AD CRABLE LNP newspaper, via AP
Don KAUTZ/LNP via AP
Adam Zurn, left, and Ben Webber push a canoe across Pine Creek in Berks County towards the headwaters of the Conestoga River, a route fur traders and Native Americans used 250 years ago.
LANCASTER, Pa. On a cold and sunny winter day on Dec. 30, six local residents gathered at a rural road near the Lancaster-Berks line and unloaded a wooden canoe, a faux fur and an old jug of the kind that once held rum.
The ensemble began pushing the 85-pound canoe through knee-deep swampy mud, at one point having to hoist the canoe over a turned-off electric fence. It may have seemed somewhat comical, but the group may have been retracing an arduous and important fur trade portage for the first time in 250 years.
Kautz, a software engineer from East Lampeter Township, had been doing research for his upcoming book, “The Conestoga River: A History,” and came across multiple accounts of a 17th-century fur trade route through Lancaster, Berks and Chester counties used by Native Americans and early Colonists.
Native Americans would paddle canoes loaded with beaver and deer hides from their villages along the Susquehanna the length of the Conestoga River. When the headwaters of the Conestoga became too shallow to be navigable, they would have to carry their canoes a couple miles to the headwaters of Pine Creek, which flowed into French Creek and on to the Schuylkill River where trading posts were located.