Native people inhabited Mason Neck and the Occoquan River for millennia.  The first known written record of the inhabitants came from John Smith in 1608 when Smith visited Tauxenent, a Taux or Doeg, village.[1]  During this period, the Doeg lived in large settlements that included long houses and a leader’s house with 40 bowman for protection.  The village was enclosed in a palisade.  Smaller satellite camps were used for seasonal resources that included hunting, fishing, gathering plants and growing corn.^[2] Multiple settlement sites have been found in the region during the English Contact period, including Doeg’s Neck, later named Mason Neck.  While outside tribal nations, including the Iroquois, invaded Doeg space, the Doeg maintained relationships with other Chesapeake area Native tribes, although remaining independent from larger Native chiefdoms like Powhatan to the south and the Piscataway east across the river.  There is some evidence that the Doeg may have offered tributes to Powhatan after he visited their territory, but most evidence points to their independence.  They also may have allied with the Piscataway in this early period, although they often did find themselves at odds.[3] The Doeg actively participated in economic exchange with English colonists.

Doeg and Early European Contact

Conflicted rocked the Virginia Native communities in the early 17^th century.  The Doeg suffered invasions from the Massawomecks in the 1620s, possibly scattering the group known as the Tauxenent.^[4]  It is possible that the Doeg, whose name first appears in the colonial records in the 1650s, were scattered members of the Tauxenant who took refuge with the Patawomeck after they were “expulsed” by the Nacotchtanks.[5]  Several places in the Chesapeake bare their name.  The Doeg seemed “unwilling to accommodate their English neighbors,” and did not live a settled life as no colonial records speak of women or planting fields, and they left a record showing their geographic expanse.[6] They seem to leave a more permanent home on Mason Neck by 1654 when the English government allowed settlement in Northern Neck and colonists start claiming Native land.[7]  Prior to 1649, White colonists could not settle on land north of the York and Rappahannock Rivers, else they face felony charges.  As the English population expanded, Gov. Berkeley and the Council opened the land north of the York and Rappahannock in 1649 and repealed the punishment of felony.  This had ramifications for the Doeg as White settlers claim that the Doeg abandoned the land on Doeg’s Neck in the 1650s and secured grants of the land.

Doeg and Mid-17^th Century European Relations

By the 1660s, the Doeg relocated to Piscataway territory on the Maryland side of the Potomac and south of the north bank of the Rappahannock.[8] During this decade, relationships between the Doeg and English colonists appear highly conflicted.  The Doeg were accused of killing a family in St. Mary’s County; some colonists said the Doeg defended their territory against English colonists.[9]  Maryland militias hunted the Doeg for retribution.  To save themselves from the militia, the Doeg signed a treaty with the Maryland government but refused to be placed on reservation land.[10]  While the Doeg may have refused a reservation as an act of defiance against colonization, it often left the Doeg with little protection as they could not retreat to land set aside for them and the English did not recognize their rights as a tribe without land.[11] Both Virginian and Maryland English dispossessed the Doeg of their land yet would not recognize them as a landless people, as the colonies only recognized Native people through land ownership.  The colonies sought to dictate where the Doeg could live and where the Doeg would call home.

While they managed some reprieve in Maryland, their problems with Virginia English persisted.  On July 10, 1666, Governor Berkeley of Virginia issued an order to the militia to annihilate the Doeg by destroying villages, killing men, and selling women and children into slavery.[12] As colonists encroached more on their land, the Doeg pushed back on that encroachment in violent ways.[13] We do not have any evidence how successful this order was, but we do know the Doeg continued to exist and influenced colonial relationships for a couple more decades.

Doeg and the Waterways

The waterscape are important drivers in the Doeg narrative.  The water allowed for easier access for Native communities to interact with each other, politically, socially, and economically.  It provided food that was supplemented by agriculture.  The water allowed John Smith to access these Native communities more easily than he could have by land and made it easier for the colonists to expand and “claim” land that Native people inhabited as travelling by water was easier.  The Doeg appear in colonial records in various locations, as the map shows.  They were a well-traveled people who took advantage of the waterways.  Food that Native people grew were often traded with English colonists.  The waterways also served as a conduit for cheap labor or free labor in the English agricultural economy.  Once indentured servitude decreased, colonists used Native slave labor before the African slave trade became dominant.  It is not known how many Doegs faced enslavement.  Some scholars even suggest that the Doeg participated in the Native slave trade.[14]  There is evidence of at least one Doeg held captive by the Seneca for a number of years.[15]

Virginia Native Policies

Native policies in Early Colonial Virginia changed as the development of the settlements expanded, the English population increased while the Native population decreased, and the economy changed.  While the biggest changes came in land ownership, Native people handled diplomatic situations delicately.  Scholar Helen Rountree stated that around 1640-1641, actions by Opechancanough, leader of the Powhatan Confederacy, sought to excuse a fine the governor had placed on an Englishman who killed a Pamunkey man he accused of theft.  Opechancanough recognized forcing the Englishman to pay the fine threatened the Native-Settler peace relations that were already fragile.[16]  The early colonial government took steps to keep both the settlers and Native people co-existing as peacefully as possible.  Laws and policies existed and Native people and settlers sometimes worked within those frameworks, but often they worked outside of the law which led to conflict.  A year after Opechancanough’s diplomatic decision, the law changed and required any person “wronged by a native person” needed to go to the militia as opposed to taking care of the matter themselves.[17]  While this may have an attempt to create order in a community with disorder (as the Englishman killed the Pamunkey man for theft instead of going through proper protocols), it gave the militia authority to intervene in disputes, and carry out violent acts against Native people that was state-sponsored. These policies would have tragic outcomes for the Doeg and other Native communities on both sides of the Potomac.

Map of Doeg Locations

This map is a location of where Doeg Indians occur in public records. This map uses references from Nature and History in the Potomac Country by James Rice.