09/17/2025
Calling all local history buffs! Have you had the chance to read the recently published report regarding Bacon's Rebellion? The report, funded by the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program, identifies the most likely properties and landscapes in the Dragon Swamp that served as the battlespace and the sanctuary space for this event. By any measure, what took place in the Dragon in late summer 1676 was a Native victory.
Bacon’s Rebellion was the first full-scale armed insurrection in English America. The project focuses on the underreported role of the colony’s Indigenous nations in events, especially those nations located in the lower Tidewater. Native nations throughout the colony were the principal focus of rebel leader Nathaniel Bacon’s ire. He aimed to destroy these communities through a program of annihilation. Bacon left in his path a wake of Native death and enslavement. When he turned his focus to the Pamunkey and other Tidewater nations, indigenous ecological and military knowledge coupled with the extraordinary leadership of Cockacoeske, the Pamunkey weroansqua (leader), proved Bacon’s undoing, at least in Dragon Swamp.
Head to our website to read the full report:https://www.dragonrun.org/uploads/1/4/0/9/140904387/mapping_the_dragon_final_report_2025.pdf
📸 “Cockacoeske, Queen of Pamunkey (1656-1686),” by Ethan Brown (Pamunkey) (King William County Historical Society)
