A Brief History of the Susquehannock Nation and Other American Indians in the Susquehanna Valley

Many people assume that the history of Cumberland County began with the foundation of towns like Carlisle, Shippensburg, Newville, and Camp Hill by European settlers in the eighteenth century. Yet, before any European frontiersman set foot in the county, there is evidence of a sizable settlement of Native Americans: the Susquehannock People. During the period of contact with Europeans, the Susquehannock Nation maintained a village in eastern Cumberland County, near the western shore of the Susquehanna River. Over the course of the next few paragraphs, I hope to give a short history of the Susquehannock people, and other Indigenous Peoples who called the Susquehanna Valley home. I will pay particular attention to the settlement these peoples made in Cumberland County. I hope that this piece will shed some light on this often-overlooked aspect of local history.

There is evidence of Indigenous populations in the Susquehanna Valley for thousands of years before any European settlers set up homesteads in the area.¹ The Susquehannock (otherwise known as the Andastes or the Minquas) were just the most recent Native population to live in the Susquehanna Valley.² Intricate rock carvings found on islands in the Susquehanna River are thought to predate the reign of the Susquehanna. They were probably made by Algonquin Peoples at some point before the commencement of European invasions.³ In all likelihood, the rock art may have been made by the Shenks-Ferry culture, who are hypothesized to be the first Indigenous Peoples to introduce tribal villages and stratified society to the Susquehanna Valley.⁴ Physical evidence, such as the rock carvings, point to a long (and rich) history of Native communities in the Susquehanna Valley, even before the arrival of the Susquehannock.

The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking group that was politically independent of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy to the north.⁵ The Susquehannock Tribe originally lived on the northern branch of the Susquehanna River but expanded to the south. The Susquehannock displaced the earlier Shenks-Ferry People, and established communities in the Lancaster County area.⁶ The Susquehannock move to the south may have been a result of the increasing power of the Iroquois Confederacy (the Susquehannock’s primary enemy), who were expanding in the north.⁷ Historians believe that this transition occurred at some point in the sixteenth century.⁸

At the time of contact with Europeans, the Susquehannock were settled in nine to twelve palisaded villages, with a population numbering about three to four thousand people.⁹ The larger villages of the Susquehannock often managed to provide for over a thousand inhabitants.¹⁰ English explorer John Smith referred to the largest of these villages as Sasquesahanough. This large village was located near present day Washington Boro in Lancaster County.¹¹

Another palisaded Susquehannock village was located near the current day Borough of Lemoyne in eastern Cumberland County. Unfortunately, this settlement has not attracted as much scholarly attention as the famous settlements in Lancaster County. Perhaps this is because the existence of this village was forgotten until the early 2000s, when the Norfolk Southern Railroad began operations in the Lemoyne area. Archaeological excavations near the route of the railroad revealed the existence of a village surrounded by a defensive palisade.¹² Archaeological evidence suggests that the Lemoyne Village was occupied in the early seventeenth century. European goods found at the Lemoyne archeological site correlate with that time range.¹³ Archaeologists have hypothesized that the Lemoyne village was a farming center that provided food for the Susquehannock political center at the Washington Boro site.¹⁴ The existence of this relationship between villages demonstrates that a complex social and political structure was emerging within the Susquehannock Nation. Yet, for reasons unknown, the village at the Lemoyne site was abandoned a couple of decades into the seventeenth century.¹⁵ It just so happens that shortly after the Lemoyne site was abandoned, the Susquehannock would enter into the most tumultuous era of their existence.

The Susquehannock always had complicated relationships with European settlers. It appears that the first European group that the Susquehannock contacted were the French, who were expanding their trade operations from their base in the St. Lawrence River Valley.¹⁶ But it would be the Delaware Bay, and the settlements in that estuary that would prove to be the biggest financial and political boon for the Susquehannock Nation. In the early seventeenth century, the Susquehannock established a close connection to Swedish settlers who were settling in the Delaware Bay.¹⁷

As European invasions intensified in North America, warfare became a huge concern for Indigenous Nations. Fearing an arms disadvantage, Native Peoples would become preoccupied with acquiring firearms.¹⁸ Of course, they would need something valuable to trade for these deadly weapons. The Susquehannock understood the economic value of having extra pelts to sell to Scandinavian traders, so they began to expand their hunting areas into the north, putting them into a direct conflict for resources with other groups, such as the Iroquois Confederacy.¹⁹ This struggle would turn into the long and bloody Beaver Wars. The conflict pitted the Susquehannock and their Huron allies against the Iroquois Confederacy.²⁰ The Beaver Wars would eventually result in the collapse of the Susquehannock Nation, both in terms of population and political power.

