Susquehannock Native American Tribe

The Pennsylvania Native American Tribes Susquehannock History Since the Susquehannock apparently had been good friends with the Huron from times long before contact, it is possible they migrated to the Susquehanna Valley from the north. The earliest village sites identified as Susquehannock were located on the upper Susquehanna River and date from about 1550, but they probably had occupied the region for at least 400 years before this. Although they inflicted a major defeat on the Mohawk shortly before 1600, wars with the Iroquois had by 1570 forced the Susquehannock south into the lower Susquehanna Valley. Hardened by years of constant warfare, they overwhelmed the Algonquin tribes along the shores of Chesapeake Bay and began extending their control southward. The first European contact with the Susquehannock was in 1608 when Captain John Smith (from Jamestown) was exploring the northern end of Chesapeake Bay. This encounter was friendly enough, but Smith was wary because of their reputation and awed by their size. His later ports described them as giants. The Powhatan also knew the Susquehannock (whom they called cannibals) from painful experience, and when the English first settled Virginia, the Powhatan had placed their villages well-inland to protect them from Susquehannock war parties who ranged the coastline by canoes. One reason the Powhatan were not completely opposed to English settlement at first was that they provided additional protection, but the Susquehannock still attacked the Potomac (Powhatan) villages in northern Virginia during 1610. Drawn by the potential profits from furs, other Europeans came to the New World during the early 1600s. Henry Hudson explored Delaware Bay and the Hudson River in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company, and by 1614 the Dutch had established a trading post on the Hudson River and were trading with the Delaware on the lower Delaware River and Delaware Bay. From the French settlement at Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, Étienne Brulé visited the Huron villages on Georgian Bay in 1611. Trading with all four European powers during the 1640s required that the Susquehannock produce a lot of fur. They were skilled hunters and trappers, but the huge demand kept them so busy hunting they had little time left to continue their war of conquest against the Delaware and Chesapeake Algonquin tribes. In west, however, it may have been different. One can only wonder where and how the Susquehannock got so much fur, and it is likely that, as the Susquehannock exhausted the beaver in central and western Pennsylvania, they were forced to look beyond their territory for more. Some was obtained from trade with the Erie and Shawnee, but the remainder probably came at the expense of encroachment and warfare with unknown tribes in the Ohio Valley. The Beaver Wars (1630-1700) were a period of intense intertribal warfare in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley created by competition in the fur trade. The Susquehannock were obviously a major participant, but the most important confrontation was between the Huron Confederation which traded with the French and the Iroquois League which traded with the Dutch. At first Europeans had been reluctant to trade firearms to natives and restricted the number and amount of ammunition. This restriction dissolved as the competition increased. When English traders from Boston attempted to lure the Mohawk from the Dutch by selling firearms, the Dutch countered by providing them in unlimited amounts. Suddenly much-better armed than the Huron and their allies, the Iroquois began a major offensive, and the level of violence in the Beaver Wars escalated dramatically. In the arms race that followed, no tribe had a more advantageous position than the Susquehannock. By playing on the fears of the rival European traders, they had access to whatever weapons in any amount they wished. To say they were well-armed would be an understatement. One of the Susquehannock villages even had a cannon to defend itself, and so far as is known, they were the only Native Americans ever to use this type of heavy armament. The history, culture and way of life of the now vanished Susquehannock Indians. The Susquehannock Indian nation were located along the Susquehannock River, from the north end of Chesapeake Bay in modern day Maryland across Pennsylvania and into New York. By the time of first European contact there were between five and seven thousand Susquehannock. By 1763, however, the Susquehannock had been wiped out by the white man's disease and inter tribal warfare. The word Susquehannock is Algonquin and apparently means "˜people of the muddy river,' in reference to the Susquehanna River. The Susquehannock people spoke a derivation of the Iroquois language, which is very similar to that spoken by the Huron tribe. The Susquehannock were a confederacy of five tribes, scattered around twenty or so villages. Little is known about the culture of the Susquehannock. Prior to the major decimation of their villages in 1675 by epidemic and fighting with the Iroquois. It is apparent, though, that these people were aggressive and warlike, being feared by many of the surrounding tribes. As with many other tribes of the Atlantic Coast they were the bitter enemies of the Iroquois. Captain John Smith met with the Susquehannock in 1608. He noted that he was impressed by their large stature, their deep voices and their dexterity with the array of weaponry that they displayed to him. The Susquehannock villages stretched along the banks of the Susquehanna River. They were the trading partners of the Erie in northern Ontario and the Huron in southern Ontario. The