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Archiver > BOZEMAN > 1999-06 > 0928277125


From: "DIANA M WILLIAMS" <>
Subject: [BOZEMAN-L] Southampton Co. VA
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 17:45:25 -0500


Hi Gang,

Last year sometime, Steve mentioned a VA Bozeman with Indian connections.
I said I had seen him and we agreed the tribe was the Nottoways. I said I
had an item about him and of all things it has emerged from my wonderful
non-filing system. Now that I see that he was in Southampton Co., it looks
more important than I had originally thought. The name is intriguing also,
William G. Bozeman. This makes more of a mystery than an answer, but here
is the whole thing. I see 3 possibilities for his father: a handsome
stranger who compromised the Chief's daughter; she just took the name from
having heard it; or someone we do not know who spent time there and was
really married to the Indian maid.
Please come forth with your thoughts. Diana

This is from: Southampton Co. VA by Thomas C. Parramore -- pgs. 12 to 15,
from a chapter entitled 'The Passing of the Nottaways'.

In the decades following the end of the Rev. War, the Nottoways continued
to buy time by selling reservation land though ever more pinched by the
change from food gathering to food growing. They were too few in number to
take any organized part in the American Rev, though the Nottoway chief
fought and died in the patriot ranks. (His name may have been on a
preceding page, but I did not get it.) By the beginning of the 19th Century
the tribal inheritance had diminished to less than four thousand acres, the
arable portion of which was barely enough even for farming.
But self-respect and self-identity remained. When they were queried in
1808 as to whether they might be willing to sell more land, the Nottoways
announced that "the white people were already as near them as they wished
them to be," and declined selling anything. They also refused to have their
children bound out as apprentices, giving as their reason that "an
Indian.....was never known as an apprentice."
Little besides their dignity remained. Trustees reported that the
tribe, whose cluster of small farms was now known as Simmons Town, was
without educational facilities and that the Indians practiced neither
sobriety, industry, nor frugality. Almost entirely illiterate, they seemed
dependent on the good will of the trustees as their only guarantee against
fraud and unfairness in their dealings with the white community.
In 1818 the Nottoways appealed to the General Assembly for the right to
sell the last of their lands except the few acres on which they actually
lived. Queen Edith Turner, Ellick Rogers, Jack Woodson, Solomon Bartlett,
and Nancy Turner, all of them illiterate, petitioned that the two dozen or
so members of the tribe were mostly either very old or else infants too
young to work. They held common title to 3,912 acres but could make use of
very little of it and were in distress for money and provisions. The
legislature in 1820 authorized sale of about a quarter of the reservation,
but a substantial part of the proceeds had to be applied to the settlement
of claims for goods advanced on credit. With Edith Turner now seventy years
of age, Littleton Schollar--the tribes principal man--older still, another
totally blind, and Alexander Rogers lately convicted of murder, the
situation was still darker than before.
It was at this crisis in affairs that the state legislature in Dec.
1823, was startled to receive from the hand of a member of the tribe a
lengthy and incisive written analysis of the tribe's fundamental problems
and a recommendation for how to solve them. The document was the work of a
young man named WILLIAM G. BOZEMAN who had left VA some years earlier,
acquired by some means a formal education, and returned to try to improve
his own lot and that of the tribe.
Bozeman's was the direct and forceful statement of a man who sought no
charity and acknowledged no inferiority:
"My forefathers helped to achieve the independence of America, they
enlisted under the banner of freedom, and went forth to battle against the
hostile armies of King George 3. They fought, they toil'd, they bled, for
that LIBERTY, which the citizens of the US now enjoy. My grandfather at
that time was King of the aforesaid tribe of Nottoway, he fell in battle,
contending for liberty, under the immortal Washington.....Will you now
behold me an offspring of the then noble spirits, of the memorable
Revolution, who by their confederated plan stood the test of British warfare
and tyranny; they burst the fetters, and hurled them at their oppressors,
and shouted they were free, the sound broke across the Atlantic and shook
the fog wrapt island of Britain; and raised America to the first rank,
among the nations of the Earth."
Bozeman proceeded to analyze what he conceived to be the chief obstacle
to the advancement of the Nottoways. It was, he asserted, communal
ownership of their land, a circumstance that had the effect of stifling
individual initiative and denying to the Indians political suffrage.
"What is more disheartening to a man," asked Bozeman, "than to know that
the labour of his hands is not to go to the children of his body? And when
we know it will, with what energy of industry it animates man for the
happiness of his children."
On Feb. 23, 1824, the General Assembly passed an act allowing the
trustees of the Nottoways either to provide Bozeman tribal funds or set
aside for him a reservation tract which he would then own in fee simple.
They further enacted that any other member of the tribe was entitled to
similar privileges. Bozeman, joined by the old queen, was allowed to
select a tract on the road from Jerusalem to Belfield. The land they chose,
probably with due deliberation, was considered to be "the most inferior" on
the reservation.

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