Upper Pine Bottom State Park is in the West Branch Susquehanna River drainage basin, the earliest recorded inhabitants of which were the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks. They were a matriarchal society that lived in stockaded villages of large long houses. Upper Pine Bottom Run is at the southern end of the Pine Creek Gorge, and the mountains surrounding the gorge were "occasionally inhabited" by the Susquehannocks. Their numbers were greatly reduced by disease and warfare with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, and by 1675 they had died out, moved away, or been assimilated into other tribes.