How were the people of Pennsylvania governed in the 1600s?

Before European settlement, Pennsylvania was inhabited by many Indian tribes, including the Erie, Honniasont, Huron, Iroquois (especially Seneca and Oneida), Leni Lenape, Munsee, Shawnee, Susquehannock, and unknown others.

In the period of European exploration, there was a flurry of activity in North America. The English (1497, John Cabot), the French (1524, Verrazano), the Spanish (1492, Columbus in the West Indies, and other Spanish explorers reaching North America perhaps by 1520), and the Dutch (1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of the Dutch East India Company, on his ship the Half Moon) all claimed lands.

In 1608, English Captain John Smith visited the Susquehannock Indians in Pennsylvania. In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed into Delaware Bay, thus giving the Dutch their claim to the area. In 1610 Virginian Captain Samuel Argall visited Delaware Bay (he named it for Lord de la Warr, governor of Virginia). Dutch navigator Cornelis Jacobszoon May was provided a patent to explore the Delaware region more thoroughly and Dutch trading posts were established up and down the Delaware Bay starting in 1620.

Captain John Smith also visited the US.

The New Sweden Company was chartered and, in 1638, established The Colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina, in what is today Wilmington, Delaware. In 1643, Governor Johan Printz arrived and built Fort Elfsborg and Fort New Gothenburg at Tinicum Island, nearby today’s Philadelphia airport. A small park with a statue to Printz commemorates the location. This marks the first permanent settlement by Europeans in Pennsylvania.

In 1655, Dutch troops, under the command of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam (New York), took control of the Swedish colony and held it until the British Duke of York seized control of it and all of New Amsterdam in 1664. The Duke granted New Jersey to two loyal friends, Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley of Stratton.