USA > New York > Ontario County > A history of Ontario County, New York and its people, Volume I > Part 2
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HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY
usual size, have been unearthed from gravel beds, and flint arrows, ceits, and stone gouges, as well as many ornaments of stone, bone, and shell, scattered over whole townships, attest the pres- ence of the early red men in this favorite hunting ground.
The Middle epoch of Indian occupancy of the county dates from the beginning of the period in which European intercourse with the aborigines of the State began. It differs vastly from the Ancient epoch in the fact that we have actual knowledge of the red inhabitants of the region from accounts written by white men who visited them in their homes and villages. Wentworth Green- halgh, by some termed an Englishman, by others a Dutch trader, in the spring and summer of 1677, visited all the Five Nations and the Senecas in particular, and made minute observations, not only counting the houses in the different villages and noting their sur- roundings, but also numbering the warriors. His account gives the Senecas, who at this time mostly resided within what are now the limits of Ontario county, 1,000 warriors, and named their four principal villages situated in the western part, as Canagora, Tioto- hatton, Canoenada, and Keinthe. Of these, Canagora, or, as it was called by the French Abbe Belmont, who accompanied DeNonville in his expedition of 1687, Gaensera, and by others Gan- nagaro, Gananagaro, or Canagora, according as different writers attempted to express or spell the Indian gutturals, was the capital and was situated on Boughton Hill in the present town of Victor. It had 150 houses and was the "St. James" of the Jesuit fathers. Totiakton, or Tiotohatton, or Tohaiton, or Sonnontonan, was on a bend of the Honeoye creek, where it makes a somewhat abrupt turn in a northeasterly direction, and was in what is now the town of Mendon, Monroe county. This was the "La Conception" of the Jesuit fathers, and numbered 120 houses, "being ye largest of all ye houses wee saw, ye ordinary being 50 to 60 foot long with 12 and 13 fires in one house." The town of Canoenada, Onnu- tague, or Gannogarae, was situated about four and one-half miles south of Gannagaro on the east bank of the Ganarqua or Mud creek in the extreme northeast corner of the present town of East Bloomfield. It was peopled chiefly by captive Hurons, and was, it is believed, the original "St. Michael" of the Jesuits, where Father Fremin labored from 1679 to 1681. It had 30 houses, according to Greenhalgh, and was "well furnished with Corne." Keint-he, or Onnennatu, or Gannondata, or Gandachioragon, the other Seneca
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THE INDIAN OCCUPANCY
town spoken of by the French and Dutch traders of the period, was about a mile south of the present village of Honeoye Falls and had 24 houses. Here was the Jesuit Mission of "St. John."
Following the invasion of the Seneca country by De Nonville in July, 1687, when he destroyed the capital Gannagaro, the inhab- itants of that settlement migrated eastward, settling in what is now. the town of Hopewell and establishing there a town called Onna- ghee, the site of which has been given particular study by Mr. Coates and has been a prolific source of arrow heads, beads, Jesuit rings, crucifixes, and amulets and other interesting relics. Just north of this in the same town another small village sprang up, while Gannogarae, the village of the captive Hurons which De- Nonville also destroyed, was removed, according to the best evi- dence obtainable, first to the White Springs, two miles southwest of Geneva, and became known as Ganechstage. This settlement was visited in 1720 by Schuyler and Livingston and in 1726 by Capt. Evert Bancker. It in turn was broken up by an epidemic of smallpox in 1732, but later, in 1750, a New Ganechstage was found by the Moravian missionaries, Cammerhoff and Zeisberger, located at Slate Rock or Burrell's Creek, five miles further south.
It was a few years later, following the abandonment of the settlement or "castle," of Onnaghee, which must have occurred previous to 1750, the time of the visit of Cammerhoff and Zeisber- ger, that Kanandarque, "Place Chosen for Settlement," or poeti- cally interpreted "The Chosen Spot," sprang into being at the foot of the beautiful lake of that name. Kanadesaga, or Ganundasaga, as given by Lewis H. Morgan, near the foot of Seneca Lake, the home of their most exalted chief, Sayenqueraghta, or "Old Smoke," as he was irreverently called by the whites, succeeded Gannagaro as the Seneca capital or "Chief Castle." This last settlement cen- tered about one of the palisade forts built by Sir Wm. Johnson in 1756 to attach the Iroquois to the British interest.
