The Indians

Our early history reveals little that is more stirring or colorful than the diverse Indians tribes of our area. The Indians that crossed our lands were divided into two major language groups, the Algonquian and the Iroquoian, but belonged to many different small nations or tribes. Each tribe spoke a different language, but the languages were much alike. Scientists call these a "linguistic group," language group or family. The largest of these is the Algonquin (or Algonquian) family of tribes with a population of over 250,000 in Canada and the United States. The Algonquin gave us Massasoit who welcomed the Pilgrims and Pocahontas who saved Capt. John Smith's life. They lived in wigwams, wore deerskins, used tomahawks, rode in birch-bark canoes and originated the word powwow. Locally, the Delaware were an important tribe.

Although the Iroquois were clearly the overlords, Algonquian tribes greatly influenced our area. The Lenni-Lenapes (meaning "men of our nation" and who were called Loupe or "wolves" by the early French because of their fierce fighting ability) became the Delaware, an English name adopted from the river named for an English noblemen. Lord de la Warr. The Delawares shared the Algonquian language, not the Iroquoin language. One tribe of the Delawares, the Munsees (or Monseys), lived in the West Branch Valley and formed the basis for the town of Muncy in Pennsylvania and Muncie in Indiana. The Nanticokes or Moors, from the Maryland area, settled for a time in the present Nanticoke. Another tribe was variously called the Piscataways, the Conoys or the Gangawese and briefly lived at Catawissa. The Shawnees migrated from eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, allied with the related Delaware and lived at times at Shawneetown on the site of the present Plymouth, and may have lived at the mouth of Fishing Creek for a time. In 1985, the Eastern Shawnee tribe had a remaining population of 377 living at the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma. The Delaware tribal people were said to total 2,400 in 1823, 3,000 in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1985 there were 396 members of the Delaware nation remaining at the Anadarko Agency in Oklahoma. (to be continued and we promise it will get more interesting!)

Five (and later six) tribes or nations united in a powerful confederacy about 1570. The tribes formed the League of the Iroquois for the dual purpose of acquiring strength and of establishing and enforcing peace. The fathers of the league were a refugee from the Huron Indian tribe, Deganawidah, and a powerful Mohawk medicine man, Hiawatha. (Longfellow gave the name Hiawatha to the hero of his epic poem, but erroneously set the scene among the Chippewa of the northern Great Lakes area.) The French called the members of the league the Iroquois. The English called them the Five Nations. The Indians called themselves the "men of men" or "original men." They are first recorded in the headwaters of the Susquehanna and points north of our area about 1400.

The Iroquois Nation was a powerful confederation, which, during its peak, consisted of a maximum of 15,000 men, women, and children. The confederation consisted of the Mohawk, who were the most easterly of the five tribes and called themselves "the possessors of the flint;" the Oneida, the "granite people" or the "people of the standing stone;" the Onondaga, "the people on the hills;" the Cayuga, "the people at the mucky land;" and the Seneca, the "great hill people." In 1710, the Tuscarora tribe, the "hemp gatherers" or the "shirt wearing people," were forced out of the North Carolina area and moved to the southern part of Pennsylvania. The Tuscarora were admitted as a sixth nation without voting rights in the Great Council. The Tuscarora were removed to Indian Territory in 1846 with a remaining population of thirty two. In 1985 the population of the Tuscarora Reservation in New York was 793. The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were the scourge of Indians from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Ottawa to Tennessee. They are known to have penetrated as far west as the Black Hills and to have attacked the Catawba in South Carolina and the Creek in Florida. The golden age of the Iroquois was from 1650 to 1755, after which its power declined.

The Iroquois controlled a number of tribes including the Tutelo, Delaware, Shawnee and Nanticoke, and virtually wiped out the Huron, Erie and the Susquehannock. From the arrival of Columbus through that of the first settlers from England, our area had been inhabited by a powerful, warlike tribe called the Susquehannock. When first encountered by John Smith in 1608, he described the Susquehannock as "the most noble and heroic nation of Indians that dwell upon the confines of America." Although related to the Iroquois, the Susquehannock carried out constant warfare with them. The Susquehannock War of 1673 was the beginning of the downfall of the tribe, who were almost completely destroyed by the Iroquois by 1675. The few survivors joined the Nottoway, later formed a new tribe called Meherrin and finally called themselves the Conestoga. For many years, the survivors lived with the Oneida in New York State, but they eventually were permitted to return to this area along with remnants of other tribes that had been subdued by the Iroquois. Epidemics reduced their number. In 1763, the last twenty were massacred by a party of rioters known as the Paxton boys seeking revenge for Indian atrocities committed hundreds of miles to the west.

