Native American Era
For thousands of years, Native Americans inhabited the region where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join to form the Ohio. Paleo-Indians conducted a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the region perhaps as early as 19,000 years ago. Meadowcroft Rockshelter, an archaeological site west of Pittsburgh, provides evidence that these first Americans lived in the region from that date. During the Adena culture that followed, Mound Builders erected a large Indian Mound at the future site of McKees Rocks, about three miles (5 km) from the head of the Ohio. The Indian Mound, a burial site, was augmented in later years by members of the Hopewell culture.
By 1700 the Iroquois held dominion over the upper Ohio valley; other tribes included the Lenape, or Delawares, who had been displaced from eastern Pennsylvania by European settlement, and the Shawnees, who had migrated up from the south. With the arrival of European explorers, these tribes and others had been devastated by European diseases, such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and malaria.
In 1748, when Conrad Weiser visited Logstown, 18 miles (29 km) downriver from Pittsburgh, he counted 789 warriors gathered: 165 Lenape, 163 Seneca, 162 Shawnee, 100 Wyandot, 74 Mohawk, 40 Tisagechroamis, 35 Onondaga, 20 Cayuga, 15 Oneida, and 15 Mohicans.
Shannopin's Town, a Seneca tribe village on the east bank of the Allegheny, was the home village of Queen Aliquippa, but was deserted after 1749. Sawcunk, on the mouth of the Beaver River, was a Lenape (Delaware) settlement and the principal residence of Shingas, a chief of the Lenapes. Chartier's Town was a Shawnee town and Kittanning was a Lenape and Shawnee village on the Allegheny with an estimated 300–400 residents.
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“Met face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a great city. The one is no more a child of nature than the other. In the progress of degradation the distinction of races is soon lost.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)