Thus the Senecas, who prior to the De Nonville invasion had migrated to the westward, seem afterwards to have retraced their steps and founded new settlements in what is now the eastern part of Ontario county and soon had large and fertile corn fields there that rivaled those which the French had found and destroyed at their former homes.
Up to this time the Senecas, unlike the other nations of the Iroquois confederacy, had been inclined to side with the French
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HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY
in the contests which continually waged between that people and the English, but the victories gained by the latter in 1756 and 1759 won their favor, the French influence over them rapidly declined, and by 1763 the devoted Jesuit fathers had been supplanted by missionaries of the Protestant faith. In 1765, the Rev. Sam- uel Kirtland, with the approval of the influential representative of the English government, Sir William Johnson, settled at Kana- desaga, and surviving many vicissitudes thereafter exerted a large and civilizing influence over the Senecas.
But while all of these missionaries, Jesuit and Protestant, labored zealously and at untold personal suffering and risk, and gained the respect and in some instances the full confidence of the children of the forest, they made little headway in their efforts to turn the Iroquois from their savage ways or convince them that they stood in need of a change of religious faith. Indeed the red man felt that he worshipped the same Great Spirit as did his white brother.
Mr. Coates dates the beginning of what he calls the Recent epoch of the Indian occupancy of Ontario county from the first efforts of the Colonies to throw off the yoke of the English king. In this great struggle, the Iroquois, with the exception of a portion of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, were adherents of the king, and the land of the Senecas, preserved as it had been from appropria- tion or settlement by either French or English, and suffering little permanent injury from the hostile incursion of De Nonville's army in 1687, was the grainery and the place of refuge of the predatory bands of warriors that under the lead of Col. John Butler and other British officers ravaged the border towns in the eastern part of the State and in Pennsylvania, the fame of whose bloody deeds at Cherry Valley and Wyoming carried terror to patriot settlers and soldiers alike.
It was to destroy this base of supplies for destructive incur- sions that General John Sullivan, in August and September, 1779. acting under orders from General Washington, the commander of the Continental armies, led an invading force up the Susquehanna and Chemung valleys and into the very heart of the Seneca coun- try. Having united the division which he personally led with an- other that had entered the region by way of Schenectady and the Mohawk, Sullivan engaged and defeated an allied force of British regulars and Senecas, led by Col. Butler and the great war chief
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THE INDIAN OCCUPANCY
Brant, in a pitched and decisive battle at Newtown (now Elmira), but otherwise he was able to carry out his purpose without blood- shed, though not the less ruthlessly.
In this brief summer campaign Sullivan and his 5000 Conti- nentals instilled into the Iroquois mind an appreciation of the strength of the Patriot cause and taught the red men that the arm of General Washington was long to reach and strong to punish those who chose to do the bloody work of the Tories. The destruction of forty or more populous and well built villages, numer- ous ripening fields of grain, and large orchards, to say nothing of the loss in fighting strength suffered at Newtown, taught a lesson never forgotten.
Foremost among the villages destroyed was Kanadesaga, which is described in the diaries of some of Sullivan's officers as a place of some fifty houses, with thirty more at a little distance, ar- ranged in an irregular manner with the stockade and the block houses erected by Sir William Johnson in 1756 in the center. In this village, reached by the army on September 7, and like most of the others visited found deserted, was located also the "council house" spoken of by the Rev. Samuel Kirtland on the occasion of his first visit to the Senecas in 1765. It was the capital or chief "Castle" of the Seneca nation at this time, and surrounding it, to quote the language of the late Mr. George S. Conover, of Geneva, the well known local historian, "were large apple orchards and extensive fields of growing corn, while half a mile north was a large peach orchard. Wild plums, mulberries, hickory nuts, walnuts and butternuts likewise grew in abundance." From this important In- dian town, which had been the rendezvous of many expeditions sent out to pillage the border settlements, led trails giving easy communication with the Seneca villages as far westward as the Genesee and Niagara and down the Chemung and Susquehanna valleys, as well as to their settlements at the north and east.
