John Smith's map showing Point Comfort, site of Fort Algernon/Fort George/Fort Monroe
Source: Library of Congress, Virginia / discovered and discribed by Captayn John Smith, 1606
The English faced two threats when they landed at Jamestown. The Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and even pirates were threats from the Atlantic. The location of Jamestown was attractive in part because anyone sailing up the river would be clearly visible before they could reach the English fort. That would have provided the English time to gather everyone inside the pallisaded fort, and to defend the Jamestown fort with their cannon and muskets.
In addition to moving inland, away from the Atlantic coastline, the English established an "early warning" site at Point Comfort. Fort Algernon was erected near the home of the Kecoughtan tribe, before the Starving Time of 1609-10. The fort was never a major fortress intended to withstand assault by Spanish, French, or Dutch raiders. Instead, it was a distant early warning system. Fort Algernon provided intelligence to Jamestown regarding new ships arriving in the Chesapeake Bay - plus some logistical support, such as safe access to fresh water, for the sailors after a long journey.
Fort Algernon was a wooden structure that apparently received only intermittent maintenance, and even burned in 1612. Remains of a later replacement, called Fort George, were washed away by the great hurricane of 1749 that piled up Willoughby Spit. In the 1800's Fort Monroe was constructed at the site, and that massive stone fort was intended to withstand attack by a hostile navy.
The other threat was the Native Americans. The Powhatans already had pallisaded towns, where tree trunks were aligned to encircle the houses and provide a wall of defense. These were designed for tribal conflicts using pre-contact technology; the palisades offered only minimal protection against the cannon of the Europeans. (See the image of a pallisaded Algonquian town, from Roanoke Colony watercolors of Thomas White that later were etched into woodcuts by Theodor De Bry.)
The English built their first pallisaded fort at Jamestown. It might have been inadequate against a Spanish attack, but it was never tested. The fort did protect against the arrows and hatchets of the Powhatan neighbors. In addition, the walls allowed the English to control how many Native Americans were allowed in the town at one time, reducing the threat of a surprise assault. The 1622 uprising revealed the colony's intelligence gathering capabilities, and analytical skills to anticipate an attack, were inadequate. (Jamestown was not assaulted in 1622, perhaps because it was too powerful or perhaps because Opchanacanough knew that Jamestown had been warned.)
Colonial settlements such as Bermuda Hundred and Henricus were built on peninsulas, and protected by wooden walls between riverbanks that protected the settlements from land attack. Though the Native Americans in Virginia could attack the river side of colonial settlements via canoes, the English had already placed cannons there for protection against European or pirate assault. The firepower facing the river was considered sufficient protection against potential amphibious attack by Algonquian warriors.
The English and Native American cultures were unable to establish a basis for peaceful coexistence in the areas occupied by English settlers. Cultures who can't cooperate... fight. Since it was the colonial settlements that changed conditions by pushing into Native American territory, it's fair to say that the English precipitated the conflicts.
The Powhatan cornfields were the most convenient areas to grow tobacco. The land was fertile and flat, and the trees had already been cleared - so the tobacco could grow in plenty of sunlight. Native American town sites were equally attractive for planting tobacco, once the Powhatan tribes had been displaced. On the other hand, the Native Americans could also trigger a fight. Killing English cattle was easier than hunting deer. Some of the English probably blamed every lost cow on the Native Americans, while some of the Native Americans blamed every hungry day on the English.
The English and Native Americans had dramatically different concepts of "appropriate land use," in areas occupied by both groups. English pigs and cattle were perceived as "game" to be harvested by some Native Americans, while the English considered themselves entitled by their charter and English law to appropriate land in Virginia without compensating the Algonquian inhabitants.
Not surprisingly, the two cultures fought using different tactics. The Native Americans relied upon swift surprise attacks, which killed a few people but rarely forced a wholesale retreat by other English settlers. The English engaged in search-and-destroy maneuvers, burning cornfields and towns to starve the assailants that they could not see. It was far more difficult for the Native Americans to cut trees and shape logs without iron axes and sharp metal tools. The English had no difficulty in destroying the traditional reed- or bark-covered huts in the Native American towns.
The power of the Powhatans was broken in less than 50 years of English occupation. As the English established farms on the Peninsula, Middle Peninsula, and then finally the Northern Neck, the Powhatan lifestyle of living in winter hunting camps and summer towns was disrupted. After the 1644 uprising, Opchanacanough was captured and murdered while in English custody, and the English systematically destroyed Algonquian towns and cornfields. The remnants of Powhatan's political organization were fragmented, never to be reassembled.
