Susquehannock Indians

Little is known about Pennsylvania’s first human occupants. As early as 7000 BC, when the great Wisconsin glacier covered New York State, Pennsylvania was covered with arctic plants and spruce-fir forests. Mastodon, musk ox and caribou grazed the Susquehanna River Valley and undoubtedly provided food for its human inhabitants. Known to archeologists as the Paleo-Indians, we can only speculate what their physical appearance, language, religion, and social activity was like by studying the tools that they used. It seems that roughly around the time of Christ these hunters and gatherers responded to the retreating glacier by moved northward.

Taken from the cover of Annals of the Susquehannocks And Other Indian Tribes of Pennsylvania: 1500-1763 by Frank Eshleman

The earliest human lives to be acknowledged in any written record of the Susquehanna Valley are the Susquehannock Indians. The Susquehannocks identified themselves as a branch of the Andastes, which were a subdivision of the larger Algonquin family. During the sixteenth century and carrying forward into the years of colonization the Susquehannocks were the most numerous people in the Susquehanna Valley; in fact it is estimated that their population exceeded six thousand in the 1640’s. However, as their northern neighbors, the New York Iroquois, gained power and prestige, the Susquehannocks experienced pressure to migrate southward until eventually in 1675, when devastated with disease and devoid of any European allies, they became annihilated by the Iroquois. A small portion of the survivors fled to a reservation on the Conestoga Creek (in the present day Lancaster area), but the majority were absorbed into the Iroquoian people. The Iroquois Confederacy established Shamokin in 1724 and by 1763 the Andastes were extinct.

When John Smith arrived in 1608 he described the Susquehannocks as wearing bear and wolf skins, and carrying bows, arrows and clubs. In their most typical form, the Susquehannocks were farmers who grew large crops of corn, beans and squash along the fertile flood plains of the river. They also worked as gatherers and hunters, collecting wild-plant foods, seeds, nuts, insects, reptiles, mollusks, fish, birds, and mammals. Tribes lived in fortified cities, which were composed of sixty to eighty foot long, bark-covered longhouses and several families, who were all related to one another via matrilineal lines of descent, lived in each long house. Like many Native Americans, the Susquehannock social organization was centered almost entirely about female ancestry. Treaties between the Susquehannocks and the whites nearly always recorded nation or family affiliations via the mother’s ancestors.

The Susquehannocks established their towns along the branches of the Susquehanna because the waters facilitated travel and trade in the region and provided the Indians with a constant supply of water and fish.

Works Cited

A Map of the Indian Trails

The Bottom Path

The Catawissa Path

The Great Island Path

The Great Shamokin Path

The Iroquois Indians

The Paxtang Path

The Penns Creek Path

The Susquehanna Path

The Susquehannock Indians

The Tulpehocken Path

The Tuscarora Path

The Great Warriors Path

The Wyoming Path

Hear David Ramsey, a local citizen tell about his Mohawk ancestory

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