Drive PA Indian Paths: Logstown-Meadowcroft

Pennsylvania's Ohio River Valley has been a corridor of movement, trade, and conflict for at least 16,000 years. On this driving tour, you'll follow ancient Native American paths now buried beneath modern roads, tracing the routes once walked by Shawnee and Delaware warriors, French fur traders, and frontier settlers. You'll also hear how those forgotten paths shaped everything from the word bucks in your wallet to the chemical plants lining the riverbank today.

The tour starts at a vacant lot on Duss Avenue in Ambridge, overlooking the site of Logstown, once the most important trading village in the region. From there, you'll drive south along the Ohio River, passing Conway Yard – one of the largest freight yards ever built – before turning inland through Raccoon Creek State Park and along the winding course of Cross Creek. You'll hear Delaware folklore, Shawnee travel customs, and accounts of the French and Indian War that help explain how a series of narrow forest paths became the roads you're driving today.

The final stretch climbs a ridge and drops back into the valley, where frontier farmers once built fortified log cabins against raiding parties. You'll pass Cross Creek Cemetery, the burial place of Mary Wallace, whose abduction and death sparked one of the Revolution's most notorious atrocities, the Gnadenhutten Massacre. The tour ends at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, a rock overhang beside Cross Creek used continuously for at least 16,000 years.

On this 120-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Learn how Logstown's French-built log cabins gave the village its English name
• Hear why young George Washington's visit to Logstown helped trigger a war on five continents
• Discover why the borough of Monaca is named after an Iroquois chief called Great Arrow
• Follow the logic of single-file travel and why war parties stepped in each other's tracks
• Hear a Delaware story explaining why crows are black
• Listen to Tecumseh's famous argument that selling land is as absurd as selling the sky

By the end, you'll never look at a road, a riverbank, or a stand of trees quite the same way again.

The Tecumseh quote is recited by actor Graham Greene.