Great Indian Warpath

The Great Indian Warpath (GIW)—also known as the Great Indian War and Trading Path, or the Seneca Trail—was that part of the network of trails in eastern North America developed and used by Native Americans which ran through the Great Appalachian Valley. The system of footpaths (the Warpath branched off in several places onto alternate routes and over time shifted westward in some regions) extended from what is now upper New York state to deep within Alabama. Various Indians traded and made war along the trails, including the Catawba, numerous Algonquian tribes, the Cherokee, and the Iroquois Confederacy. The British traders' name for the route was derived from combining its name among the northeastern Algonquian tribes, Mishimayagat or "Great Trail", with that of the Shawnee and Delaware, Athawominee or "Path where they go armed".

The age of the Great Indian Warpath is unknown. Many of the trails were broken by animals traveling to the salt licks in the region, especially by the herds of buffalo in the Valley of Virginia. These animal trails were later used by Native Americans, and even later by European pioneers. Certainly the trails were used for commerce, trading and communication between tribes before the land was explored by Europeans. In Virginia during November 1728, William Byrd II commented while passing a branch of the Indian trail what would later be called the Great Wagon Road in what would eventually be Henry County, Virginia, that "The Indians, who have no way of traveling except on the Hoof, make nothing of going 25 miles a day, and carrying their little Necessities at their backs, and Sometimes a Stout Pack of Skins into the bargain."

While archaeology shows that the Great Valley of Virginia was inhabited before the arrival of the Europeans, by the 18th century most of the region was abandoned. Only smaller villages and settlements of different tribes occupied the valley, which was used as a hunting ground, a travel route, and a warpath between the two great clusters of Eastern Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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