Kittanning Path

The Kittanning Path was a major east-west Native American trail used crossing the Allegheny Mountains barrier ridge connecting the Susquehanna River valleys in the center of Pennsylvania to the highlands of the Appalachian Plateau and thence to the western lands beyond drained by the Ohio River. The Kittanning Village was the first major Delaware Indian settlement along the descent off the Allegheny Plateau.

The nature of the path, in actual fact, a series of path alternatives funneling through seasonally or directionally more or less difficult notches—the gaps were one of only five animal power navigable places to cross east to west across the Appalachian Mountains west of New England. The Kittanny path (by other names) would also come to be used first by Dutch, then English and British colonial fur traders as well as Amerindian emigrants moving westwards before and after the French and Indian War and in the post-1780 settlers migrations west of the Mountain as the American Revolution entered its final years.

For Centuries the Kittanning Path like the similar Chief Nemacolin's Trail to the south provided an negotiable overland route through very tough country for the Iroquoian stock peoples, the Erie, the Susquehannock, the Iroquois, and Mingo and the Lenape, Miami, and Shawnee, and early Europe an settlers to cross the Allegheny Mountains barrier ridge. The path exploited one of the few so called gaps of the Allegheny rising alongside the feedwater streams draining into the Juniata River, a tributary of the wide ranging Susquehanna terminating on the Allegheny River due Northeast of Pittsburgh in what is now Armstrong County, Pennsylvania at the Native American village of Kittanning (at present day Kittanning, Pennsylvania).

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