Laid Back History: School Edition | Ep 1 - Native Americans of Western Pennsylvania

hi I'm Clegg Kilgore from the Washington County Historical Society and today we're talking about the Native Americans of western Pennsylvania so we're talking about the Native Americans of western Pennsylvania and it's a kind of something we don't think about a lot that in the 18th century this was in western Pennsylvania this was the front tier of the United States and so prior to the 1740s 1750s you're gonna find a large population of Native Americans here and now the strange thing is is you're not gonna find them being permanently inhabiting this this location but they're using it as a hunting grounds and so we want to talk a little bit about that and about their interactions with the with the settlers that would have come out here so we're gonna jump back a little bit and we're not gonna go back in the prehistory you know we could we could go back and talk about meta croft which dates to you know 15,000 years ago but we're gonna we're gonna start really let's say about 300 years ago we'll go back to the 216 1700s and start there and what you're gonna find is that the this is Native American territory you're not going to see any settlers out here really you know there's gonna be settlers that that are on the east coast and then as time goes by as the population increases along the coast they're going to start pushing a little bit further west and so you're gonna see those tribes that initially would have been on the east coast being pushed out here to the frontier so tribes like the Delaware or as they would have been known the the lineal anafi they lived on in New Jersey in Delaware and then in the very eastern portions of Pennsylvania but as settlers started coming in you know you get into the to the 1600s as settlers start moving in and they're they're living along the coast they're pushing these tribes a little bit further west and so the Delaware now we're going to be shoved to to like the central Pennsylvania area and then the settlers keep coming so you get into the 1700s and the the settlers are still moving further to the to the west and so these Delaware tribes are pushed even further now they're gonna be they're gonna run into other tribes because out here in the 1600s you're gonna have the Monongahela peoples you're gonna see what would become the Shawnee Indians even from up in New York State where the Seneca are being pushed down or are kind of curving down into the North northwestern part of Pennsylvania so there's a lot of different tribes in here and they're all broken up when I say the Monongahela peoples that's a lot of smaller tribes but what ends up happening is as the Delaware being pushed further to the west and the Shawnee are starting to rise up out of the south they incorporate these smaller tribes into their own tribe and so the Monongahela peoples kind of disappear by 7 to 1725 they're they're pretty much gone they've been incorporated into the to the Delaware the Shawnee and even in some cases they've moved north into the into Erie the area of Erie today and been incorporated into the Seneca people's well the settlers don't stop you know they don't stop in the east they continue to push further to the west and as they do they push these tribes further and further and so the Delaware end up being located in the Ohio the Ohio River Valley so Eastern Ohio what is now the West Virginia Panhandle Pennsylvania western Pennsylvania they're kind of in that area and they're sharing that with the Shawnee the Shawnee are are mainly in Ohio but they're hunting in western Pennsylvania and so that's kind of what you're gonna see in the 1750s 1760s here in Western PA so how are the Native Americans living you know we I remember you know when I was in school we think of your the Plains Indians with the longhouses and the way they were living and that's not really the same here they're they're living a little bit different here in western Pennsylvania they had what they called wiki or or Hut's that they would build so these are kind of imagine they would take saplings so trees that are you know about that big around you know three or four inches at most and they're gonna bury them sticking straight up in the ground so you're gonna have a circular formation of these trees these saplings and then what they would do is they would pull them together into the center and tie them off so you have almost this like dome structure then they would take bark they would strip the bark off of trees and layer them onto that that framework of saplings because they would not only pull those towards the center they would weave other smaller limbs within those those larger saplings that were pulled together so you take that that bark and you start at the bottom and you start layering it up towards the top so it's going to overlap so your bottom ones here the next one's gonna lay on top then the next one this way and they continue that all the way up towards the center and they would leave an opening in the center though so what that does is by that overlapping by that layering over top it kinda acts like shingles so rain snow whatever might be would lay on there but it would run off it wouldn't run into the into the wiki and then you're also gonna see as I said that opening in the center because they're gonna build a fire they're gonna have a small fire pit in the center of the wiki so that not a big fire but a small fire that they can heat it with and all the smokes gonna come up the dome and out that's off and so they're going to use those as as as hunting Hut's so when they're traveling through the area they might build these to stay in while they're hunting before they go back to their villages in their villages they lived in a variation of the longhouse it was same idea take poles or small saplings bury them in the ground except you're gonna do it in a straight row and then you're gonna bring them together in the center and then they would put bark over top of them or later on they would build a variation of a log house basically taking on some of the characteristics of the settlers log cabins that they would build they would put poles in the in the ground and then lay big trees in between them and so you would have two walls that were kind of like stacked logs that went up and then a framework of saplings that they would then cover and they would down down the center of those they would build a trench they would dig a trench actually and they would have fires all along that that would the smoke would go up and then out the center because they would leave portions of it open and so you would have along the edges that that trench that's where you would have you know foods that were drying they would you know even if they were smoking meats they would have the set the the natives themselves would sleep in there would stay in there and that was their home that's that's kind of the way that they they would live they used prior to the settlers coming out here prior to I guess I should say prior to the traders coming out here they used stone tools they used a lot of flint so they had Spears and the bow and arrow that had Flint heads on him either spear heads or arrow heads they had drills they would make these drills that were that were made out of Flint that had just a um along a piece of Flint that came to a point had a a small handle that came off of it and you could spin it or use a bow to spin it and they could actually drill holes using that they had stone tools so there their axes their war-clubs would be made out of stone and so they were taken it's called napping they would nap it and bring that stone to a pretty sharp edge but even still if you're cutting down a tree you're not really always kind of say you're not really cutting down a tree you're just kind of beating it into submission