Doeg people

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Doeg
Native American religion
Related ethnic groups
Nanticoke, Pamunkey, Chickahominy

The Doeg (also called Dogue, Taux, Tauxenent)

colonists' uprising in Bacon's Rebellion
.

Background

The Doeg (or Dogue) tribe of Virginia were part of the coastal Algonquian language family. They probably spoke Piscataway or a dialect similar to Nanticoke.

According to one account, the Doeg had been based in what is now King George County, but about 50 years before the founding of Jamestown (ca. 1557), they split into three sections, with groups going to Caroline County and Prince William County, and one remaining in King George.[2]: 4 

When

Siouan-speaking Manahoac
tribe.

John Lederer, who visited the Piedmont region of Virginia in 1670, wrote that the entire area had been

"formerly possessed by the Tacci, alias Dogi, but... the Indians now seated here, are distinguished into the several nations of

Monakin etc."[3]

Further, "The Indians now seated in these parts are none of those whom the English removed from Virginia, but a people driven by the enemy from the northwest, and invited to sit down here by an oracle above four hundred years since, as they pretend for the ancient inhabitants of Virginia were far more rude and barbarous, feeding only upon raw flesh and fish, until they taught them to plant corn..."
[3]

Frontier

In the 1650s, as English colonists began to settle the

My Lord's Island. By 1670, they had driven most of the Doeg out of the Virginia colony and into Maryland—apart from those living beside the Nanzatico/Portobago in Caroline County, Virginia.[1]
: 97 

Tensions between English colonists and the Doeg on the Northern Neck continued to grow. In July 1675, a Doeg raiding party crossed the Potomac and stole hogs from Thomas Mathew, in retaliation for his not paying them for trade goods. Mathew and other colonists pursued them to Maryland and killed a group of Doeg, as well as innocent Susquehannock. A Doeg war party retaliated by killing Mathew's son and two servants on his plantation.[4]

A Virginian militia led by

Nathaniel Bacon entered Maryland, attacked the Doeg and besieged the Susquehannock. This precipitated the general reaction against natives by the Virginia Colony that resulted in "Bacon's Rebellion". Following this conflict, the Doeg seem to have become allied with the Nanzatico tribe, who paid for the release of some Doeg jailed for killing livestock in early 1692.[1]: 104  The Doeg maintained a presence near Nanzatico at "Doguetown" (around Milford in Caroline County) as late as 1720.[2]
: 43 

"Welsh" identity

A centuries long investigation into the existence of “

.

A clergyman of Welsh origins, the Reverend Morgan Jones, told

Tuscarora
– a people with little if any connection to the Doeg proper.

See also a prior similar confusion of a neighboring Native American people’s tongue with Welsh in 1608 among the

Province of Virginia between the area that would later become Richmond and the Piedmont. A native Welch speaker, Peter Wynne, had been sent along as a translator, [7] and could not understand the local Monacan
language.

Legacy

Dogue, Virginia is named in honor of this tribe. Dogue Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia is also named after this tribe.

References