Gallitzin, Pennsylvania

History

Dutch traders and trappers friendly to the Susquehannock may have visited the region about 1620, as the town sits atop a mountain pass through which the ancient Amerindian trails (later renamed the Kittanning Path) transited. The plateau atop the escarpment was the domain of the Iroquoian confederations of the Erie people and the Susquehannock peoples, both sharing the byways and hunting lands of the Allegheny Mountains until about the mid-1650s. The Susquehannock and Erie people are known to have traded through the area, one of the few avenues the Erie, who dominated the hunting lands west of the Alleghenies, had to obtain by firearms; though, by all accounts, all the tribes in contact with the numerous Erie were reluctant to trade them firearms. Further, Susquehannocks are quoted to have expected 800 Erie warriors in 1662 to join in their war with the Iroquois. By 1675, both the Susquehannocks and Erie tribes would both fall to rampant multiple-years of epidemic diseases, in combination with the vicious multi-decade internecine territorial bloodletting known as the Beaver Wars, which left the Alleghenies a remote hunting ground of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederation.

From the History section of Gallitzin, Pennsylvania on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.