The Piscataway and Nanticoke: People of the Tidal Shore

Before the English ships came up the Potomac in sixteen thirty-four, the land that would become Maryland was spoken for. The Piscataway Confederacy held the western shore of the Chesapeake, a network of towns and fishing weirs and trade routes running from the fall line down to the tidal flats. Their paramount chief, the Tayac, lived near the river the Piscataway called the Patowomeke. The Nanticoke held the Eastern Shore, along the river that still carries their name. Between those two peoples, the bay's shores had been occupied for many thousands of years.

The Piscataway were not nomads. They were farmers, raising corn, beans, and squash in the river bottoms. They were fishers who knew every seasonal run of shad and herring. They were traders, connected to the Powhatan Confederacy to the south and the Lenape to the north. Population estimates at the time of English contact vary widely depending on the method. Some scholars suggest the Chesapeake tidewater nations together numbered in the tens of thousands. What is not in dispute is that epidemic disease arrived before the colonists did; the Piscataway had already lost significant numbers to illnesses that traveled overland from earlier European contact to the south.

The first English to arrive at what is now St. Mary's City were met by Piscataway who were negotiating from a position weakened by that disease and by pressure from the Susquehannock to the north. The Tayac Wannas allowed the English to settle. He had his own strategic reasons: the English were a potential counterweight to the Susquehannock, who had been raiding Piscataway settlements for years. The alliance that followed was uneasy, and it did not last.

By the end of the sixteen hundreds, most Piscataway had been displaced from their ancestral tidewater territory, moving north and west. The Nanticoke faced similar pressure and began moving toward Pennsylvania and New York by the early seventeen hundreds. A small Piscataway community maintained continuous presence in southern Maryland, and their descendants continue to press for federal recognition today. The Piscataway Conoy Tribe holds state recognition from Maryland. The river and the bay and the tidal creeks they named are still here. The people who named them are still here too.