Extinct Tribe: the Susquehannock

The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking people who lived along the Susquehanna River, to the Delaware River, with range stretching to the Potomac.  They were a buffer between, and often at conflict with, the Iroquois Five Tribes in New York, the Delaware/Lenape, and tribes along the Potomac River.  The most extensive contact with them came from Swedish missionaries in the 1640's, who also compiled a dictionary of Susquehannock words for posterity. 

The Huron, another Iroquoian people, referred to the Susquehannock as Andastoerrhonen, meaning people of the blackened pole, referring to their method of building.  French sources corrupted this an Andastes.  The Delaware gave the Susquehannock a name which cannot be mentioned in a family-oriented post, and also called them minqua, meaning foreigner or different.  The Delaware name sisawek hannon len, meant oyster river people.  The Powhatan, another Algonquian-speaking tribe, called them Susquesahanough, which English speakers corrupted to Susquehannock.  The Susquehannock people's own means of referring to themselves is not recorded.  Settlers in Pennsylvania also referred to these Natives as Conestoga, which is an Iroquoian word meaning place where there is an upright pole.  Conestoga was the name of the last remaining of the Susquehannock towns, and the name stuck. 

The Susquehannock were a confederation of several smaller groups of people.  Like most Eastern Woodlands people, they dwelt in palisade longhouses and relied on agriculture in addition to hunting.  Prior to European contact, the Susquehannock were a formidable tribe, capable of holding off the Five Tribes in New York, or the Delaware.  They traded extensively with the Dutch and also Swedes.  However, warfare and disease took their toll and most Susquehannock had perished or been assimilated into other tribes by the time the English took over Dutch claims in North American in the 1660's.  The Susquehannock competed with other tribes, most notably the Iroquois, in the ongoing beaver trade and the wars that accompanied it.  A series of epidemics hit the Susquehannock hard in the late 17 and early 18th centuries.  Those that remained fled beyond the mountains and joined the Shawnee.

A few Conestoga remained in Pennsylvania, where they tried to remain neutral during the French and Indian War (1755-1763) and Pontiac's Rebellion (1764).  As discussed in a prior post, these people were massacred during an uprising by the so-called Paxton Boys.  The Susquehanna River and Susquehannock State Park were named for the tribe.