THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
sop says was "called by their own name the Susquehannock River."
These Indians, the most powerful tribe in Maryland, were among the fiercest enemies of the Iroquois, by whom and by the white men of Virginia they were at last subdued. A greater enemy, however, had been found in the small-pox, which in 1661 and later years reduced the number of the warriors from seven hundred to three hundred, and thenceforth for a hundred years they remained "a weak and dwindling people." The last remnant of them perished in 1753 in Lancaster Jail, "cruelly butchered by a mob." The famous orator Logan was their most celebrated chief.
The name Susquehanna is described by Simms as "an aboriginal word said to signify crooked river."[1] This interpretation has long survived, and perhaps to Cooper more than to anyone else is its survival due. Cooper gives that meaning in "The Pioneers."
The word is not found in Iroquois dictionaries. It is not even an Iroquois word, although the name of an Iroquois stream and of a people who became allies of the Iroquois. It is, in fact, an Algonquin word, and seems to have come from the Lenni Lenapes, or Delawares. Heckewelder, the missionary, says it is properly the word "Sisquehanne," and he advances the opinion that it came "from
- ↑ History of Schoharie County. Jephtha Root Simms was a native of Connecticut, and in 1829 was employed in New York City in a retail store. His health failing, he removed in 1832 to Schoharie County, where he went into business. He afterward became a toll-collector on the Erie Canal at Fultonville. Later he served as ticket-agent for the New York Central Road at Fort Plain, and at Fort Plain in 1883 he died at the age of seventy-six. Simms's History of Schoharie County was first published in 1845. Just before his death he brought out an enlarged edition in two volumes with a new title, The Frontiersmen. Mr. Simms all his life was an industrious collector of local material. He wrote entertainingly and told a story well.
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