The Iroquois council fire was held near what is now Syracuse at the principal village of Onondaga, the capital of the confederacy, and at one time one of the most important and widely known towns in North America north of Mexico. The term "longhouse" was symbolically applied to the League, and its members spoke of themselves as the "people of the longhouse," based on the long, rectangular houses in which the Iroquois people lived. The symbolic longhouse was represented as extending from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, sheltering within its walls the five tribes who kept the five fires of the longhouse. At the ends of the house stood the doorkeepers, the Mohawk at the east and the Seneca at the west. In between these were the Oneida, who kept the second fire, and the Cayuaga, who kept the fourth fire and whose job it was to care for captives. In the center were the Onondaga who provided the presiding officer and intervened when there was a tie vote in the Great Council in which the Mohawk and Seneca formed the upper house and the Oneida and Cayuga the lower house. The individual nations could, and frequently did, make war as separate powers.

The Iroquois lived in wood and bark cabins arranged in communities, surrounded by a stockade-type fence. It was sometimes necessary to change the location of the village when the bark houses decayed and became infected with vermin, accessible firewood became exhausted, and the soil ceased to produce sufficient crops. Much work was involved in moving to a new site. The Indians did not rename their villages when they moved. They simply lived in a different spot, perhaps twenty miles from the original location, in a village with the original name. The location of the paths to the village also changed, but the names of the paths did not. A name belonged to a whole area rather than to a spot where a settlement stood at a particular time; i.e., Wyoming was a Delaware Indian name, at one time applying to the whole region as far south as Bloomsburg. In common usage, the name Wyoming was applied to what is now Kingston, Wilkes-Barre and adjacent towns. (The state of Wyoming is also named for it)

Indian names abound in our area and Indian influence is everywhere: corn, potatoes, tobacco, cocoa, quinine, the hammock, canoe, toboggan, lacrosse and an elaborate system of Indian paths.

The early North American Indian had no horses. When possible, he moved by water, which accounts for the early settlements made by the banks of rivers. By land, an Indian overland trail always led to its destination in less time and with fewer physical obstacles than any other course. Most primary trails were from twelve to eighteen inches wide and frequently were worn a foot or more deep by several centuries of soft moccasins. Trained runners of the Indians are believed to have covered almost a hundred miles between sunrise and sunset.

One of the earliest Indian trails was the Wyalusing Path, which ran from Wyalusing to Muncy. From Dutch Mountain to Muncy Creek the almost direct path stuck as much as possible to high, dry and level ground. It passed close to Painter Den Pond, picking up the headwaters of Muncy Creek, reaching Nordmont above the mouth of Elk Lick Creek. The first white man to use the path was Bishop John Ettenwein, who led a band of converted Indians across the path in 1772. He wrote of Sullivan County:

"We entered a vast swamp. The undergrowth was so dense that it was impossible to see a man six feet distant. It took five days to traverse the way to the end of Muncy Creek which we crossed 36 times on our journey." The Wyalusing Path was also used as access to Sullivan County in order to catch trout and to hunt deer."

The Indians of the Six Nations used the Wyalusing Path to cross part of Sullivan Country after pillaging the Muncy settlement. They then traveled to Tunkhannock to join forces with a larger band from central New York State. The large militant band went down the Susquehanna River to make the attack on July 3,1778, known by the Indians as the Battle of Wyoming and known by the white settlers as the Wyoming Massacre. The Indians attacked the valley known as Wyoming. The American side retreated to the present Forty Fort, outnumbered almost three to one. The two sides met in a bloody battle that reportedly saw 227 of the defenders killed and many tortured. The survivors fled from the fort, but many died on the way to their homes or to the homes of settlers who lived nearby. Many of the Indians fled the scene using the Pechoquealin Path which ran from Wyoming to Shawnee on Delaware. General John Sullivan lead a punitive expedition against the Six Nations in the summer of 1779 at Newtown (now Elmira), New York. Moses VanCampen was quartermaster of Sullivan's expedition and much later was the namesake of the Benton hotel. VanCampen was born in 1757, and moved "eight miles north of the mouth of Fishing Creek in 1773." He moved to New York State in 1795, and after an active life as surveyor and engineer died at the advanced age of ninety-two. There is an excellent museum at Letchworth State Park in New York state where more information about VanCampen is available.

