Thornton Hollow Overlook

Thornton Hollow Overlook is the wide place coming up on your right. On a clear day the view opens here to more than a half circle, from the four bumps of Hogback around past Fork Mountain and Oventop, with the Piedmont beyond. This side of the ridge drains the other way. The streams below you are bound for the Rappahannock, and that's the country to think about here. The Monacan Indian Nation places its ancestors, the Monacan and Mannahoac tribes, in a confederation that ran from the Roanoke River Valley to the Potomac, and from the Fall Line up through these mountains. Their languages were Siouan, and scholars think Siouan speakers were once one people in the Ohio River Valley, thousands of years ago. They weren't the Powhatan people of the Pocahontas story, and they had their own country and their own names for it. John Smith placed the Mannahoac at the head of the Rappahannock, between the Monacan and the Massawomek. Testimony from the Rappahannock Rangers suggests Monacan people were living in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in sixteen eighty-two. Every year, the Nation says, they left their villages for their hunting camps, after deer and elk and small game, and people moving up to mountain camps in summer and fall wore paths through these gaps. In sixteen oh eight, on the Rappahannock near the falls, John Smith's men took arrows from the shoreline. They found a wounded man left behind. Smith's Powhatan guide tried to kill him as an enemy. Smith stopped it, and through a translator the man gave his name, Amoroleck, of the Mannahoac alliance, though the Monacan chronology calls him a Monacan captive. Smith asked about the worlds he knew, and he named three, the Powhatan, the Monacan, and the Massawomek, a people who lived on a great water. That's a crowded map, before the English drew theirs. Then Smith asked why his people had turned on strangers who came in friendship. Amoroleck told him, as the English wrote it down. We heard that you were a people come from under the world, to take our world from us. And then he took them to his people's camp, and his people fed them and danced. Smith went back and boasted to Powhatan that the English had beaten his enemies. Amoroleck's answer is the line that lasted.