Episode Details

In 1634 — the founding year of Maryland — the ruler of the most powerful native people on the Potomac was murdered by his own brother. The dead man, Wannas, distrusted the English. His killer, Kittamaquund, took his place and welcomed them. The peaceable founding the colony liked to remember sat on top of a killing, and on top of something larger: the English had not arrived in an empty country, but in the middle of someone else's war.

This is the story of the Piscataway — an Algonquian paramount chiefdom ruled by the Tayac, an emperor of chiefs — and the cold calculation that let Maryland survive its first years. Squeezed from the north by the Iroquoian Susquehannock, a Tayac chose the English as a buffer and a shield, placing the newcomers like a stone on a board against a deadlier enemy. It is the story of Father Andrew White living in the Tayac's bark longhouse, the illness and the cure, the baptism of an emperor in a bark chapel, and the Tayac's daughter raised in an English manor and dead before twenty-five.

The bet was shrewd. It was reasonable. It may have been the best move the Tayac had. And it still ended his people's power on their own river — because the shield he picked up kept growing after he was gone.