[piasa]

Thanks for the reply!

Before that, most of the tribal elders believed they came from what is now the James River Valley in Virginia.

That rings a bell, it's what I'd read but I could not recall the river.

[Vigilanteman]

FWIW, the James River Valley of Virginia is probably one of the nicest areas on the east coast adapted to a variety of agriculture. Excluding citrus fruit (which is pretty much a modern invention in Florida after the peninsular swamps were tamed), both crops considered southern (tobacco, okra) and northern (corn, millet) thrive there.

It is probably no small coincidence that the Powhatan were the fiercest, meanest tribe on the east coast when the Jamestown colony arrived. It also helps explain how the white man encountered weaker and weaker resistance as he pushed us further west.

That's why I tend to go with the Mandan majority tribal elder theory of origin in the James River Valley, though I don't discount the possibility that they made a detour to the Ohio Valley by way of New York's Finger Lakes Region. There are just too many Siouxian legends about the "land of many waters" which could just as easily describe western New York as it does northern Minnesota.