Rappahannock

The Rappahannock are an Algonquian-speaking people of the Virginia tidewater and a peripheral member of the Powhatan Confederacy. They dominated the valley of the river that bears their name, with thirteen villages and a capital at Topahanocke.

English explorers met their chief in 1607, and John Smith was brought to their capital later that year to be checked against memories of earlier raiders. Colonial retaliation after the 1622 Indian massacre struck them in 1623, but they stayed out of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War of 1644 to 1645.

Planter settlement forced a retreat: chiefs deeded land to the colony in 1651, and by 1669 the survivors, perhaps a hundred people, had withdrawn to the Mattaponi headwaters. In 1684 Virginia ordered them merged with the Portobago for protection against Seneca raiders; the later community descended from this fusion, also including the Morattico and Doeg.