It was not in the Shenandoah Valley that they built their pyramids, their ceremonial circles, their human figures seventy feet long, commemorating kings. But, they lived in the Valley, and left burial mounds behind them. In the early eighteen hundreds, a citizen of Winchester (VA) William Pidgeon made himself into an amateur anthropologist. He opened a mound nine miles from his home and found a stone vault in the center, full of bones. The railroad destroyed it when they built their right of way, but after four hundred wagonloads of stones had been removed, it is still six feet high. Four miles west of Winchester, under another mound of stone, they found a limestone basin eight feet in diameter, deeply marked with fire. On the North Fork stood still another mound and on the South Fork a moat and a wall, the remnants of a ceremonial circle. The earliest historians of the Valley, writing more than a hundred years ago, mention these remains as having been "reduced by the plow." The seated skeletons, the earthen vessels, the pipes with twining serpents, were looked at curiously, and lost.

When the white man came, he found the Valley almost empty, used as a hunting ground and a roadway between north and south. There was a well-marked trail along the top of the Blue Ridge, where the Skyline Drive now runs. There was another trail in the Valley, which is now the Valley Pike (route 11). The Shawnees maintained three villages near Winchester, three collections of bark huts near little clearings where the straggling corn and pumpkins grew rank in the summer and were abandoned in the snow. Another Shawnee village stood near Woodstock (VA), and the Tuscaroras occupied the neighborhood of Martinsburg (WV), where were found the giant skeletons, seven feet long, with three-foot thighs.

The first settlers heard legends of a tribe called the Senedos who had been exterminated by the Iroquois, and occasionally a trader found a tribal slave who claimed to have Senedo antecedents. The Cherokees had a tradition of having lived there until the northern Indians drove them farther south. There were also stories of a struggle between the Powhatans from the Eastern shore and the Iroquois.

It was said that Opecancanough, son of Powhatan, made war in the Valley on the Iroquois chief Sherando, drove him out and left his son Sheewanee in charge. But Sheewanee was not strong enough to face the counterattack, and soon fled back to the Tidewater. Opecancanough, informed by runners, swooped down on Sherando through a gap in the Blue Ridge, killed him, and re-established his son. The Valley Indians were known as Shawnees from then on...

...All this (history) the first settlers got only by hearsay. The Indians they knew in the Valley were the Delawares from Susquehanna, the Catawbas from South Carolina, who passed to and fro hunting... Only one imperishable trace of them remains, ringing down the centuries like distant music. They left the Valley its name, Shenandoah. The name has evolved, like most American place names of Indian origin, coming down through old records in many phonetic spellings: Gerando, Gerundo, Shendo, Genantua, Sherando. Many meanings have been assigned to it. The most romantic one, the one popularly accepted by the Valley people themselves, is Daughter of the Stars. This meaning has been much beloved, and incorporated into the writing which every generation of inhabitants feels inspired to produce, but the basis for it has remained concealed from the present researcher. The name appears in books of Indian etymology as Schin-han-dowi, the River-Through-The-Spruce (but spruces are rare in those mountains), or On-an-da-goa, the River-of-High-Mountains, or as Silver-Water. The Museum of the American Indian in New York City believes that it is a word of Iroquois origin meaning Big Meadow. Or it might come from the fallen chief, Sherando, or from the earlier exterminated tribe, Senedos... But these discussions matter little. As Daughter of the Stars the river has been enshrined in the hearts of Valley dwellers, and Daughter of the Stars it will remain to them.