Susquehannock were farmers, fishermen and hunters. In the spring they planted corn, beans and squash. After the planting had been completed they would move to temporary camps on the Chesapeake Bay where they would hunt and fish. In the fall they would return to harvest the crops and to hunt. The Susquehannock people moved into the Susquehanna valley from northern regions around 1150 C.E. Originally they occupied areas to the north of the Susquehanna valley. Wars with the Iroquois, however, drove them south. Here they drove out other Algonquin tribes and set up their own permanent villages. First European contact came in 1608 when Captain John Smith from Jamestown came across the Susquehannock along the Chesapeake Bay. He described them as giants. The French were the next Europeans to make contact with the Susquehannock. They convinced these people to side with the French and the Huron against the Iroquois in their bitter warfare of that time. The Dutch, however, sided with the Mohawk in their battle against the Susquehannock in 1615. Despite this the Susquehannock were able to maintain trading relationships with all of the European nations who had interests in the Atlantic coast. The Atlantic Coast tribes engaged in rivalry during the 1600s over the right to trade with the French and the Dutch. The Susquehannock attacked the Delaware over the privilege of trading with the Dutch. After four years of fighting the Delaware were driven south to New Jersey. The Dutch were pleased to find that their new trading partners, the Susquehannock, were better hunters and trappers than the Delaware and therefore produced better furs. The Susquehannock also extended their dominion south, pushing aside the Powhatan. They were soon trading with the English in Virginia. Encroaching European settlement, however, strained the friendly relations and soon there was outright hostility between the Susquehannock and the white man. But this rivalry was overshadowed by the inter tribal warfare between 1630 and 1700 that has become known as the Beaver Wars. The Susquehannock, who had obtained armaments in abundance from the European trading partners, were to cause havoc among their enemies. In the 1650's warfare and epidemics decimated the Susquehannock. Around this time they also ceded lands in the lower Susquehanna Valley to the English. Another epidemic in 1661 lowered their number of warriors to just 300. By 1675 the Susquehannock had been defeated by the Iroquois. They were now prisoners of the Iroquois and were adopted into that nation. In 1706 the Iroquois allowed about 300 Susquehannock to establish their own village in the Susquehanna Valley. They were still, however, under the dominion of the Iroquois. Many Christian missionaries moved into the area and made converts. In 1763 the surviving 20 Susquehannock had become peaceful Christians. Despite this they were all slaughtered by an angry mob who had been incited by some recent hostilities committed by an unrelated tribe. The Susquehannock were no more. Susquehannock From Wikipedia The Susquehannock people, also called the Conestoga (by the English) were Iroquoianspeaking Native Americans who lived in areas adjacent to the Susquehanna River and its tributaries from its upper reaches in the southern part of what is now New York (and the lands of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy), through East-central and central Pennsylvania (West of the Poconos and the Delaware nations), with lands extending beyond the mouth of the Susquehanna in Maryland along the west bank of the Potomac[2] at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. Evidence of their habitation has also been found in West Virginia. The Cumberland Narrows pass, later called the Nemacolin Trail, abutted their range and it was likely navigable through valleys from their large settlement at Conestoga, Pennsylvania Names and endonym There is no record of the Susquehannock autonym, i.e. what they called themselves. As Europeans penetrated the interior from the coastal areas dominated by Algonquian-speaking tribes, they usually learned the names of new tribes by what the first groups called them. The Europeans adapted or transliterated these names according to their own languages and spelling systems, trying to capture the sounds of the names: • The Huron, another Iroquoian-speaking people, called these people Andastoerrhonon, meaning "people of the blackened ridge pole", related to their building practices ); • • • • • The French adapted the Huron term and called them the Andaste (Andastes in plural); The Lenape/Delaware, an Algonquian people, used an ethnonym for their traditional enemy which meant "treacherous"; the Dutch and Swedes derived their term of Minquas for the people from this term; The Powhatan-speaking peoples of coastal Virginia (also Algonquian) called the tribe the Sasquesahanough, meaning "people at the falls" or "muddy water people," due to the association of the tribe with living along the lower Susquehanna River; The English of Maryland and Virginia transliterated the Powhatan term, referring to the people as the Susquehannock; The English of Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century called them the Conestoga, derived from their village, Conestoga Town in Pennsylvania. Its name was based on the Iroquoian term, Kanastoge, possibly meaning "place of the immersed pole." History The original population of the Susquehannock is uncertain due to lack of contact with the Europeans, whose records provide such data. The Europeans' best guesses are that the tribe numbered from 5000-7000 in 1600, and were a regional power capable of holding off the Iroquois Confederacy early in the century when the Iroquois began warfare in pursuit of fur