The Indian Path

By the time European explorers arrived in the eighteenth century, Paint Creek had long served as a Native American travel route known as the War Road, the Hunter's Road, or the Indian Path. Delawares, Mingoes, Ottawas, Senecas, Shawnees, Cherokees, Catawbas, and others regularly used it to travel to and from settlements in western Virginia, and the area often served as a staging ground for incursions into European settlements advancing from the east. Paint Creek took its name from painted trees that marked the landscape, evidence of Native American activity in a region where many nations used glyphic symbols and pictures rather than written alphabets to transmit information. War and hunting parties painted pictographs on trees along the route to record exploits or mark trails, and early settlers named two prominent areas near the present-day Raleigh-Fayette County line the Big Painted Trees and the Upper Painted Trees. In 1755, Shawnee warriors led Mary Ingles and her two sons down Paint Creek after abducting them from their family's homestead near present-day Blacksburg, Virginia, on the way to a Shawnee village near Portsmouth, Ohio. After escaping with another captive, Mary began a difficult four hundred fifty mile journey back to Virginia, possibly trying unsuccessfully to retrace her route through Paint Creek before continuing up the New River Gorge; she was later found alive near present-day Eggleston, Virginia and reunited with her husband. Paint Creek was also one of many Indian trails that crossed the area of present-day Raleigh County, with a major junction just north of Pax near the site of the Big Painted Trees, where one path branched northwest toward the Coal River and another branched south toward the Bluestone River and Virginia, including the Paint Creek Trail that passed through the east side of present-day Beckley where Kanawha Street is located.

West Virginia · United States