eventually it just gives up and falls over and so these are the types of tools that they're gonna be using early on but in the 1730 1740s you see traders coming out here you know the Morgan trading company sends people out here there's French traders there's English traders and they're bringing for the first time iron tools and iron implements so they're going to be coming out in in what they what they introduce to the to the Native Americans are things like axes iron axes or tomahawks you know the thing that we we always think of them when we talk about Native Americans you know we always think about them having a tomahawk well they they didn't have those originally those were traded to them by the settlers and by the traders that came out here and so these iron tools that they now have if you go from stone to a stone axe to an iron axe I mean those are worlds apart and so the set the the Native Americans became kind of dependent on these traders for these iron tools that they're gonna be using and so you're like I said this thing that we always think about with Native Americans the tamaak actually was introduced to them by the settlers and then later on they would also have they would have weapons like muskets they would have muskets that the traders would trade to them and so they did have muskets that they could use now these muskets that they had weren't like the ones the settlers would have they weren't rifled they were smoothbore they were the older surplus ones that weren't being used anymore sometimes they were cracked and damaged and what the English traders did is they painted the stalks the wood portions of them they would paint it blue or red in the Native Americans love that they love how colorful it was so they they thought it was great but really what the what the the traders were doing were just hiding all the issues all the imperfections in the guns themselves and so what you end up with is the the Native Americans having these these muskets these trade muskets what they didn't have a lot of was powder you know so the the English traded and the muskets but kind of didn't want to trade them the powder because they didn't want him to be able to use the muskets against them and so the settlers out here got to the point where they were very familiar with the Native Americans and they could tell you when it was a native whether it was a Shawnee or whatever it was firing one of their muskets because it made a different sound it made more of a popping sound instead of a bang because they didn't have as much powder they would load it with a lot less powder than what black powder than what you would actually need so what ends up happening is that you you have these settlers that are pushing further and further west and the Native Americans are being pushed further and further west there were some friendly tribes the Delaware tried to try to make treaties with the settlers with the English and tried to be friends with them in some cases they even tried to incorporate English traditions and customs and religion into their own religion and own customs and traditions thinking that you know maybe the settlers would be the English would would not push them further west if they kind of incorporated themselves into the English it didn't work too well for them it was a nice idea just didn't work real well so as the English kept pushing further and further west the the Native Americans kept getting pushed further west and so the last tribe you're really gonna find here in Washington County there was a Delaware tribe that was known that that had a chief by the name of catfish his name was Tim Gong Qin people had a hard time saying it so they called him catfish and there's a little stream in Washington called catfish Creek and that was named after catfish because their camp was right in Washington down where Washington and Jefferson Jefferson's football field is that was catfish camp and so that was kind of the last tribe you're gonna see here in western Pennsylvania the Shawnee attempted to not let the settlers push any further west so they they were more violent towards the settlers and when you when you learn about the the settlers on the frontier about how they how they had to build up to 45 different settler forts out here to protect against the Native American raids they had to do that because of the Shawnee the Shawnee were attacking the frontier settlements and they were attacking for for several reasons one they were looking for powder you know they were looking for powder to load their muskets are led to make the musket balls with they were looking for supplies and they were also looking to push the settlers out of this region they were also wanting to get their lands back and so you do have a lot of confrontations between the settlers and in the shawnee you know we always look at it probably as the the Shawnee being in the wrong they were the ones attacking the settlements but you know we were the ones taking over their land you know as as we pushed further west we signed treaties that said we wouldn't come over the Allegheny Mountains or we wouldn't cross the Ohio River and we did you know we kept taking more and more land you know as the settlers would come out here and see this this fertile beautiful land across the river they went and they took it and so the Shawnee were fighting to keep their land you know what they claim to be theirs and they had a better claim to it probably than we did but we had the resources you know eventually what happens is how we stake a full claim to western Pennsylvania and the Ohio territory there's a group called Wayne's Wayne's legions and that was the United States Army at the time in the 1790s under the command of general Anthony Wayne and Anthony Wayne takes his legions out in Ohio fights a war against the Native Americans and at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 he defeats the Native Americans and that kind of puts it into the to the what we called the uprisings but really it was them defending their lands kind of puts an end to it and with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 all the western territory is given to to the United States at that time not no longer the English and so we stay claim to what is western Pennsylvania Ohio western Virginia Kentucky Tennessee that whole area now becomes our land in the Native Americans have to push even further west so the tribes that were the Seneca peoples the Shawnee the Delaware they go further west and some of them become down in Oklahoma some of the Shawnee become what's what we know is the Cherokee and that's kind of probably the most famous tribe we think of but the Cherokee you know form out of the Shawnee and we shove them even further west and eventually we push them all the way to the coast and put them on reservations but they made a stand here they tried in western Pennsylvania to make a stand just they weren't successful you know and ended up being pushed even even further to the West so so that's kind of a brief overview of what you would find in western Pennsylvania when it came the Native Americans you know and again they started on the east coast get pushed out here and finally get pushed out all together but you're gonna find the Monongahela peoples the Delaware the Shawnee portions of the the the the Six Nations the the Seneca you're gonna find you know them having all ties to western Pennsylvania but for the most part to thing the thing to think about is western Pennsylvania wasn't by the 1725 1730's you don't see really Native Americans living here that much it's more of just a hunting ground so that's our our talk on the Native Americans of southwestern Pennsylvania [Music]

Channel: Visit Washington County, PA

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Id: u2So2g4ss4I

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020