Pocahontas, a Native American woman, is one of the best-known cultural icons in the United States. However, her biography has been constructed through her association with the English settlers in America. Pocahontas was not her real name. She was in fact called Amonute when she was born. She was the daughter of a powerful tribal leader in the region near the Chesapeake Bay. The most well-known story regarding Pocahontas is that she saved the life of English colonist Captain John Smith. Moreover, numerous depictions of her in art, literature, and film show that the two were romantically involved. In fact, she most probably didn’t save his life and the two were, at best, friends.
Pocahontas married a Native American warrior named Kocoum about 1610. Some believe they had a child, a daughter Ka-Okee, though this lineage is not widely known or published. Around age 17 she married John Rolfe. They had only one child, a son named Thomas Rolfe, born in 1615. All of Pocahontas’s descendants trace back to the progeny of either Anne Rolfe and Peter Elwyn, or Jane Rolfe and Colonel Robert Bolling. The descendants of Princess Pocahontas, through her son Thomas Rolfe number in the tens of thousands and encompass numerous lines of the colonial Virginia and British gentry.
SOURCE: The Historian's Den