The great trail leading westward followed substantially the course of what is now the "Turnpike," with the exception of a slight variation from the present village of Flint Creek to Canan- daigua lake, in which distance it bore to the south and came out on the east shore of the last named lake. Crossing the outlet and continuing along the foot of the lake, the trail wound up the hill- side in a northwest direction to what General Sullivan called "the elegant town" or Castle of Kanandarque. This village consisted of
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HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY
some thirty houses, which like those at Kanadesaga, together with the vegetable gardens near by and orchards in the vicinity, were "immediately burned" (Sept. 10), and the army marched on the next day to the west, to the foot of Honeoye Lake, where was located a village of ten houses with its corn fields and orchards. General Sullivan extended his march and his work of devastation westward to the Genesee, and returning left behind him nothing but ruins and desolation.
The order of General Washington "to lay waste all the settle- ments around, so that the country may not only be overrun but destroyed," had been faithfully carried out.
It was a ruthless, cruel work, but one absolutely necessary for the protection of the patriot settlements, and it was effectual. While a few small Seneca villages had been overlooked, the power of the Iroquois confederacy was forever broken. The spirit of the bloodthirsty allies of the Tories was humbled by the destruction of their homes and the larger portion of them scattered to the west- ward and settled anew in villages west of the Genesee, near the shores of Lake Erie, along the Alleghany and Niagara. The period of the Indian occupancy of Ontario county had passed.
But the territory now embraced in Ontario county was never "occupied" by the Indians in the sense which that word carries as applied to its present population. Although there is evidence of numerous Seneca settlements in the county, the fact should not be accepted as indicating any general occupancy of the land. The settlements heretofore mentioned and many others of lesser size were of different periods. The relics which are found on their sites, varying as they do from those exclusively of the stone age to those that show an admixture of glass beads, iron hatchets and copper ornaments, with religious tokens and remnants of old muskets and sabers, all of European manufacture, prove to the discriminating student that some of these settlements were of great age, their whole history antedating the appearance of either the white trader, priest or soldier, while others clearly were more recent and of various periods. As it has heretofore appeared, the Iroquois, was prac- tically a nomad. The severe climate in which he lived necessitated somewhat substantial shelters, but his dwellings were simple and quickly constructed out of the bark and branches that strewed the forest. He was a gregarious being, and for companionship with his kind or for protection against enemies, located his homes in
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THE INDIAN OCCUPANCY
groups of some size, but his household belongings were exceedingly limited and easily moved and he had no domestic animal except the dog. He moved his home to new ground, as the game upon which he largely existed retreated, the soil on which he raised his crops was exhausted by repeated harvests, or the forest was cleared of the litter with which he built his fires. These removals occurred every few years, averaging every ten years perhaps, but the great forests that covered the region of which this is written did not at any one time shelter as many people as now make their homes in à single village or township.
The part which the Iroquois played not only in the imagina- tion of the early settlers, but actually in their lives and in the his- toric struggles that marked the advance of the rival forces destined finally to possess and use the land, might lead to the conclusion that they were a large and organized people. Organized they were in a confederation remarkably effective for both offense and defense, but the entire Six Nations never probably exceeded 20,000 souls, nor had a fighting force of more than 4,000. Of this force, the Senecas constituted the larger number. Wentworth Green- halgh in 1677, after careful personal investigation, said the Sene- cas had 1,000 warriors. Sir William Johnson in 1763, reported they had 1050. Missionary Kirtland in 1783, following their very disas- trous wars with the French, estimated that the Senecas had no more than 600 warriors. Following the war of the Revolution, in 1794, the Government found that there were then, all told, 1780 Senecas. In 1818 Jasper Parish said officially, "The population of the Six Nations of Indians is 4575." According to the United States census of 1890 the number of Iroquois then living in the States had grown to 7387, while there were 8483 in Canada, mak- ing a total of 15,870. Of this number 5,239 were living in New York State, and 2767 of these were Senecas.
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HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY
II.
COMING OF THE WHITE MAN.
French Traders and Priests the First White Men to Enter the Seneca Country-French Explorers and French Soldiers Fol- lowed-Sullivan Opened the Way for the Pioneers-Settlement Delayed by Disputes as to Title-The Phelps and Gorham Purchase-Sale of Land to Settlers.
