Shamokin: The Refugee City at the River's Fork

Before Sunbury was laid out and before Joseph Priestley built his laboratory on the riverbank, this ground at the confluence of the North and West Branches of the Susquehanna was one of the most important and most complicated places in eastern North America. It was called Shamokin, and for nearly thirty years in the middle of the eighteenth century it was the largest Native American settlement in Pennsylvania, and possibly in the entire Mid-Atlantic.

Shamokin was not a single tribe's town. It was a city of refugees. As European settlement pushed west through the Delaware River valley and then into the Pennsylvania interior, the people it displaced did not simply disappear. They moved west and north, congregation by congregation, clan by clan, to this fork in the river where the Iroquois Confederacy maintained a kind of regional capital. Delaware and Lenape bands arrived first in the seventeen twenties and seventeen thirties, pushed out of Tulpehocken Creek valley by German settlers. Then came the Nanticokes from Maryland, the Tutelos and Saponis from the Carolinas, the Mahicans from the Hudson River valley, the Shawnee, the Tuscaroras, and members of all five original Iroquois nations. At its height Shamokin held several thousand people speaking at least a dozen languages.

The Iroquois placed an Oneida chief named Shikellamy here to manage this gathering. He served as a kind of diplomat-governor, arbitrating disputes among the refugee peoples and mediating between the entire assembly and the Pennsylvania colonial government in Philadelphia. Shikellamy became deeply respected by both sides. He worked closely with the provincial interpreter Conrad Weiser and worked to keep the peace through increasingly impossible pressures.

The French and Indian War ended it. In seventeen fifty-five, as the frontier erupted, the population scattered. The British built Fort Augusta on the site in seventeen fifty-six. By seventeen seventy-two it was Sunbury, a colonial town. The memory of what was here before is preserved mostly in the name: Shamokin, meaning something like the place of eels.