The Yaocomaco People

The Yaocomaco Indian tribe lived on both sides of what would eventually be called the St. Mary's River. The Yaocomaco tribe was a small independent tribe who interacted with, and were possibly influenced by, large chiefdoms in the area, including the Piscataway chiefdom in what became Maryland, and the Powhatan chiefdom in what became Virginia. The tribe was led by a werowance, or chief, who would seek advise from other leaders in the tribe including spiritual leaders and war captains.

The Yaocomaco were of Eastern Algonquian lingual and Eastern Woodland cultural stock, having much in common with other groups of the Atlantic coastal region such as the Powhatan of Virginia and the Wampanoag of New England. These groups spoke varying dialects or forms of the Algonquian language.

Survival

The Yaocomaco Indians were dependent upon food available during each season. Most of what they ate, they grew-corn, beans, and squash. Seasonal harvests of foraged roots, seeds, fruits, and green plants as well as fish, reptiles, shellfish, and animals, especially deer, provided additional food.

Appearance

Yaocomaco people were reported to be tan-skinned with dark hair. They generally wore clothing of deerhide. A twined cordage or simple hide belt tied around the waist could hold a bag for personal belongings. Their clothing varied somewhat with the season; in cold weather they may have worn linen trade shirts, leggings made of hide, moccasins, and mantles of various furs and hides.

Pigments from earth or plant products were sometimes applied to the face and body as insect repellent and for different ceremonial purposes. Women reportedly wore permanent tattoos on their faces, breasts, arms, and legs. Beads of shell, bone, copper, stone, clay, and pearls were used for adornment and sometimes various small animal parts were also worn.

Ceremonies

Gatherings held to celebrate the major events of tribal life and various seasonal activities included feasting and dancing. Gourd and turtle shell rattles, water-filled pottery drums, and reed flutes may have been used as instruments.

Contact with the English

The Yaocomaco Indians were reportedly in the process of abandoning the immediate area when the colonists first arrived. The exact reason is not known, but it may have been because of attacks from enemy tribes such as the Susquehannock.

In exchange for tools and cloth, the English colonists were welcome to take shelter in vacated Yaocomaco houses and to begin planting crops in the already cleared and fertile fields. The colonists were given information by the Indians about field management, hunting, and trapping. About half of the Yaocomaco people moved immediately and the rest were to move within the year.

Early relationships between the colonists and the Yaocomaco and neighboring tribes were reportedly good. English leaders, for the most part, wrote of the natives with respect. Within a few years the Jesuits, who were among the first colonists, undertook to convert the native people to Christianity with some success.

While living in the Yaocomaco hamlet the colonists would have used many of the items brought from England including some food such as grains, peas, oil, vinegar, and salt, as well as personal clothing, bedding, muskets, hoes, axes, saws, shovels, hammers, nails, iron cook pots, fry pans, wood eating utensils, and chests or trunks in which to put their belongings.