The first white man to enter the country of the Genesee was a French trader or a French priest.
Champlain in his explorations of 1615 penetrated the Iroquois country, but did not come further west than Oneida lake. In 1669 La Salle, with Fathers De Casson and Galinee, visited the principal Seneca Indian village, then twenty miles south of Irondequoit bay, and continued his journey to a burning spring, supposed to be that which is located near Bristol Center, Ontario county. The Marquis De Nonville, in July, 1687, in a campaign which was undertaken with the intent of punishing the Senecas for their alleged inhospit- able treatment of French traders, and of stopping their warlike in- vasions into New France, marched down from Irondequoit bay into the very heart of the Seneca country, and ambushed by the Indians at Gannagaro (Boughton Hill) engaged there in the only actual battle between armed forces known to have occurred in what is now Ontario county. But before these French explorers had spied out the country or these French cavaliers had performed their bloody task, white traders had followed the Indian trails and bought for beads and bullets and for that yet more seductive and destructive medium of barter, rum, the peltries which they in turn exchanged in the eastern markets for good coin of the realm.
Before the soldier also, and certainly close on his heels, marched the devoted Jesuit fathers. At least Father Chaumonot is known to have visited the Seneca towns as early as 1657, and in 1668 Father Fremin became a resident missionary among them, built a
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COMING OF THE WHITE MAN
chapel at Gandougarae on the Ganarqua (Mud Creek), and labored to teach them the truths of the Christian religion. In 1765, follow- ing the rise of English influence, the Rev. Samuel Kirkland, the first Protestant missionary to visit the Senecas, had extended his labors to Kanadesaga. At Geneva some white traders had settled, and Jemima Wilkinson and a few followers had established themselves on the west bank of Seneca lake. At Catharinestown at the head of that lake were one or two white families. All else were Indians. Western New York was yet a wilderness.
So for nearly three hundred years following the discovery of America by Columbus, Western New York remained in possession practically undisputed of the Seneca branch of the Iroquois con- federacy. Traders had bought what the Indians had for sale, Jesuit missionaries had preached and taught and incidentally burned, and French soldiers had destroyed the homes and the stores of grain of the aboriginal possessors, but the "long house" of the Six Nations remained unshaken, and while the tides of conquest and settlement swung around to the north and further to the west, this "Great Western Wilderness," as it was spoken of in the books of the time, remained practically a terra incognita to the white man.
Western New York, thus protected against appropriation by the French, was saved to English immigration, the English tongue and the English faith. At least the strength of the Iroquois and their ability to save their Eden from invasion and appropriation by the recurring tides of immigration from the Old World remained , unbroken until after the Colonies had declared their independence and were in the throes of revolution. Then in 1779 the Sullivan expedition forced its way into the very heart of the region and accomplished the double purpose of humbling the power of the cruel allies of the English king and of informing the hardy Continentals of the possibilities of the so-called "Wilderness" for new home making. The men from the rocky hillsides of New England were only incidentally soldiers. They were first and finally farmers and home makers, and they saw in the beautifully situated and fertile lands of Western New York a field that promised the largest rewards for industry and enterprise. As a consequence they carried back with them to their homes, after the war was over and the vic- tory won, lively recollections of this land of promise and hopes that could only be satisfied by the transfer of themselves and their fam- ilies to the west.
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HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY
But ten years elapsed after the strength of the Senecas had been broken and Sullivan's soldiers had gone back to their homes before the work of actual settlement could begin. Following the war of the Revolution came first the doubts involved in the rival claims of New York and Massachusetts.
These were not settled until December 16, 1786, when under the terms of the agreement effected at a convention of commission- ers, representing the two states, held at Hartford, Conn., Massachu- setts formally acknowledged the sovereignity and jurisdiction of New York over all territory lying west of the present east line of that state; and New York ceded to Massachusetts the preemption right, or fee of the land, subject to the title of the natives, to all that part of the state lying west of a line beginning at the 82nd milestone in the Pennsylvania boundary and running due north to Lake Ontario. This was the Preemption line famous in the sub- sequent history of Western New York. The title to all land west of this line, excepting only a twenty-mile wide strip east of the Niagara river, was ceded to Massachusetts, though thereafter to be a part of the State of New York. Massachusetts had it to sell, New York to govern. In the tract thus disposed of was about six million acres of land.
