Great Minqua Path
Manor Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
This was the chief trail used by the Minqua (Susquehannock) Indians to carry great wealth in beaver skins to the white settlements on the Delaware during the mid-seventeenth century. The Swedes, Dutch and English warred for the control of this trade.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
This was the great artery of the mid-17th-century fur trade, the chief trail by which the Minqua—also known as the Susquehannock—carried beaver pelts eastward to the European settlements along the Delaware. The trade was so lucrative that the Swedes, Dutch, and English fought one another to control it. The path traced a route of immense commercial and political importance in the early contest for the region.
Why it matters
It reveals how Native trade networks shaped the earliest European rivalries in the Mid-Atlantic, with the beaver pelt as the currency of empire.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Washington Boro Archaeological Sites
Manor Township, PA · est. 2007
Along a bend of the lower Susquehanna River lies one of the densest clusters of archaeological sites in Pennsylvania, holding traces of human presence stretching back some 11,000 years — from fleeting hunting camps to sprawling palisaded villages. Its most powerful inhabitants were the Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian-speaking people who dominated the regional fur trade with European colonists through much of the 1600s. By 1675, warfare with rival nations and devastating epidemics had shattered their power. Generations of excavation here have reshaped how scholars understand Native lifeways in the mid-Atlantic.
Martin Chartier - PLAQUE
Manor Township, PA · est. 1925
Martin Chartier was a French adventurer from Canada who had served at La Salle's Fort St. Louis in the Illinois country before leading a band of Shawnee eastward, first to Maryland and then, by 1697, to the Susquehanna at Pequea Creek. Settling on a tract granted him by William Penn, he became one of early Pennsylvania's most important Indian traders and interpreters, and an agent in Penn's treaties with the Susquehanna nations. His son Peter, born of his Shawnee wife, carried on the trade after him.
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