Introduction: In this article, Melissa Davenport Berry writes about Pamunkey Chief Tecumseh Deerfoot Cook, whose tribe had family ties with Chief Powhatan and Pocahontas. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.

My story today focuses on Pamunkey Chief Tecumseh Deerfoot Cook (1899-2003) and his family, who lived on the Pamunkey Reservation in King William County, Virginia.

The Pamunkey Indian Tribe was one of the most prominent tribes Europeans encountered along North America’s East Coast.

This prominence stems in part from notable allied figures, especially Powhatan and Pocahontas, whose actions became central to American history.

The Pamunkey Indian Tribe played an important role in England’s early North American settlements, and records preserved in U.S. and English archives document its presence as early as Captain John Smith’s 1607 visit, when the English settled Jamestown.

Chief Turns 100 with ‘Lots of Honor’

On 14 November 1999, over 400 people gathered at the Pamunkey Indian Museum and Cultural Center located on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation to celebrate the 100th birthday of Chief Tecumseh Deerfoot Cook, son of Chief George Major “Wahansacook” Cook and Theodora Octavia “Mini Haha” Dennis Cook. Tecumseh served as Pamunkey chief from 1942 to 1984.

According to his student file at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, his name Tecumseh means “Shooting Star.”

The Richmond Times-Dispatch covered Tecumseh’s 100th birthday party and featured two photographs of him. The one on the top right shows him grinning with joy and vitality. The lower photo shows him in a blue pinstripe suit wearing a traditional headdress, dancing next to Preston Adkins of the Chickahominy Tribe.

A receiving line formed to greet the guest of honor, but he simply wanted his well-wishers to dance and celebrate. The great chief was full of life and plenty of energy and told the press his good health and endurance are due to his Pamunkey diet. His advice:

“Eat plenty of raccoons and muskrats, and drink Pamunkey River water, but lay off the ’possum.”

This article reports:

“There is a whole lot of honor here,” said Lonnie Custalow, one of the group’s drummers, who added: “I hope I’m in half as good of shape as he is when I’m 50.”

Spry doesn’t do justice to Cook, who led the Pamunkey Tribe for 42 years and guided sportsmen to the river’s fabled duck and goose hunting for at least half a century.

At the time of his 100th birthday, about 75 tribe members lived on the 1,200-acre peninsula of the Pamunkey River set aside in a 17th-century peace treaty. The Pamunkey Tribe and their neighbors, the Mattaponi Tribe, are the only tribes living on reservation land originally designated by 17th-century treaties.

Despite the daylong festivities, the 100-year-old chief was not sitting out the hunt planned for the next day. He intended to join a group of hunters pursuing deer for a Thanksgiving tribute to Virginia’s governor.

One of the Most Photographed Men in Pamunkey

Tecumseh was a celebrated figure in his lifetime. Here is a photograph of him printed in the Buffalo News in 1983. He was 83 years old and told the press about his love for fishing.

Tecumseh said he may be using gill nets and a 14-foot johnboat, but he still gets the same excitement fishing as the young lads who proved their bravery over 300 years ago by wading into the Pamunkey River to rope giant sturgeon by the tail.

In Pennsylvania on 22 April 1926, Tecumseh married Ruth Estelle Bradby, daughter of James E. Bradby and Elmira (Page) Bradby.

Here is a photo of Tecumseh’s father George Major Cook, chief of the Pamunkey Tribe, offering game in a symbolic annual tribute to the governor of Virginia, on 22 November 1910. U.S. President William Taft attended the ceremony that day, along with Governor William Hodges Mann. Cook signed the photo below with the inscription, “Fraternally yours, George Cook, Chief of the Pamuckers [Pamunkeys].”

Below are photos of the Cook and allied families living on the Pamunkey Reservation, all courtesy of the Frank Gouldmith Speck Photograph Collection at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian (MAI).

Speck used these images to illustrate the Pamunkey section in his 1928 publication “Chapters on the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia” in the MAI’s Indian Notes and Monographs series.

In this next photo from the collection, we see: “Pamunkey women seated outdoors in chairs with Tecumseh’s mother Theodora Octavia Dennis Cook standing behind on left, and her daughter Princess Pocahontas Cook standing to right. Seated, from left to right: Theodora’s daughters Theodora Dennis Cook; Ruth Cook; Ruth Estelle Bradby (later wife of Tecumseh Cook); and Theodora’s daughter Captola (Kaptola) Eulala Cook.”

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Note on the header image: close-up of the Powhatan bronze. Credit: Pamunkey Indian Museum and Cultural Center.