trading. The Susquehannock later effectively defeated the Seneca nation and Cayuga nation of the Iroquois in mid-century circa 1666. They may have decimated bands of the Delaware, who became a tributary nation following a war with the fierce Susquehannock before 1640. In the later case, and through the balance of the century, the Susquehannock were allied with the Dutch, who traded them firearms for furs as early as the 1610s. The nation also fought a war declared by the Province of Maryland from 1642-50s and won it, albeit with help from their long-time allies the Dutch. But following the zenith of their tribal power in the 1670s, the Susquehannock mysteriously suffered an extremely rapid decline— presumably from infectious disease and then by successive subsequent defeats by the balance of the Iroquois. Their numbers may have diminished to about 300 in 1700. By the American Revolution, Delaware and Susquehannock living in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania were massacred and scattered when General Washington set troops against the Indians in 1778. The Susquehannock society was a confederacy of up to 20 smaller tribes, who occupied scattered villages along the Susquehanna River. The Susquehannock nation remained independent and not part of any confederacy into the 1600s. Ultimately, they were not strong enough to withstand the competition from colonists and other tribes in their piece of the so-called Beaver Wars of that century. About 1677 their remaining people, decimated by disease and war, merged with their former enemies and distant language kin, the Haudenosaunee ( Iroquois) Five Nations, based in New York. Susquehannock artifacts on display in the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. Archeological materials have been found in Pennsylvania, and Maryland's Allegany County at the Barton (18AG3) and Llewellyn (18AG26) sites. West Virginia's Grant, Hampshire and Hardy counties region (Brashler 1987) possess archaeological sites having Susquehannock ceramics. Archeologists have also found evidence of the people on the Potomac River and its tributaries. They have classified these artifacts as the "late Susquehannock sequence". A Contact Period (1550~1630) Susquehanna site, 46Hy89, is located in the Eastern Panhandle at Moorefield, West Virginia. The English seldom visited the upper Susquehanna inland region during the early colonial period. It is likely that the Susquehannock had occupied the same lands for several hundred years. When Captain John Smith of Jamestown met them in 1608, they had a formidable village in the lower river valley near present-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Captain Smith wrote of the Susquehannock, "They can make neere 600 able and mighty men, and are pallisadoed [palisaded] in their Townes to defend them from the Massawomekes their mortall enimies." He was astonished to find the Susquehannock were brokering trade with French goods. He estimated the population of their village to be 2,000, although he never visited it. The French explorer Samuel Champlain noted the Susquehannock in his Voyages of Samuel Champlain; in 1615, he called one of their 20 villages, Carantouan. It was located on the upper Susquehanna River near present-day New York state. It rallied more than 800 warriors with two other villages, Champlain reported. Modern estimates of the total Susquehannock population, including the whole territory in 1600, range as high as 7,000 people. During the sixteenth century and carrying forward into the first decades of colonization, the Susquehannock were the most numerous people in the Susquehanna Valley. During the early Dutch colonization of New Netherland, the Susquehannock traded furs with the Europeans. As early as 1623, they struggled to go north past the Lenape (later known as the Delaware), who occupied territory along the Delaware River, to trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. In 1634, the Susquehannock defeated the Delaware in that area, who may have become their tributaries. New Sweden - encounter between Swedish colonists and the natives of Delaware In 1638, Swedish settlers established New Sweden in the Delaware Valley near the coast. Their location near the bay enabled them to interrupt the Susquehannock fur trade with the Dutch further north along the coast. In 1642, the English Province of Maryland declared war on the Susquehannock. With the help of the Swedes, the Susquehannock defeated the English in 1644. The Susquehannock were in an intermittent state of war with Maryland until 1652. As a result, they traded almost exclusively with New Sweden to the north. In 1652 the Susquehannock concluded a peace treaty with Maryland. In return for arms and safety on their southern flank, they ceded to Maryland large territories on both shores of the Chesapeake Bay. This decision was also related to the Beaver Wars of the late 1650s, in which the Haudenosaunee swept south and west against other tribes and territories to expand their hunting grounds for the fur trade. With the help of Maryland's arms, the Susquehannock fought off the Iroquois Confederacy for a time, and a brief peace followed. In 1658, the Susquehannock used their influence with the Esopus to end the Esopus Wars, because that conflict interfered with their important trade with the Dutch. From 1658 to 1662, the Susquehannock were at war with the powerful Iroquois confederacy based in New York, which was seeking new hunting grounds for the fur trade. By 1661, the Maryland colonists and the Susquehannock had expanded their peace treaty into a full alliance against the Iroquois. Fifty Englishmen were assigned to the Susquehannock to guard their fort. In 1663, the Susquehannock defeated a large Iroquois