Susquehannock

Distribution of the Susquehannock language

The Susquehannock people were natives of areas adjacent to the Susquehanna River and its tributaries from the southern part of what is now New York, through Pennsylvania, to the mouth of the Susquehanna in Maryland at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. These people were called:

• Andastes by the French (from their Huron name Andastoerrhonon),
• Minquas by the Dutch and Swedes (their Lenape (Delaware) name meaning "treacherous"),
• Susquehannocks by the English of Maryland and Virginia (an Algonquian name meaning "people of the muddy river", and
• Conestogas by the English of Pennsylvania (from Kanastoge, meaning "place of the immersed pole", the name of their village in Pennsylvania).

Susquehannock artifacts on display in the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.

It is unknown what the Susquehannocks called themselves. The Susquehannocks were Iroquoian-speaking people. They rejected invitations to join the Five Nations Iroquois League to the north.^{[citation needed]} This made them a typical enemy of the Five Nations. The true nature of their society, whether comprised of a single tribe in a single village, or a confederacy of smaller tribes occupying scattered villages, will probably never be known, since Europeans seldom visited this inland region during the early colonial period. It's likely that the Susquehannocks had occupied the same land for several hundred years. They had a formidable village in the lower river valley near present-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when Captain John Smith of Jamestown met them in 1608. He estimated the population of their village to be two thousand, although he never visited it. Modern estimates of their population, including the whole territory in 1600, range as high as seven thousand.

Over the next hundred years, the Susquehannock population was devastated by the ravages of disease and warfare. Some groups left the area and joined other tribes to the north, south, and west. The remaining Susquehannock, numbering only a few hundred, eventually settled in a new village in Lancaster County called Conestoga Town, where they lived under the protection of the provincial government of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth. Nevertheless, their population declined steadily, so that only twenty-two people remained in Conestoga Town in 1763. That year the Paxton Boys, in response to Indian hostilities on the western frontier, attacked the village and brutally murdered all twenty people that they could find.

Language

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 only contains about 100 words, but it is sufficient to show that Susquehannock was a northern Iroquoian language closely related to those of the Five Nations.

References

• Illick, Joseph E. Colonial Pennsylvania: a History. New York. Scribner. 1976.
• Kent, Barry C. Susquehanna's Indians. Harrisburg, The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. 1984.

External links

• "Where are the Susquehannock?" from native.brokenclaw.net
• "Susquehannock History" by Lee Sultzmanpdc:Susquehannock

Donate to Wikimedia