After 1644, the Indian threat to the English colonists in Virginia came from bands of northern Indians raiding into Virginia from Pennsylvania and New York. The 1646 treaty signed by Opchanacanough's successor, Necotowance, required the Virginia tribes to be allies with the English against such raids. In 1656 the leader of the Pamunkey Tribe (Totopotomoy) was killed while fighting "Rickohockans" (perhaps offshoots of the Seneca tribe in western New York) at Bloody Run, in what is now the Church Hill area of Richmond.
Once the Powhatans were destroyed, the primary interaction between the English and the remaining tribes were based on the fur trade. Whenn the English first arrived in 1607, Powhatan established his tribal organization as the "middleman" who would take a cut of the profits. Powhatan blocked the Sioux-speaking tribes west of the Fall Line from direct trade with the English at Jamestown. (Powhatan was not unique in this approach. In New England, the Iroquois tribes blocked the English from trading with the Hurons and others who lived further inland, and extracted high prices from the English for furs and skins until the American Revolution disrupted relationships.)
The fur trade depended upon Native Americans harvestiing a surplus of furs and food from their lands far from English settlements, and bringing the furs/skins to Tidewater settlements to trade with the English. Petersburg, Virginia grew from a fur-trading fort managed in the mid-1600's by Abraham Wood on the Appomattox River.
Both sides benefitted from the transactions. The English stayed east of the Fall Line, and the tribes west of the Fall Line got access to English metal products, textiles, and guns. (The French focused on building up such trade, rather than occupying Native American land and creating an agricultural colony, in their settlements in Canada, Louisiana, and the Ohio River Valley.)
The colonial fur trade in Virginia was a rough business, as William Claiborne discovered in the 1630's. In addition to conflicts between tribes for control of the hunting territory, the English fought among themselves. Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 was triggered in part by rivalries between Governor Berkeley and his friends (who had been given special rights for engaging in the fur trade) and the out-of-power planters who lived at the edges of colonial settlement. The risks of living at the interface of English/Indian territory (the "frontier") were high, but the rewards were limited by Governor Berkeley.
Colonial policy on protecting the frontier from raiding northern tribes was not consistent. Frontier forts were built and then abandoned because of the cost of staffing them. Prince William County, now urbanizing as population growth in Northern Virginia continues to expand, was once on the frontier. The stone walls in the basement of the Bel Air house may be the remnants a 1670's fort that housed rangers assigned to the headwaters of various coastal streams. The rangers were looking primarily for hunting parties of Susquehannocks and Iroquois from New York. Such groups were considered more likely to raid English farms, since they had no local towns or farm fields to protect.
The alternative to fixed fortifications on the frontier was to hire rangers to patrol the territory. The rangers were less-than-perfect sensors, and northern raiders could slip into Virginia undetected. When Nathaniel Bacon's overseer was killed by Indians, he launched a rebellion against the establishment based in Jamestown, attacked the peaceful Indians who were allied with Governor Berkeley - and even burned Jamestown itself, before Bacon died and the rebellion fizzled.
In 1714, Governor Spottswood stimulated development of a fort at Fort Christanna, south of modern-day Lawrenceville in Brunswick County. At the time, it was the edge of British colonial power. The modern historical marker at the site calls it "The Farthest Western Outpost of the British Empire."
Spottswood intended to concentrate the fur trade with southern tribes at one location that could be controlled. A surprise attack in 1717 by Iroquois rivals, on the Native American groups he had gathered peacefully at Fort Christanna, damaged his strategy. However, his main opposition was rival Virginia traders who traded weapons and other products for furs and skins, independent from Spottswood's licensed trading program.
For 130 years after the destruction of the Powhatan tribes, from the 1644 uprising to the intrusion into Kentucky in the 1770's, colonist/Native American conflicts on the Virginia frontier were predominantly triggered by fur trade rivalries, not by Native American resistance to colonial settlement. That's due in large part to the apparent retreat or die-off of the tribes west of the Fall Line. When English settlement crossed beyond the Fall Line and started to occupy the Piedmont in the early 1700's, there were few Native Americans remaining east of the Blue Ridge.
By the 1730's, colonial occupation of the Shenandoah Valley disrupted Native American hunting patterns, but did not result in large-scale displacement of Native American villages. Perhaps disease, or perhaps attacks from raiding Catawbas from the south and Iroquois from the north had emptied out the Piedmont before the colonists arrived in large numbers. That's a key reason Virginia built so few forts on the "frontier."
Prior to the conflicts with Shawnee and other Ohio tribes during the French and Indian War in the 1750's, frontier farmers built sturdy wooden houses that also served as defensive structures rather than facilities dedicated to just military protection. Such houses are called "forts" in many reports written in colonial days, especially after settlement reached the Shenandoah Valley. Families would retreat to the fort only when there was a specific alarm that a war party was nearby.
