would have to go out in the marshes for that by canoe. canoes were not for toys for overgrown boys. both sexes had to use canoes. and that brings me to the next thing. canoes were the family station wagons and u-haul trucks. both sexes had to know how to use them. and using one was something you always had to do with other people, because the blasted things were so heavy. dugout -- log dugouts canoes were used all through virginia, up in the mountains, too. and it took at least four people to move a good-sized one, if it was one that was really something like 50 feet long, you wanted at least eight people paddling. i've done a small canoe with only two and it was blue murder. absolutely murder. also, the waterways, which

became the highways for indians, would remain the highways for the invaders from the old world who were all accustoms ed to using boats, as well. and that obtained until a lot of the country roads were paved in the 1930s. so that was a matter of continuity of attitude. but as for how you use eco zones, i need to stick to the subject. another thing it meant was that the two sexes didn't look alike. the men on the average were taller than the women by about 4 inches. average indian height in prehistoric times, late woodland times seems to be 5'7", 5'3" for english. the women averaged 5'2" but they believe probably built like piano movers. digging tuckahoe will make you that way. and that is a very mild form, as we found out later, of a way you dig tuckahoe.

if you're really going to dig enough to feed a family, you're going to sit down at the plant with several other people, multiple people, and you are going to pry at the thing with pry bars and you're going to get filthy. this is just after a tuckahoe digging expedition. and you can see the tubers in the bucket there. i never found a woman who was willing to undertake it. i didn't for long. i pleaded increasing old age and found some grunts. and they said they hurt for a long time thereafter. okay? very hard work. women's work. yeah. the women would be built like piano movers. the men -- i've told this in the lecture, the men who did so much literal running -- you don't always bring down a deer with the first arrow. you've got to chase the sucker down. and when you are going to war or more effectively coming back with somebody trailing you, you're going to be running. the men tended to be built like cross-country runners.

they were not built like gym rats. or football players or weight lifters. they had to do a lot of long distance endurance running. because of tuckahoe, this is what the inside of a tuber looks like. and because eric's hands were so roughened from use, he was the -- the head honcho in the indian village at jamestown settlement in those years, he didn't feel it at all. when i touched that thing, any part of it, my hands burned, terrible stuff. takes a lot of processing. but the thing is, you're able to get it year-round. and you memorize where it is when the leaves are up. you can spot where it has been, even during the wintertime. this is a tuckahoe bed in halfway creek. i took it illegally from the colonial parkway bridge without getting caught. in the winter. anything for science.

but there's all kinds of riches of food down there, if you know how to prepare the tubers once you get them. that meant in turn, historians take note, that anybody with this kind of resources in the bread basket marshes was going to be impossible to starve out. so when i read accounts from late 1622 that the colonists are starving and so are the indians, i don't believe that last part. they could still gather tuckahoe, and they could live very nicely, thank you. and when spring came, the english better look out. because of that also and they're knowledge of how to use swamps and the upper parts of rivers that the english mainly did not want, you can get quite a lot of survival of indian dissended communities. it actually shows up best on the maryland eastern shore which is why i use this map. i haven't worked it out fully in virginia to my own satisfaction, because a lot of the people would no longer bear tribal names and there are enclaves all

over eastern virginia. but you can see where the reservations were allowed by maryland to survive. the people were surviving, and they were still mostly waterfront. quite a few of them were living well up those rivers. and they had access -- not so much to meandering rivers, but swamps, especially 1678 to post 1746, you've got to live in the swamp to survive there. there's not much tuckahoe, even now. i checked with the guy who has canoed all over it, and he knows his plants. phd bottom annie, he better. and some of their descendents are not far away. i've been in e-mail communication with one of them within the past week. so you get a lot of people surviving, more than we usually realize. and where the people get to choose the place for their reservation, as the virginians did, you can figure out why they

did it for ecological reasons. osamkateck in the middle, the place of the reservation, it has never been owned by anybody but indians. they chose what land to keep. why did they choose it? maybe because it was fairly easily defensible. there may have been something to it. but look at the wonderful red stars just across the river. they were still going after the stuff in bread basket marshes. if the corn crop failed, the local king william whites and blacks might be doing real poorly the next winter. the indians would still be doing just fine, thank you. and therefore, you could expect -- these are just the recognized tribes that i work with. you can expect that there will be plenty of indians still. the refuge areas they were able to go to, and they used

resources that the white competition didn't want, enabled them to change their culture slowly, at their own pace. that doesn't mean it wasn't painful. the culture change is painful. we're all living through that now. but they were able to adapt and survive. and they're still here. thank you. any questions pertinent or im? >> here we go. >> what was the food preparation with that stuff? were they making it into a bread? was it a big mush? what was it? >> they did both. yeah. they did both. it makes only a moderately good flour. my chef friend, who was the dirty one on the left side,

found that even with a kwees nart, he couldn't get it into smooth flour the way you can with corn. but from there, you can make it into a mush. what's recorded is they made it into bread. by the way, i don't know whether it's going to be book number nine or number ten for me. i am coauthoring a book with my sister, who is a phd nutritionist, recently retired, and we are going to reconstruct the pal tan diet and the nutritional aspects of it, including what various types of preparation would have done. yeah. we've just finished a five-week course on it for the senior citizens lifetime learning at cnu. and she is collecting what she wants to boil down. i'm ready to write. [ laughter ] >> i usually am. >> in your studies around 1600, were you ever able to make an estimate of how many native peoples there were in virginia?

