Smith spent a month exploring the 130 mile long tidewater of the mighty Potomac River. He reached the little falls by barge where he encountered Algonquians who had transported meat and furs from the Piedmont above the falls to the tidewater, where the loaded canoes would be paddled down river to trade with the villages of the Piscataway and Patawomeck chiefdoms. Portage around both Little and Great Falls was necessary but the dug-out log canoes of the Algonquian speakers were too heavy to carry. Several trips would have been required over the portage. The birch bark canoes of the Iroquoian speakers could be portaged, but these canoes were very valuable and the Iroquois did not often risk losing them in an attack by the Algonquin speakers. Since Smith does not make an issue of the language spoken at the falls, they were probably tidal natives returning from an interior hunting or trade mission. Once above the falls, native canoes could transverse the upper Potomac almost to the eastern continental divide. This was not Smith’s famed northwest-passage, as he found out when his vessel could go no higher than the first falls. But to the Chesapeake natives, this was the northwest passage of trade to the Mississippi River drainage and the Great Lakes beyond.