Drive PA Indian Paths: Forks of the Ohio to Logstown

The Pittsburgh area sits at a crossroads that shaped North American history. On this driving tour, you'll follow the Great Path – an ancient trail network connecting the Eastern Seaboard to Detroit – tracing the Ohio River from the Forks to the Indian trading village of Logstown. You'll also hear how Indigenous nations, French and British colonizers, and frontier figures like George Washington and Meriwether Lewis all collided along this same stretch of riverbank.

The tour starts at the Duquesne Incline overlooking the Forks of the Ohio, where Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt once stood as rival colonial outposts. You'll drive along Route 65, the modern road laid over those ancient paths, passing Brunot's Island – where Lewis held his bon voyage party before the Corps of Discovery set off – and pulling over at McKees Rocks to learn about a 2,500-year-old burial mound that was dug up, argued over, and ultimately lost to quarrying.

Along the way, you'll stop at Riverside Park to hear Charles Dickens describe this same river in 1842, just two generations after Indians were forced out. You'll also hear a Lenape teaching story about what happens when humans stop respecting animals, and learn how wolves – revered by Indigenous peoples and despised by settlers – shaped the ecology and culture of this landscape. The tour ends at Logstown, the fur-trading hub where Seneca chiefs held court, French traders built log houses, and George Washington came repeatedly to court Native alliances.

On this 60-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Hear how Fort Duquesne was blown up by the French themselves as 6,000 British troops approached
• Learn the story of Sattelihu, the trusted interpreter who envisioned a Pennsylvania blending European and Indian cultures
• Discover how Neville Island went from Indigenous territory to asparagus farms to WWII landing craft production
• Find out why colonists refused to believe Indians built the Ohio Valley's massive earthen mounds
• Walk the bank of the Ohio as Dickens described it – a wilderness of fallen trees and deep solitudes

This tour brings forgotten voices back to roads you may have driven a hundred times without knowing what lay beneath them.