Great Minqua Path
Near York, Pennsylvania
The road you are traveling follows the ghost of one of colonial North America's most contested trade routes. This was the Great Minqua Path, the main trail of the Susquehannock people, whom English colonists called the Minqua. For generations they carried enormous quantities of beaver pelts south along this corridor to the trading settlements on the Delaware River.
Beaver fur was the oil of the seventeenth century. European demand for felt hats made it among the most valuable commodities on the continent. The Susquehannocks controlled this path and the trade it carried, which made them powerful enough that three colonial powers, the Swedes, the Dutch, and the English, all competed for their trade and alliance. By the sixteen seventies, warfare and epidemic disease had shattered the Susquehannock nation. But this path through the Pennsylvania piedmont endured long after them.
