Drive PA Indian Paths: Turnpike Eastbound, Part 1

Pennsylvania's modern highways hide an ancient story that most drivers never notice. On this driving tour along the eastbound Pennsylvania Turnpike, you'll trace the Raystown Path, an Indigenous trail that shaped everything from frontier trade to Revolutionary War battles. You'll also hear how the people who walked this route – Seneca, Shawnee, and Delaware among them – left marks on American culture that persist to this day.

The tour starts at the Monroeville entrance to the Turnpike, following Interstate 76 East. As you drive, you'll learn how Indian trails became wagon roads, how beaver pelts fueled a continent-wide trade network, and how wampum belts encoded everything from marriage agreements to declarations of war. You'll also pass close to Bushy Run Battlefield, where Scottish Highlanders fought Delaware, Seneca, and Shawnee warriors in a two-day ambush that sent shockwaves back to Philadelphia.

Along the way, you'll hear a Seneca folktale about husband-hunting, a language lesson in Shawnee and Lenape greetings, and the story of Hanna's Town – a frontier settlement burned to the ground in 1782, just months before the Revolution officially ended. The tour ends at the Somerset travel plaza, where the region's famous winter snowfall makes a fitting backdrop for a story about Indigenous snowshoe design.

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

• Hear how the Raystown Path connected the Ohio and Susquehanna rivers long before European settlers arrived
• Learn what Indian trail food – parched corn mixed with maple syrup – actually tasted like
• Discover how glass beads from European factories replaced centuries of hand-drilled shell work
• Explore the story of Hanna's Town, where 60 settlers survived an attack with only nine working guns
• Hear about the Captivity Stories genre, once the most popular literature in 18th-century America
• Visit the Flight 93 National Memorial, a 20-minute detour from the Somerset exit
• Learn why this stretch of Pennsylvania remains one of the most active Bigfoot-sighting regions in the country

If you've ever driven the Turnpike without giving a second thought to what came before the asphalt, this tour will change that permanently.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks for the contributions of the Seneca Language Department directed by Ja:no's Bowen; Paul A.W. Wallace whose 1965 work Indian Paths of Pennsylvania cleared the way for all to follow; and Henry Schoolcraft who in the first half of the 1800s put tribal stories, legends and myths into writing -- as best as a Victorian white man could -- as Indian culture was thought to be on the verge of extinction.