Yet there was a time when the Susquehannock seemed to be ascendant. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Susquehannock allied with the Mohawk Nation and carried out a series of successful military campaigns against other Iroquoian groups and the Leni Lenape (also known as the Delaware). The Susquehannock gained a dominant position within both the Susquehanna and Delaware river valleys.²¹ Their military influence even extended to the Ohio River Valley.²² Their monopoly on trade in the Mid-Atlantic region seemed to be secure.

The English victory over the Dutch in the Anglo-Dutch War turned the regional geopolitical situation on its head. New Netherlands disappeared, and with it went an important military alliance for the Susquehannock.²³ The Susquehannock had come into contact with the English as early as 1608, when John Smith had met with a group of sixty Susquehannock warriors near the mouth of the Susquehanna River.²⁴ Smith had heard from the Powhatan Confederacy that the Susquehannock were competent warriors, and fearsome foes.²⁵ But the English would not be able to exert much influence over the Susquehanna Valley until late in the seventeenth century.

In the aftermath of the Anglo-Dutch War, the English consolidated their power in the region, and quickly moved to displace the Susquehannock Nation. In 1675, the Maryland Colony (in cooperation with their new Iroquois allies) coerced the Susquehannock to move into an abandoned fort on the Potomac River. The Susquehanna Valley was now open for European settlement. Some of the Susquehannock would later decide to move back into the Susquehanna Valley under the influence of the New York colonial government, but the splintered Susquehannock would never reach the level of political and military prominence that they enjoyed in the middle of the seventeenth century.²⁶

The new colony of Pennsylvania was established at around the same time as the Susquehannock became splintered into their Potomac and Pennsylvania factions. Now the Susquehanna Valley had become ground zero for a territorial struggle between the colonies of New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, not to mention Native groups like the Iroqouis. All of these groups wanted to control the fur trade in the forested interior. In order to establish a claim for land in the Susquehanna Valley, William Penn (the founder of Pennsylvania) began to negotiate with those Susquehannock who had decided to return to their original homeland. The English were now referring to this population as Conestoga Indians.²⁷

William Penn established good relations with the Conestoga, allowing them to settle along the banks of the Susquehanna River. He also allowed other displaced Native groups to come and settle in the Pennsylvania interior. This led to the establishment of multiple multiethnic settlements along the Susquehanna River, including two in Cumberland County: Geneptukhanne

(where the Conodoguinet Creek meets the Susquehanna), and a second village around what is now New Cumberland. A sizable number of Shawnee Nationals moved into the present-day Carlisle area, where they were soon joined by James Letort, Carlisle’s first European settler.²⁸ During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, legions of displaced Natives would settle in the Susquehanna Valley at places like Conoy Indian Town (in Lancaster County), providing a population barrier between the English Colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy.²⁹ These refugees were simply looking for a safe place to stay in a region torn by warfare, but displaced Natives would soon be consumed by the violent American frontier.

The band of Susquehannock who had moved to the Potomac under the supervision of the Maryland colony were subject to a great tragedy around the year 1675, when they found themselves caught in the middle of Bacon’s Rebellion. Virginian rioters unleashed their violence against the Susquehannock, and the Susquehannock’s settlement on the Potomac was almost completely annihilated.³⁰

The Conestoga, the last remnant of the Susquehannock in the Susquehanna Valley would also come to a tragic end. In the infamous Paxton Boys Massacre, dozens of vigilantes from the Pennsylvania frontier came to the Indian Town in Lancaster County to murder the Native inhabitants. Upon their first attack, they killed six Conestogas. The fourteen survivors fled to the Lancaster County jail, but the Paxton vigilantes pursued them once again, broke into the jail, and ruthlessly slaughtered the fourteen surviving Conestogas, women and children included.³¹ The extermination carried out by the Paxton murderers ended hundreds of years of Susquehannock political organization in the Susquehanna Valley. In the middle of the eighteenth-century Native refugee groups (like the Seneca and the Shawnee) also began to leave the Susquehanna, seeking better living arrangements to the north and west.³² A long history of Native settlements in the Susquehanna Valley was coming to a sudden end.

Clearly, there was a long history of Indigenous settlement in the Susquehanna Valley before any European colonists settled in the area. The Susquehannock Nation were simply the last Native people to settle this region before the European invasions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created an entirely new political dynamic in the region. The rise and fall of the Susquehannock Nation during the course of the Beaver Wars is an important reminder that Indigenous Nations still managed to exert agency during the colonial period. But it also reminds us that when an Indigenous Nation found itself exposed to overwhelming military opposition, the results could be disastrous. The later part of Susquehannock history reveals the intense violence that defined the colonial period: intense violence that often bordered on the wholesale destruction of Nations and the total genocide of Indigenous Peoples. While the tragic end of Susquehannock history in this area occurred almost three hundred years ago, their presence here should never be forgotten.