The valley of the Susquehanna river was occupied by a tribe of Iroquois lineage and language, known as the _Susquehannocks, Conestogas_ and _Andastes_. The last name is Iroquois, from _andasta_, a cabin pole. By some, "Susquehannock" has also been explained as an Iroquois word, but its form is certainly Algonkin. The terminal _k_ is the place-sign, _hanna_ denotes a flowing stream, while the adjectival prefix has been identified by Heckewelder with _schachage_, straight, from the direct course of the river near its mouth, and by Mr. Guss with _woski_, new, which, he thinks, referred to fresh or spring water. Of these the former will appear the preferable, if we allow for the softening of the gutturals, which was a phonetic trait of the Unami dialect of the Lenape. The Susquehannocks were always at deadly feud with the Iroquois, and between wars, the smallpox and the whites, they were finally exterminated. The particulars of their short and sad history have been presented with his characteristic thoroughness by Dr. John G. Shea,[5] and later by Prof. N. L. Guss.[6] They were usually called by the Delawares _Mengwe_, which was the term they applied to all the Iroquois-speaking tribes.[7] The English corrupted it to Minqua and Mingo, and as the eastern trail of the Susquehannocks lay up the Conestoga Creek, and down the Christina, both those streams were called "Mingo Creek" by the early settlers. It is important for the ethnology of Pennsylvania, to understand that at the time of the first settlement the whole of the Susquehanna Valley, from the Chesapeake to the New York lakes, was owned and controlled by Iroquois-speaking tribes. A different and erroneous opinion was expressed by Heckewelder, and has been generally received. He speaks of the Lenape Minsi as occupying the head waters of the Susquehanna. This was not so in the historic period. The claims of the Susquehannocks extended down the Chesapeake Bay on the east shore, as far as the Choptank River, and on the west shore as far as the Patuxent. In 1654 they ceded to the government of Maryland their southern territory to these boundaries.[8] The first English explorers met them on the Potomac, about the Falls, and the Pascatoways were deserting their villages and fleeing before them, when, in 1634, Calvert founded his colony at St. Mary's. Their subjection to the Five Nations took place about 1680, and it was through the rights obtained by this conquest that, at the treaty of Lancaster, 1744, Canassatego, the Onondaga speaker for the Nation, claimed pay from the government of Maryland for the lands on the Potomac, or, as that river was called in his tongue, the _Cohongorontas_. _The Hurons._