In addition to the Wyalusing Path, other historic Indian war paths in our area included the Catawissa Path, linking Catawissa with the Indian town Shamokin, now called Sunbury. (The name Shamokin was originally applied to the whole area within fifteen miles of the forks of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna.) The Wapwallopen Path ran from Wapwallopen to Wyoming, now Wilkes-Barre. The Nescopeck Path went from Bethlehem to Nescopeck. The Tulpehocken Path from Shamokin to Womelsdorf, then called Weiser's, in one place crossed an
18-inch shelf on the side of a cliff on the East side of Swatara Creek. The Tioga Path, or the Forbidden Path, left the Sheshequin Path at Trout Run, continuing over the mountains through the present Blossburg and Mansfield to Painted Post, an important Indian junction point. The Towanda Path went north from Muncy to Towanda as straight as topography would permit. The Great Warrior's Path began at Tioga (now Athens) and ended at Shamokin, going through Wysox, Wyalusing, Tunkhannock, Lackawanna, Shawneetown (Plymouth), Shickshinny, Berwick, Bloomsburg and Danville. Part of the trail had both a river route and an inland route, but both trails were called by the same name.

Shamokin, at the forks of the Susquehanna, was the most important Indian town in Pennsylvania from about 1718 until the start of the French and Indian War. A number of important canoe routes and Indian trails converged here. The area was the home of an Iroquois "half-king," sometimes called a "Vice Regent" or "Viceroy," who supervised refugee groups of Indians in the area. (One of the best known was the Oneida chief, Shikellamy, who became the overseer of Delaware and other tribes in 1729. He died in 1748.)

Three main trails could be followed between Shamokin and Tioga (now Athens), New York: the Wyoming Path, the Towanda Path or the Sheshequin Path. The Wyalusing Path across the present Painter Den property was a fourth route to Tioga, although between the severity of our winters and the path's repeated crossing of Muncy Creek it was probably little used in the winter months.

Sixty years of warfare ended in 1764, wars that pitted England against France, English colonists against French colonists. The Iroquois as a league did not take part in the American Revolution, but let each nation decide on its individual action in relation to the colonies. The Iroquois nations generally sided, however, with the English against the Delawares and the Shawnees who sided with the French. It is assumed that no white settlers lived in the present Sullivan County until the conclusion of the Indian wars. The French were eventually defeated and gave up their land claims in North America, including Pennsylvania. Realizing that the English treated the Indian with less respect than did the French, the Delawares and Shawnees continued their fight to regain their land and, in 1761, a brief, unsuccessful confederation of eighteen tribes known by the Indians as Pontiac's Rebellion and by the whites as Pontiac's Conspiracy was formed with the powerful chief of the Ottawa Indians. Pontiac's sessions of attacks lasted for three months. When this confederation was defeated, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed at Rome, New York, and reserved to the Indians of the Six Nations the land for a hunting ground "in the forks of the Susquehanna northward." April 3, 1768, the day following the signing of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 2,000 applications for land surveys were made.

In 1768, settlers encroached on the reservations and formed a "white settlement at the mouth of Muncy Creek." John Penn, Governor of Pennsylvania, ordered Col. William Plunkett to break up the community. The settlers were driven off the land or imprisoned. The dwellings were later occupied by squatters who lived there until 1778, when they were attacked by a band of Indians who took possession of the area. Moses VanCampen joined "Plunket's Expedition" about 1775 and was a distinguished and admired pioneer.

The Indian reservation north from the forks of the Susquehanna was opened for settlement to veterans of the Revolutionary War between 1787 and 1791 by the "New Purchase of 1784." The present Sullivan County, at that time part of Northumberland County, was included.

At the end of the war, the Indians who had espoused the cause of Great Britain were sent to lands assigned to them in the province of Ontario, and many of the descendants of the original Iroquois still live in Canada. After the defeat of the British and the establishment of the United States, the Iroquois remaining in this country were recognized as a nation, and the tribes were assured peaceful lives on reservations in New York State under the Treaty of Canandaigua (signed in 1794) and subsequent treaties.

In 1985 on the New York reservations there were 413 Cayuga, 211 Oneida, 669 Onondaga, 3,025 Mohawk and 5,548 Seneca. In Oklahoma, the combined population of the Seneca and Cayuga was 753, and in Wisconsin the Oneida reservation had a population of 4,437.