The Earliest American Heroine

BY JEDEDIAH PURDY
TODAY 10:00 AM

... White’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare ..., born shortly before her grandfather left for England in 1587 and lost to history thereafter, was .. swept up in the literature of American Romanticism. In 1840, Cornelia Tuthill made her a heroine in “Virginia Dare, or the Colony of Roanoke,” which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger. Her Dare survives among friendly natives to become an American Diana, or a Katniss Everdeen avant la lettre, sprinting through unbroken forests in doeskin, wielding her bow and arrow to deadly effect ... In 1875, an anonymous “M. M.” published a story in Our Living and Our Dead, a North Carolina magazine dedicated to Confederate nostalgia and anti-Northern fomentation, in which Indian magic had turned Virginia Dare into an enchanted white doe who haunted the coastal forests for a century and witnessed the Indians’ “extinction, and the wide occupation of their forfeited patrimony, by that superior race, the Anglo-Saxon, with their bondsmen, the sable African, the red man’s inferior” ... In Henry Randolph Latimer’s .. “Virginia Dare, or the Lost Colony of America,” the colonists’ fictional Indian patron, Chief Croatan, is the continent’s first scoutmaster, who “taught the Saxon lads” swimming, tree-climbing, fishing, tracking, trapping, and archery ... In .. the best-known telling of the story today, Paul Green’s .. drama “The Lost Colony” (which is performed .. every summer on Roanoke Island), a hostile Spanish boat drives the colonists and an Indian protector into the woods, singing as they disappear ... It is telling that the “lost colony” is regarded as a great mystery at all. Groups of people disappeared all the time along the eastern coast of North America in those decades ...

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