This weekend my sister and I ventured north to the mountains to visit Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and Tuscarora State Park. In this stretch of the Appalachians, the hills run zig-zags with even-topped ridges folded hard with valleys squeezed in between. They serve to funnel north winds to create aerial highways that carry millions of birds migrating southward from New England, the Canadian Maritimes and Boreal, and the Arctic in the fall.
We'd spent the morning on the overlooks and boulder trails of Hawk Mountain and watched as a lone hawk spotter-counter started his first shift of the fall season on the North Lookout. I'll post about that experience later, but for the afternoon we drove down into the folded valleys for a wander. Like the aerial highways above, these valleys have carried people for thousands of years on networks of footpaths.
We navigated the Spirit of the Tuscarora Trail, a figure-8 path that winds along the flanks of Lake Tuscarora and Locust Creek through hemlock, oak, hickory, and rhododendron forest. We came upon several sections of trail that followed a much older treadway which reminded me of the holloways and sunken footpaths of Scotland and England. There was some careful trail work done under the rhododendron to clear just enough limb lattice to clear room for a human passing beneath. I've seen rhodo forests hacked to bits to make way for wider, higher trails that accommodate groups and bikes and horses, so I made sure to let Pap Knauss know in a Facebook post that his careful work was really appreciated.
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| Looks like recent rains refilled a vernal pool - toadlets abound! |
Paul A. W. Wallace (1891-1967), author and professor at Lebanon Valley College near here, wrote one of the first books I remember picking up in my undergrad years at MICA while studying landscape. It sparked my interest in human-man landforms and in reading old maps. Indian Paths of Pennsylvania, (1965) laid groundwork for environmental history in Pennsylvania, a field he once called "outdoor history." I don't doubt that his books, both of which I still have, influenced my love of EH and later, my earning a PhD in the field.
Like rivers of wind that carry birds along Appalachian ridges, river and creek valleys served as a corridors for human travel over and through this mountainous state. Wallace worked to document this network of indigenous paths that carried people great distances and connected native towns and villages. These paths are all but gone today - paved over, plowed up, eroded away, or built upon - so that very few sections of the old ways survive. I've come across some old traces occasionally in my years hiking PA and on this hike we wondered if we hadn't come across a trace, maybe having become a bridle path after being abandoned by foot travelers.
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| From: Wallace (1965) Indian Paths of Pennsylvania |
It certainly had the right feel. I've walked an embedded section of the Paxtang Path that is now the modern Conestoga Trail, itself named for the last of the Susquehannocks, and followed its through some old woods along the Susquehanna. A farmer-friend in Adams County pointed out what he thought was a section of the ancient Monocacy path, a major South-Central PA foot trail out of Maryland. It's mainly the Lincoln Highway Rt 30 today, but what he showed me was a very narrow sidling road, too narrow to be the famous wagon road carried tens of thousands of settlers west. Lou is the sixth generation to farm this land. "We've always called it the old Indian Trace," he said and we followed it across his woodlot for a ways before it ended at a paved road and was lost to a recreation field on the other side. On several occasions I've intersected what I believe to be the Nanticoke Path that runs north-south from Delaware to New York. I've also experienced Indian paths in North and South Carolina and Virginia where old Indian paths are still called traces.
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| Pearl Shell Mussel |
Wallace's research was extensive. He used old maps, archives, settler and missionary journals, and the oral histories of early 20th century road builders who remembered the lay of the land before paved turnpikes and highways. He talked to farmers and miners who knew of sunken trails that led to hand-dug quarries for flint, soapstone, paint minerals, and chert. His work was so extensive and exact that his maps have been added to the State Archives GIS system and marked as historic.
Wallace suggests that for those engaged in long-distance travel on the Pennsylvania path network, finding a night's rest was not as difficult as we might imagine. Villages, rock shelters, and even traveler's cabins were kept for tired travelers and were written about by traders who found the paths accommodating, often faster to use on foot than the rugged and dangerous wagon paths. These paths did not have names as we name our roads and highways today, but they were often known by the names of villages that connected them like the Mahoning Indian Town Path and Conestoga Town Path that we can still follow by road today.
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| Embedded path - a trace. |
Like a big river, a major paths was fed by tributary paths. The Great Warrior Path, known to hundreds of tribes across the Eastern U.S.was joined by dozens of footpaths that came from upcountry towns and palisade villages from the Chesapeake to the Great Lakes. Some treadways were ages old, while others like the Nanticoke Path were in use only for the few years it took an entire indigenous group to leave their homeland, displaced by European invaders. In a time of national division and dangerous hate of "the outsider" I am reminded of my own immigrant ancestors who played no small part in ridding the land of its indigenous population and I wonder how they, German, Scot, English, and Scot settlers, thought about the people they displaced, if they gave them any thought at all.
The Tuscarora People were displaced from coastal North Carolina after the violence of the Tuscarora War (1711-1718). Succumbing to the pressures of European settlers, merchants, and militias, the people fled north on the Tuscarora Path. It carried exiles hundreds of miles north to Pennsylvania and New York where they were accepted into the protection of the League of Five (now Six) Nations. According to park literature, descendants of some of those migrants continue to live in the area though most resettled in the Great Lakes region. The Tuscarora War bears some further research as it played a decisive and divisive role in how the southern slave trade evolved from kidnapping and enslavement of native people to the African slave trade in the Carolinas. David Perry's newest research (below in Notes) really casts an intense light on this period of Colonial history.
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| Tuscarora Lake |
We finished up our hike down at the lake to enjoy the sounds of a few families picnicking and kids swimming. The trail was beautiful and I was excited at having spotted a new-to-me freshwater mussel species, the Pearl Shell (thanks again to Pap) - (life dance!). It's time to dig out the snorkle mask and go visit our cold creek mussel beds which are in dire need of protection and appreciation. Great day hiking, mountain and valley miles of wonderful Pennsylvania natural and hidden human histories.
Notes:
Edie Wallace, granddaughter to Paul A.W. Wallace, and a cultural resources historian documented her trip to retrace a route laid out by her grandfather in his classic book. I've been on this route a lot.
"Following Grandpa's Footsteps: Retracing the Indian Paths of Pennsylvania," in: International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture, Vol. 36 (2013). http://www.pioneeramerica.org/past2013/past2013artwallace.html
Wallace's book can be found on the Internet Archive and is still available in print. https://archive.org/details/indianpathsofpen00wall/mode/2up
David Perry's excellent 2016 book, The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies, takes the deepest dive yet into the factors, factions, and consequences of this deadly period of Colonial settlement when white merchants, planters, traders, and slavers poured into the Carolinas from Barbados and Europe and threatened the survival of the Tuscarora people. A good read, but not an easy one.
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