Foot of Tussey Mountain

May 25, 2007 - 7:52am — JYork

The view today from the foot of Huntingdon County Pennsylvania’s Tussey Mountain looking east reveals green, rolling ridges, a farm valley and Raystown Lake facilities. With the exception of Raystown Lake, the forested hills and farms have been here for 100’s of years and long before that American Indians enjoyed the same view.

People "power" altered this landscape and in doing so it add pages to a story about a piece of real estate located at the foot of Tussey Mountain.

While the exact location of this event may not be known, history records that a Huntingdon County farmer was tending his fields at the foot of Tussey Mountain when a surprise attack by Indians ended his life. The year was 1776. A small, granite marker located in the Entriken Cemetery was placed and dedicated in 1994 during a public ceremony organized by Entriken resident Charlie Johnson.

I believe that event and the recently developed Pioneer Family Campground share the same location.

First a forest, then a clearing cultivated for crops, then the scene of a brutal attack, then a short lived Par-three golf course [sorry never took a picture] and then a first-class campground and presently a family vacation spot.

This is a neat story location. Not to mention one really nice campground.

The field looks more like this now:

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May 28, 2007 - 7:24pm — JYork

Footnote - No Teepees in Pennsylvania

PaulaZ is a great resource for . . . well most things and she can research with the best of them. I asked her a question about American Indians, who, when, lifestyle, culture, etc and got this reply;

"Good question. At about the time of contact, and a little before, most people seem to think that there were Delaware and Shawnee in central PA. During the American Revolution, Seneca raiding parties came down from New York. There were probably others involved in these raids, too.

Larry Smith has attempted to put together who was around here; check out http://www.motherbedford.com/Indian1.htm

Long ago, going back to the retreat of the last continental glacier here in North America (about 16,000 years ago), many people lived here, but we can't pin them to a known historic group. The earliest evidence of people in North America is at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County, PA http://meadowcroft.pghhistory.org/

There is plenty of evidence for using natural rockshelters and caves (including Indian Caverns (http://www.indiancaverns.com/), although their interpretation leaves a little to be desired -- no teepees in PA!). And, of course, there was Sheep Rock Shelter, now under Lake Raystown (see

http://www.explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=2499 for a neat knife from there). When I was working in the Allegheny National Forest, up in Warren and McKean counties, we discovered that the boulder fields were also used for camps, at least.

Later shelters were made by bending saplings and covering them with bark or skins. This was basically how the longhouses of the Iroquois were made, and they really were long -- some as much as 300 feet!

Shorter versions go by a variety of names -- wikiup, wigwam, and were often grouped together within a stockade. Here's a neat site about who lived in what where:

http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/houses/housingmap.html

A note about names: use American Indians to talk generally about America's aboriginal population. If you know the cultural affiliation, use that (for example, Iroquois, Lenape or Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, etc.). And remember not to say things like "Delaware Indians" or "Iroquois Indians;" it's redundant -- just refer to them as Delaware or Iroquois. (That's how you can immediately separate the people in the know from the posers!) Here's the site for the National Museum of the American Indian: http://www.nmai.si.edu/.

FYI, the literal translation of the names of most Indian cultures in almost all languages is "people" or "the people." This site http://www.tolatsga.org/Compacts.html is a good place to start in looking into their histories."

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