There is evidence around Elk County that people were in the area going back several thousand years. By the 18th century, as Europeans spread across Pennsylvania, the Iroquois seem to have been most influential in northern Pennsylvania. Based in what we now know as New York, they were located in the area from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Historian Sherman Day (1843, Historical collections of the State of Pennsylvania) described them as follows.
A great Indian confederacy claims attention, whose acts have an important bearing upon the history of Pennsylvania. This confederacy was originally known in the annals of New York as the Five Nations and subsequently, after they had been joined by the Tuscaroras, as the Six Nations. As confederates, they called themselves Aquanuschioni, or United People ; by the Lenapes they were called Mengue, or Mingoes, and by the French, the Iroquois. The original Five Nations were the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Oneidas, the Senecas, and the Mohawks. In 1712 the Tuscaroras, being expelled from the interior of North Carolina and Virginia, were adopted as a sixth tribe. The language of all the tribes of the confederacy, except the Tuscaroras, was radically the same, and different from that of the Lenni Lenapé. Their domain stretched from the borders of Vermont to Lake Erie, and from Lake Ontario to the head waters of the Allegheny, Susquehanna, and Delaware rivers. This territory they styled their long house. The grand council-fire was held in the Onondaga valley. The Senecas guarded the western door of the house, the Mohawks the eastern, and the Cayugas the southern, or that which opened upon the Susquehanna. The Mohawk nation was the first in rank, and to it appertained the office of principal war chief ; to the Onondagas, who guarded the grand council-fire, appertained in like manner the office of principal civil chief, or chief sachem. The Senecas, in numbers and military energy, were the most powerful.
The peculiar location of the Iroquois gave them an immense advantage. On the great channels of water conveyance to which their territories were contiguous, they were enabled in all directions to carry war and devastation to the neighboring or to the more distant nations. (Day 1843: 6)