invasion force. In April 1663, the Susquehannock village on the upper Ohio River was attacked by Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga warriors of the western Iroquois. In 1669-70, John Lederer was guided by a Susquehanna man on his journey to southwest Virginia and North Carolina (Mooney 1894:32). Paula W. Wallace writes, "In 1669 Iroquois Indians warned the French that if they tried to descend the Ohio River they would be in danger from the "Andastes." (Susquesahanocks: Wallace 1961:13). In 1672, the Susquehannock defeated another Iroquois war party. The Iroquois appealed to the French for support because the Iroquois could not "defend themselves if the others came to attack them in their villages". Some old histories indicate that the Iroquois ultimately defeated the Susquehannock, but no record of a defeat has been found. In 1675 the Susquehannock suffered a major defeat by the Iroquois League. English colonists invited the tribe to resettle in Maryland, where they relocated across the river from Pennsylvania. But the Susquehannock suffered from getting caught up in Bacon's Rebellion the following year. After some Doeg Indians killed some Virginians, surviving colonists crossed into Maryland and killed Susquehannock in retaliation. The Susquehannock moved to old Fort Piscataway, below present-day Washington, DC. Problems on the frontiers led to the mobilization of the militias of Maryland and Virginia and, in confusion, they surrounded the peaceful Susquehannock village. When five Susquehannock chiefs came out to negotiate, they were murdered. The Susquehannock slipped out of the fort at night and harassed settlers in Virginia and Maryland, then eventually returned to the area of the Susquehanna River. Covenant Chain treaty In one of its treaties with the colonies, in 1676 the Iroquois reached peace with Maryland and Virginia, and the Lenape/Delaware. They offered to shelter the Susquehannock, distant relations through the Iroquoian-language family, and sometimes allies; though in the Amerind way, sometimes rivals and enemies—as recently as ten years before the Susquehanna had thoroughly trounced the Seneca and Cayuga. Around 1677, most of the remaining Susquehannock after the disease epidemic of the early1670s, a pale shadow of their former tribal strength moved to New York, joining mostly with the Seneca and Onondaga nations, who also spoke Iroquoian languages. The Iroquois, who had a long tradition of adopting defeated enemies into their tribe, and Governor Edmund Andros of the Province of New York told the Susquehannock they would be welcome in New York and protected from Maryland and Virginia. Some returned to their homeland on the southern shores of the Susquehanna River, keeping their distance from the center of Iroquois power. Other groups fled to the Iroquois for shelter, and others moved to the upper Delaware River into the somewhat depopulated Delaware Nation lands (ravaged both by the Susquehannocks whom had made them tributary and the Iroquois, which had never gotten along with Algonquian speaking peoples) where they lived under the protection of New York. After adopting the majority of the Susquehannock, the Iroquois acquired a right to most of the territory along Susquehanna River, but they never claimed below the fall line. To the southwest, the remnant Susquehannock merged with the Meherrin, and allied Nottoway or Mangoac, the Iroquoian-speaking tribes of Virginia. The new group called themselves Chiroenhaka, according to the 20th-century ethnologist James Mooney. As of 2009, researchers have found archaeological evidence of Susquehannock movement into and habitation of areas such as the Mouth of the Seneca and Pancake Island villages in present-day West Virginia, according to Bryan Ward, West Virginia Division of Culture and History. The Susquehannock population had been devastated by the recurring warfare and high fatalities from new Eurasian infectious diseases, to which they had no immunity. About 1697, a few hundred surviving Susquehannock settled in a new village in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania called Conestoga Town. Their presence also gave rise to the name of the Conestoga River under Governor William Penn, which in turn gave the name to a famous type of wagon—which weren't built on the east side of the Alleghenies whereas hardware kits, the metal parts for which, were made there. The Indian tribe remnants lived under the protection of the provincial Pennsylvania government, but their population declined steadily. In 1763, a census counted only twenty-two people in Conestoga Town. That year the Paxton Boys, in response to Pontiac's Rebellion on the western frontier, attacked the village. The Paxton Boys slaughtered six people at Conestoga. The remaining Indians were sheltered in a Lancaster workhouse by the Commonwealth. The governor discouraged further violence, but two weeks later, the Paxton Boys killed the remaining 14 Susquehannock at the workhouse. In the early 1700s, other remnant Susquehannock migrated to Ohio, where they merged with other tribes, becoming known as the Mingoes. They lost their identity as a distinct nation. Legacy • Susquehannock State Park in Pennsylvania is named for the tribe. • Drawing of a Susqeuhannock ca. 1675 • Susquehannock Fort ca. 1671 Language Susquehannock language The Susquehannocks were an Iroquoian-speaking people. Little of the Susquehannock language has been preserved. Almost the only source is a Vocabula Mahakuassica compiled by the Swedish missionary Johannes Campanius during the 1640s. Campanius's vocabulary contains only about 100 words, but it is sufficient to show that Susquehannock was a northern Iroquoian language, closely related to those of the Five Nations.