Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)
I last read this slim book (which was composed from a lecture series that Axtell delivered at Louisiana State University in April 1996) maybe ten years ago; re-reading it now, I could not remember if my favorite groaner Axtell line appeared herein or in another Axtell book.
I was delighted to reach page 40 and see:
Although [Powhatan] was interested in trading corn for a few English goods, especially prestige items such as shiny copper and blue glass beads and useful metal tools and weapons, he would not sell his birthright for any price. Off and on for the colony’s first six years, he waged diplomatic and real warfare against the intruders. When he died in 1618, five years after Pocahontas’s marriage brought an uneasy peace, his brother Opechancanough succeeded him and kept a suspicious eye on the acquisitive English, who built him an English-style house with a lock to buy his acquiescence in their expansion. But he, too, could not be bought, certainly not for a mess of cottage.