The interests of the region were involved later in the attempts of the so-called Lessee companies to acquire possession of the Iro- quois lands by 999 year leases, but the unlawful attempt was hap- pily foiled, and although the Massachusetts purchasers thought it wiser, or, perhaps, cheaper, to grant the "lessees" some concessions in compromise, they had only to secure the consent of the Indians in order to enter upon legal possession and begin the settlement of the lands for which they had contracted.
Oliver Phelps, of Massachusetts, who had acted as a commis- sariat of the Continental forces during the Revolution and who had become interested in the stories told by the soldiers of Sullivan's army, had the sagacity to foresee that a land of such natural beauty and yielding so bountifully under the rude agriculture of the Indians, was destined to be the seat of a vast civilized population. He accordingly made arrangements with a number of friends to purchase a tract of a million acres. Later he became associated with Nathaniel Gorham, a prominent citizen of Massachusetts, who had made plans to a similar effect. In 1788, yet more associates were admitted in order to avoid unprofitable rivalry, and the company
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COMING OF THE WHITE MAN
agreed to purchase of Massachusetts all the lands embraced in the cession of the preemption right from New York, the stipulated consideration being 300,000 pounds sterling, or about $1,000,000 in the depreciated paper currency of the state.
The purchase was subject to the Indian title, and with the pur- pose of extinguishing this, Mr. Phelps, in July, 1788, made his first visit to the Genesee country. In a treaty, concluded at Buffalo creek, he finally succeeded in getting the red men to relinquish possession of a tract of about 2,- 600,000 acres. This tract was the eastern part of that for whose purchase he and his associates had contracted with the State of Massachusetts. It embraced the land lying between the Preemp- tion line on the east, and, gen- erally speaking, the Genesee river on the west. For this domain, which was thereafter known as the Phelps and Gorham Purchase, Mr. Phelps agreed to pay the Indians $5,000 in cash and an an- nuity of $500 forever.
Mr. Phelps found the country to more than meet his expecta- tions. As the officers of Sulli- van's army had described it in their several diaries, it was a heavily timbered country, with occasional clearings and here and there an Indian orchard, and cultivated fields on which the In- dians raised corn, beans, squash and watermelons. Mr. Phelps wrote to his associates, "You may rely upon it that it is a good country." Colonel Hugh Maxwell, who
OLIVER PHELPS.
Oliver Phelps was a native of Windsor, Conn. He served in the commissary depart- ment of the Colonial Army, and settling at Suffield, Mass., at the close of the Revolution, he held successively the offices of Member of Assembly, State Senator, and Member of the Governor's Council. He assisted in the organization of the Phelps and Gorham syndi- cate in 1788 and acted as the representative of that company in the exploration of the Genesee country and in negotiations for the extinction of the Indian title to the land. He removed to Canandaigua in 1802, and though disappointed through the failure of the land enterprise to yield the expected returns, he liad a large part in the development of this region. He served as First Judge of the Coun- ty from the date of its organization, 1789, until 1793, and he represented the western district of the State in the Ninth Congress, 1803-05. Jesse Hawley wrote of Mr. Phelps that he was "the Secrops of the Genesee Coun- try. Its inhabitants owe a mausoleum to his memory in gratitude for his having pioneered for them the wilderness of this Canaan of the West." He died in Canandaigua in 1809, aged 60 years.
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HISTORY OF ONTARIO COUNTY
had come on with Mr. Phelps and had begun under the latter's direction to survey the newly acquired land into townships, wrote to his family in Massachusetts, "The land in this country is exceed- ing good, but it wants good inhabitants."
The first stakes had thus been driven in the white occupancy of Western New York. But at this juncture, after having settled with the Indians and set surveyors at work, and engaged choppers to cut a road through the woods from Fort Stanwix, Phelps and Gorham found themselves unable to carry out the contract they had made with the State of Massachusetts. The paper currency of the state was worth, at the time they made the contract, only about 20 cents on a dollar, but before pay day arrived its value had risen to nearly par, and in 1789, with the consent of the Massachusetts legislature, they relinquished their claim to all the original purchase, except that in which they had been able to extinguish the Indian title.
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