Susquehannock Indian Encampment

Maryland Historical Society

The Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock Indians dominated the territory north of the Patapsco and Choptank Rivers from large fortified villages centering along the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Archaeological, historical, and linguistic analysis suggests that the Susquehannocks were closely related to the northern Iroquoian tribes of the Fingers Lakes area of the Northeast.

By the 1580s, the Susquehannock moved into a large fortified village 40 miles north of the mouth of the Susquehanna River.1 From this location, they were able to dominate the regional trade in fur, marine shell, and copper. As European trade items entered the area in the 1500s, the Susquehannock gained access through displacement, adoption, or alliance with local Algonquian chiefdoms of the upper Chesapeake region. During his Summer 1608 voyage of the Chesapeake, Captain John Smith met and established a trade alliance with the Indians. Village population varied from an estimated 1,000 to 4,000 people. They lived on an economy of farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering.2

In the 1620s, the Susquehannock established a trade alliance with the Dutch, who knew them by the name of Minqua. In 1632, they entered into a trade alliance with Virginian William Claiborne, who had established an English settlement on Kent Island.3 The fur trade for beaver was so profitable that the Colony of Maryland was established in 1634 to take advantage of it.

In 1638, Maryland colonists attacked and took over the Claiborne settlement on Kent Island, leading to hostile relations with the Susquehannock.4 These hostilities lasted until the peace treaty of 1652. In that treaty, the Susquehannock Indians ceded to Maryland the land north of the Patapsco and Choptank Rivers in exchange for Maryland support of the Susquehannock against the Five Nation Iroquois.

Maryland wished to enter into a peace treaty with the Five Nation Iroquois in 1674. They invited the Susquehannock Indians to move to the Potomac River on Piscataway Creek. At this location, they were attacked by a joint force of Maryland and Virginia colonists and Piscataway Indians in 1675. They escaped from the attacks and traveled around the region, resettling back at their original territory by 1690. They accepted control by and protection of the Five Nation Iroquois. However, the Susquehannock continued to raid and encouraged the Five Nation Iroquois to attack the Piscataway in retribution for the1675 battle.

From a population of 4,000 in 1608, the number of Susquehannock dwindled to about 300 people by the 1690s. Twenty of the twenty-two surviving Susquehannock Indians in Lancaster County were massacred by the Paxton Boys in December of 1763.5 The Susquehannock were a major Indian nation involved in a far reaching trade network from the late sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, they became one of many refuge native populations living under the protection of the Five Nation Iroquois in the Susquehanna River valley and the Five Nations territory.

1. Jennings 1984 provided a detailed discussion of the Iroquois of the Northeast and their interactions with the Susquehannock. Kent 1984 provides detailed historical, archaeological and language data on the Susquehannock.

2. Kent 1984: 364

3. Fausz: 1988: 62-70

4. Fausz 1988: 83

5. Kent 1984: 66-68

Kent, Barry C. The Susquehanna’s Indians. Anthropological Series No. 6. Harrisburg: The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1984.

Jennings, Francis. “Susquehannocks.” In Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Handbook of North American Indians 15 (Northeast). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984.

Fausz, J. Frederick. “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake.” In Colonial Chesapeake Society. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.