>> estimate, yes. an estimate, i have a lot of faith in, no. nobody -- i mean nobody, including on the other side of the pond, was taking censuses of people at that point in time. it wasn't considered government's business. so all we have of the indians is john smith's warrior accounts, as they're called. he and chisago superiors wanted to know how about able-bodied males would be able to shoot at them if they came visiting. and that's not much to make an estimate from. but the best we can do without estimates is something under 10,000 people for the virginia coastal plain. that's a much smaller population. and when you couple that with using less drastic technology, and also using a lot more eco niches rather than really focusing in and destroying a few, you've got people who did live much more gently on the

land. but less than 10,000 people, probably. to the english, it appeared empty. and they often rode accordingly. which is how much they knew. i believe the gentleman down here in the -- who has got the mike? >> right here. >> go ahead. >> oh, sorry. i'll get to you next, sir. in back with the mike? and then bring it down here for him, please. >> i have heard that the indians used fire, and improved their hunting that way. and therefore, the woods looked quite different from the way they do now. could you comment on that? >> they did look different from what they do now, but not for that reason. there has been controversy -- i'm being polite -- about how extensive the fire hunting was. and nobody really knows. until somebody invents a time machine, we're not going to know. but we've got a certain amount of opening up of woods from fire hunting, a certain amount from hurricanes blowing trees down, a certain amount from lightning

strikes, starting fires, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. but it may not have ever amounted to very much. the major thing that would have struck you and me, if we got in a time machine and went back, was the fact that up away from the rivers we're going to be seeing mature dissiddous forest. with much, much less underbrush in it, because of that. and that is why john smith was able to write, you can ride a horse any way between the trees. by the way, i disagree with father andrew white in maryland. he says you can drive a coach in four. that's overdoing it. [ laughter ] >> so the major difference in the forests back then would have been the way the ground looked. rather than how many open spaces. but yes, it would still look very heavily forested to you and me, in any case, compared to what we're used to now. >> what can you tell us about

the terrible scourge of coastal indians in both north and south america on the east coast occurred from the onslaught of european diseases to which the indians had no resistance? >> i get this question every time. and it's several doctoral dissertatio dissertations. i'm going to answer only for virginia, right? we have only one record, one, in 1617, of the indians here being hit by any kind of epidemic, and it appears to have been bloody flux, not small pox. i asked alfred crosby, who wrote the column ban connection and some of those others, what his opinion would be. was it going to be 90% as hank dobbins used to say? and he said no. the reason is, that the indian population here was not only small, less than 10,000 people, but they lived in small hamlets and at two different seasons of

the year, they disburseded from those hamlets. and nature could clean the place up. if you want a 90% loss of population, you've got to look to a city, and there were no cities. in aboriginal virginia. there may have been 90% loss of population in some inca cities. but not out in the countryside where the villages were and still are smaller. and not generally in north america. it's only when people get so concentrated, and the big epidemics of small pox you hear about were all in indian refuge communities, where they had been concentrated, and there were too many people who could not move around enough. so nothing like the mortality in north america. that people are often given to think. yell. go on, charlie, yell.

>> i -- i -- it's interesting you're using soils maps to determine the ecological zones in which native peoples were living. i did the same thing in my dissertation for tobacco. when i looked at the map you had, which is based on the smith map of the rappahannock and the location of tribes, want to hazard a guess as to why there are more tribes on the north shore of the rap panic than the south? >> i agree with morris who remarked on it back in the 1940s, and he said that -- probably political reasons for it. tribes on the rappahannock were under pressure to join the organization. they had done so, at least officially, but if they wanted to make independent decisions because they were getting contacted by more northerly peoples, they didn't want palitan to have such an easy time zapping them. and it didn't make sense for the rappahannock tribes, villages, to be on the north end of the

northern neck and paltans on the south side. they could send warriors and zap you right quick. if you're on the north side, you can see them coming. does that help? and i didn't point that out. somebody beat me to it. >> i was going to say taxation, but -- >> yeah. charlie. >> you mentioned milk weed and dog bane or indian hemp. yucca. yucca fill men toesa, i believe is native to eastern sandy areas. >> say it louder? >> the yucca philementosa. >> it does grow in sandy soil. >> you mentioned two -- >> they're the two i know best, and they have been found in archeological sites all over the eastern woodlands. yucca less so, as i understand it.

