Trail Horses for Sale in Pittsburgh PA, Rockwood PA

About Brownsville, PA

In pre-Columbian times, the right bank Monongahela held several mounds where iron rich red stone predominated, [d] now believed to have been constructed by a branch of the Mound Builders cultures, but were believed by colonials to have been forts—leading to the area near the river crossing being called Redstone Old Fort in various colonial government records, and later Fort Burd, when an arms cache was built there. By the time the region first became known to Dutch colonists and traders and the French in the 1640s, the lands were largely unoccupied, [e] but under the management of one tribe or shared by several groups of Iroquoian peoples, likely the Erie people, or Wenro people [f] and possibly shared with Seneca, the Shawnee people and the Susquehannocks. With all the rivers and streams tributary to the Monongahela, Youghiogheny, Allegheny Rivers, there is little known about the region's precise role in the Beaver Wars of the 17th century, but when French and Dutch and Swedish fur traders penetrated to the Greater Ohio Basin in the 1640s-1650s, the one thing that seemed clear to those observers was the lands later termed the Ohio Country seemed empty and unpopulated. When in the 17th century, the occasional Englishman, as provincial Virginian or Marylanders generated their observations the emptiness of the region was confirmed. Before the 1750s, the area was 'colonized' by weakened remnant tribes such as the Delaware, the few Erie and the Susquehannock survivors (climbing the gaps of the Allegheny) the Iroquois allowed to move there as tributary peoples.