For hundreds of years, Native Americans lives in the Patapsco, Patuxent, Middle and Little Patuxent River valleys. Captain John Smith had seen some members of the Susquehannock tribes, also referred to as the Iroquoian speaking Susquehanna or Conestoga tribes, in person and drew a North American map depicting a Indian warrior in it. Captain John Smith once wrote:
They seemed like giants to the English. Their language sounds like a voice in a vault. …One had a wolf’s head hanging in a chain for a jewel. His tobacco pipe three-fourths of a yard long prettily carved with a bird or a deer at great end, sufficient to beat out one’s brains. The calf of the chief’s leg was threefourths of a yard about, and all his limbs so proportionate, that he seemed the goodliest man we ever beheld. His hair on the one side was long, and the other shorne close like a coxe’s comb. His arrows were five-fourths long, headed with the splinters of a white chrystal stone, like a heart an inch broad and one and one-half inches long; these he wore in a wolf’s skin at his back for a quiver.’”
Maryland Historical Magazine
In 1652, the Susquehannock tribes signed a peace treaty with Maryland, giving up their provenance over the territory that is now Howard County.
Hamilton Historical Records 