Dragon Run is 140 square miles of wilderness across four counties: Essex, King and Queen, Middlesex and Gloucester. The creek drains swampland and forest to create the headwaters of the Piankatank River. In the 1970s, the Smithsonian Institution surveyed 232 watersheds of the Chesapeake Bay along the East Coast and ranked Dragon Run as the second-most pristine. Little has changed since.
“It’s remote — hard to get to — and it’s just a treasure for biodiversity,” said Jeff Wright, president of the nonprofit Friends of Dragon Run. About a quarter of the area is protected by preservation easements and most of the rest is privately owned, so there is little public access to the waterway.
Even the origins of the name are obscure, appearing on the earliest English maps with no explanation of what the “dragon” was. “It’s a great mystery,” Wright said.
A host of Indigenous tribes lived around Dragon Run, and some converged there from other areas. The most prominent tribal leader at the time was Cockacoeske, queen of the Pamunkey, a formidable woman who would appear before the House of Burgesses in regal splendor and refuse to speak, instead having her son deal with the foreigners.
She realized early in 1676 that trouble was coming. Looking to outlast the rebellion and preserve relations with the colony’s government, Cockacoeske forbade the killing of any English person and made plans to take the tribes into Dragon Run.
Over several months during Bacon’s Rebellion, some 700 Native people lived in and out of the Dragon and, for the most part, evaded Bacon and his men. King, other researchers and the tribes have been figuring out how they managed to do that.
“This was a distinct strategy of preservation,” Rappahannock tribal historian Edward Ragan said.
To narrow down what sections of the 40-mile-long wilderness were the setting for the conflict, archaeologist Megan Postemski has studied deeds and land patents that reveal who owned property around Dragon Run at the time.
“I think we’re getting a good sense of the lay of the land,” Postemski said. Some of the property owners were allies of Bacon and would have posed a threat, meaning the tribes were likely to avoid those areas, she said.
One landholder — William Claiborne — was an ally of Berkeley and inclined to help the Native people. King and the researchers are hoping to get access to a major section of Claiborne’s property from the modern-day owner. Another nearby landowner has been more involved with the project, and artifacts found there — such as stone tools —confirm a strong Native presence, King said.