Editing Duryea, Pennsylvania (section)

===Early history===
The area now known as Duryea Borough was historically the heartland of the [[Susquehannock]] tribe, also called the Conestoga, which were an Iroquoian people whose territory extended from lower [[New York (state)|New York State]] to the [[Potomac River|Potomac]]. The Susquehannock befriended the [[New Netherlands|Dutch]] traders by 1612, who soon began trading tools and firearms for furs. The Dutch had established their trading posts along the rivers near where two natural Indian trails allowed them to make contact with the Conestoga&mdash; these were the sometimes disputed lands of the Susquehannocks and the rival [[Delaware nation]] (Lenape people).
 
The Dutch, while buying the lands for their settlements on the Hudson and Delaware in Lenape lands, soon developed frictions with their hosts and eventually formed an alliance with the more warlike and fierce Susquehannocks. In the 1630s, the Susquehannocks and the Lenape people warred. In 1642, the British [[Province of Maryland]] declared war on the Susquehannocks and over eight mostly inconsequential years of warfare, while the Dutch allied themselves with the Susquehannocks, lost it to the Dutch and the Indians.

A few years later, the English Sea Power defeated the Dutch ending their continued influence in [[North America]]. The Conestoga continued to grow in strength. In the 1660s, the area supported a military conquest which greatly weakened two of the western Iroquois tribes: the Seneca and Catagua. They were also struck by three years of plague (around 1670) in which 9 out of 10 Susquehannocks died. In the next few years, renewed war with the Iroquois kept the tribe from recovering and only a pale remnant of its strength relocated to the plains area now between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, where they came to deal with William Penn and the new colonial [[Province of Pennsylvania]].