an alternative is the inner bark of the red cedar. although i don't think it has as much tensile strength as the other. i haven't really tested this. if i ever other. i haven't really tested this. if i ever genuinely retire which will be in the next me lynn i m millenia, i want to try it out. >> back row. >> thank you for being here, dr. roundtree, the county shows the only two reservations in the state and i find it very interesting that it once again proves that no good deed goes unpunished, because the natives are what allowed us to survive and history always affects those who write it. thank you. >> when i write a book about indian history, if i cast it from the indians and nonindians,

i think i'm probably being accurate. yes, ma'am? >> what is your feeling about the current controversy over whether or not native americans arrived 20,000 years ago and if you think they did or whenever you think they came, how long did they live in coastal areas. can you answer that? >> you're asking a cultural anthropologist who is not an archaeologi archaeologist. yeah. i have no problem with people arriving in north america during any interglacial or during any interstay int interstadial. they said where was the first thanksgiving in massachusetts or virginia. and i said neither one. it was in alaska 30,000 years ago.

people is going to walk where people sees food. and the bering strait then being grassland albeit cold grassland with plenty of critters on it, people were going to come across it any chance they got. so, they would have arrived here in north america. where they went after that, that's what i don't commit myself to. we are possive that there were people here in virginia at the cactus hill site which is 17,000 years ago. and that's a heck of a long times, friend, that's 15,000 bc. it was during the ice age when things were quite different and i've been to cactus hill and i see those artifacts as authentic, so people who have been here, it doesn't bother me a whit, but i'm a fundamentalist christian. i'm a whiskeypalian. a darwinist, so i've got no

problem with long spaces of time and i think the indians have been here a real long time. >> since you brought up the ice age, i was doing a tour of a museum and you helped to develop the indian portion of the exhibit there, but i was giving a touring and somebody said on the tour that the early indians had interacted and hunted woolly mammoths. i had not heard that before, but since you talk about the ice age, is that true, that the very earliest indians two have? >> yes, woolly mammoths, mastodons more likely. they existed here. there were people here. naturally they hunted them. yeah. you got to go way back in time to the ice age, but if you have people back there, yes, they hunted those. they didn't do it recently. have i worn you out?

oh, no. thank you for coming. a look at our recent visit to little rock, arkansas, a look at the city's rich history and literary culture, you're watching "american history tv" all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3.

>> little rock all of our square miles are places i have a great deal of affection for, but this one is special to us. the old mill was built in the late 1930s. it was originally built by a developer who built the lakewood area which is one of our residential subdivisions, and it was dedicated to kind of reflect a bit of art. in fact, a lot of art. the concrete as you can see around is actually looks like petrified wood, but it's concre concrete, you know, the mill was actually never an operating gristmill but, yeah, it was constructed to reflect that kind of an ambience about the city's and the country's early history in milling flour and turning it into bread. but it was done by an artist actually out of mexico, a fellow

by the name of rodriguez was commissioned by the matthews family to come up and build this as part of that residential neighborhood, and over the years the city took it over, and now operates it as one of our parks. one of the things that's interesting from a historical no note is that this old mill is probably the only standing structure or structures that were in the movie "gone with the wind." the history reflects that that got on the script list of scenes and in the opening credits, wasn't on very long, came up and we now claim that title from a literary standpoint. there's a lot that goes on here, you know, readings take place, weddings take place. we have folks who rent it for various things, and it's just

become a symbol of north little rock, so we're awfully excited about sharing that with people who come in from around the country, and frankly it's a little bit of heaven on earth at least from those folks that get to enjoy it in north little rock. we want to welcome your viewers to little rock's old mill and ask them to come whenever they have a chance to visit when they are in the neighborhood. >> you're watching "american history tv," all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. the single largest and most impressive civil war monument in washington to a military officer is the statue of general grant. even though he was president of the united states, it's really his service as the commanding

general of the union army that made him famous. it's a very unusual statue. it faces down the mall from the lincoln memorial and it's right at the base of the capitol. it's actually several statues together, and it was constructed over time. it was constructed and designed by a man named henry strait who was not a professional artist. he literally gave his life to making this statue which took decades to do, and it was built in stages. first the marble base was erected around 1910. then in 1912 a depiction of the artillery in the civil war was added and in 1916 depiction of the cavalry was added and in 1920 the enormous statue of general grant. the statue itself is 17 feet tall. it's on i think, like, a 20-foot pedestal, the statue weighs

something like 10,000 pounds with a figure of general grant sort of slumped down. people said the horse looked more alert than general grant does. the horse's ears are up as if seeing battle. but grant had a pose and he seemed to be unfazed, he was sort of waiting in the distance of what was going on i guess is what the sculpture was trying to show. the two statues on other side are not glory to war. the artillery is in the mud. it's raining. everybody looks wet, uncomfortable, one of the reins has broken loose. some of the horses are bolting. it just looks like a miserable day. the cavalry, one of the horses is falling and a rider is being thrown to the ground. he's clearly going to be tram e trampled to death by the