Before the Forts, Before the Fight: The True Wyoming Valley

And far from being “wilderness,” the Wyoming Valley was a landscape shaped by human hands.

A River Valley That Fed the People

By the time European eyes first caught sight of this place, the Wyoming Valley was already ancient with human history. Archaeological evidence places human presence here as far back as 10,000 years ago—bands of hunter-gatherers following mastodon trails, carving tools from stone, and slowly learning how to shape the land rather than just move through it.

By the 1200s CE, large parts of the Susquehanna River corridor were under the stewardship of Eastern Woodland cultures—particularly the Lenape (Delaware) to the east and south, and the Susquehannock to the west and north. These were not “tribes” in the way Europeans understood nations. These were interwoven societies, organized through kinship, consensus, and seasonal rhythms.

And they knew this land.

They did not "discover" farming. They perfected it.

A Managed Eden

The river valley was no untouched garden—it was a well-tuned system. Native people used controlled burns to clear underbrush, encourage the growth of grasses and berries, and manage deer movement. They understood crop rotationand companion planting. They had storage pits for surplus. The famous “Three Sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—were planted together in ingenious formations that replenished the soil and maximized yields.

The forests that Europeans would later call “wild” were, in many places, orchards and food forests, subtly curated over generations. Oak, hickory, chestnut, pawpaw. Maple trees tapped for syrup. Ramps and fiddleheads gathered in spring. Trout and eels netted from the rivers.

To live in this land was to understand it intimately. The people here didn’t dominate nature. They participated in its flow.

The Valley as a Crossroads

The Wyoming Valley was more than a productive floodplain—it was a conduit.
It connected the Delaware River Basin to the Ohio Country. Paths now paved by highways were once well-worn trade routes, linking Native towns and nations across what we now call the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The Susquehanna was a highway of canoes and bark boats. Through this valley came wampum, tobacco, mica, quartz, beaver pelts, shells, and ideas.

And people.

Seasonally, groups would gather—Lenape, Munsee, Shawnee, even Iroquois emissaries—at river junctions and cornfields to hunt, fish, trade, hold councils, arrange marriages, and celebrate. This was not an empty valley. It was alive with voices, smoke from longhouses, laughter, footsteps.

The Coming Storm

By the late 1500s and early 1600s, the balance began to shift.
European goods—iron pots, beads, knives, muskets—filtered in through trade. So did disease.

The Susquehannock, who once dominated parts of the upper valley, were devastated by epidemics and warfare. The Iroquois Confederacy pushed from the north and west, seeking to control fur trade routes. The Lenape, traditionally powerful in the east, were forced inland.

By the time white settlers arrived in earnest in the mid-1700s, many Native groups had already been displaced, weakened, or absorbed, often intentionally divided through policy and treaty.

The people who had sculpted and stewarded the land were treated not as architects of it, but as obstacles to be removed.

A Different Vision of Civilization

In the colonial imagination, the Wyoming Valley was wilderness waiting to be tamed.
But that’s not the truth.

It was a valley of memory, community, and resilience.
A place shaped by generations of Native peoples who understood that civilization wasn't about buildings or flags—it was about balance, reciprocity, and kinship with place.

And that, perhaps, is the part of the story worth carrying forward.

Because before it was a valley fought over by Connecticut settlers and Pennsylvania militias,
before the massacre, before the poem,
before the name Wyoming meant anything to the United States—

—it was home.