The Aboriginees
The Indians of North America lived in the hunter state, and depended for subsistence on hunting, fishing and the spontaneous fruits of the earth. Where climate permitted some tribes cultivated corn, long potatoes, pumpkins and squashes. They did not know the use of metals, and all their weapons and tools were made of wood and stone. They also made a rude kind of earthen vessels and their clothing was the skins of wild beasts. They had no flocks, herds or domestic animals of any kind, the horse and ox being natives of Europe and not found in America.
Their government was a kind of patriarchal Confederacy. The small villages or families had a chief who ruled or controlled it, and their several bands composing a nation had a chief who presided over the whole.
The Powhatan Confederacy in Tide Water, Virginia, South of the Potomac, was composed of thirty tribes or villages numbering a population of about 8000 being one to the square mile, and capable of putting 2400 warriors in the field.
The tribes on the head waters of the James, Potomac, and Rappahannock North of the falls of these rivers were hostile to the Powhatans and were attached to the Mannahoacs.
Jefferson says "Westward of all these tribes, beyond the mountains and extending to the great lakes were the Massawamees a most powerful confederacy, who harassed unremittingly the Powhatans and Mannahoacs." These were probably the ancestors of tribes known at present by the name of the Six Nations.
At the time the Territory of West Virginia was first known to the whites all sources of information agree that there were no permanent towns within its boundaries, that it was a kind of a "No Man's Land."
There were probably at all times small parties and families living in rude wigwams scattered along all the principal rivers of the State engaged in hunting, who had their permanent homes west of the Ohio.
Their camping places were known by the first settlers as "Fort Fields," and to this day arrow heads, stone hatchets, bones and mussel shells, charcoal and pottery are still turned up by the plow.
The burying places were often on high hills and the burial seems to have been made by covering the body with a heap of stones.
Unless the old fields of Hardy County were planted by the Indians, it is supposed that no crops were raised in West Virginia. This is owning probably to the dense forest which at that time covered the Country and to the great labor necessary to clear off the timber, as the Indians were never known to engage in anything requiring regular and prolonged hard work.
The flint out of which their weapons and tools were made is found in Ritchie, Randolph and Pocahontas Counties.
While they constructed no roads they had regular routes of travel, which were beaten into well defined paths by the passing feet of many generations of pedestrians, which were as plain to the Indians as a turnpike to the White Man.
As they had no beasts of burden the labor of moving where all their effects had to be carried on their persons must have been considerable, but this work fell to the lot of the squaws.
On some of the streams canoes were used when the depth of the water permitted.
The Catawba War Path or Warriors Road as it was sometimes called, led from Western New York by way of Fayette County, Pa., crossing the Cheat at the mouth of Grassy Run, through the Tygart's valley to the Holston River. Over this route the Six Nations traveled in their wars against the Southern Indians.
A branch of this trail bore South West from McFarland's on Cheat to the Monongahela, down Fish Creek to the Ohio River, thence through Southern Ohio to Kentucky.
An Eastern trail was up Fish Creek from the Ohio down Indian and up White Day Creeks and on to the South Branch Valley... Other trails ran East from the Tygart's Valley to the South Branch, that known as the Seneca being the principal one.
A trail ran up the Big Kanawha and reached into North Carolina, and one ran up the Little Kanawha thence to the waters of the West Fork, up Hacker's Creek, through the Buckhannon country to the Tygart's Valley.
The settlements that were made on and near these trails by the whites were subject to repeated raids from the Indians beyond the Ohio and suffered severely from them.
The trails leading from the Ohio East were well known to the early settlers, and scouts were posted on them near the Ohio to give the alarm to the settlers of the approach of war parties.
Whatever tribes said to have been the Huron's, occupied or claimed West Virginia, were conquered and driven out by the Six Nations, who had their seat of Government in Western New York, and the territory held by right of conquest.
The Six Nations were composed of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagoes, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras, the Tuscaroras being admitted to the Confederacy in 1712, before that time they were known as the Five Nations.
The conquered and claimed territory reaching from Massachusetts to the Lakes and South to the Tennessee.
At a treaty held by Sir William Johnson with them at Fort Stanwix, now Rome, New York, in 1768, they relinquished title to the King of all territory lying East of a line commencing at the mouth of the Tennessee up the Ohio and Allegheny rivers to Kittanning Creek, thence N.E. to the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers.
The Shawnees, Delawares, Mingoes and other small tribes living on and West of the Ohio laid claim to some of this territory, and continued to dispute its possession with the whites until the treaty of Greenville by Wayne in 1795.
The occupation of Fort Duquesne by the English followed by the treaty of Fort Stanwix extinguishing the Indian title to West Virginia, emigration set in and continued until the occupation of the State, notwithstanding the hostilities of the Ohio Indians and the War of the Revolution.
Whether the race known as Mound Builders, whose work is scattered over the State, were the ancestors of the Indians, or whether the latter destroyed them, must always remain in doubt.
Whoever they were and what part they played on the stage of human events will never be known. The record of their lives has been closed, never to be opened again.
It is but little that can be said of the early Indian of West Virginia. As a child of the forest he worked out the problem of his simple life.
He left no written record of the history of his race, no monument commemorating the deeds of his great men, no ruined palaces no works or buildings of a public nature. He simply lived out his miserable existence in the dreary forest to the end with no higher ambition in life than to triumph over his enemies, and leaving nothing to show to others that he had ever lived save a few stone weapons and the ashes of his fires.
The coming of the white man was an evil day for the red one, and even in his untutored mind he saw the dawn of a new era which was foreign to his nature, and which he could not understand and would not accept and therein he read the doom of his race.
The dark night of barbarism that for untold centuries had brooded over the green hills and along the fair rivers of West Virginia has been dispelled by the bright light of a new civilization, and the courage and energy of the pioneer has made the once savage wilderness blossom as the rose.
