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WASHINGTON

THE NATION'S CAPITAL

FRANK A. VANDERLIP

Many generations before George Washington, as the New World Romulus, paced off in person the metes and bounds of the Federal City, the powerful Algonquin tribe of American Indians had established their capital within the confines of what is now the District of Columbia. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, conducted, with his eighty painted chiefs, his savage councils of war, or peaceably smoked his calumet within view of the hill destined to become the site of the forum of the Republic. Nacochtank, afterwards Latinized as Anacostan by the Jesuit fathers who accompanied Lord Baltimore to Maryland, and now called Anacostia, a suburb of Washington, was the precise location of Powhatan's wigwam capital.