USA > New York > Livingston County > Geneseo > A history of the treaty of Big Tree : and an account of the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the making of the treaty, held at Geneseo, N.Y., September the fifteenth, eighteen hundred ninety-seven > Part 4
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17,927 acres, which proved that she was sharp enough for Mr. Morris.
Ebenezer Allan did not show up in the proceedings. If present, he kept shady, so to speak, and possibly was one of that disturbing ele- ment which caused considerable trouble during the progress of nego- tiations. The deed from the Indians of the lands for his daughters was given to him in trust for them. Yet it is said that Allan sold and conveyed it to Robert Morris when on a visit to Philadelphia, that Morris was aware of the fact, that he had no right to sell it, and the daughters were thus cheated out of their land.
On the part of Mr. Morris the treaty of Big Tree was conducted with most consummate skill. With him it was indeed a case of must, with the must very much emphasized. When Thomas Morris told the Indians, as he did repeatedly, in substance, that they would never have another offer for their lands, he put up the biggest kind of a bluff, for no man knew better than he, that in the event of failure of the treaty, renewed efforts would have to be put forth to secure the title to this land. The bluff probably had to some extent at least the desired effect, but that it was ably supplemented by some very effective work on the part of Thomas Morris and his friends during the hiatus which interrupted the proceedings there can be no doubt. Robert Morris had plainly indicated the course to pursue, and if Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Little Billy, Pollard, Farmer's Brother and Young King received gratuities, pensions or bribes, ranging from $10 to $250 per annum for their influence with their people to effect a sale, are they any more to be blamed than Thomas Morris, acting under the deliberate and explicit directions of his illus- trious father? In a case of bribery, it is not always easy to determine which is the guiltier, the briber or the bribee.
It would have made a much fairer page of history, had it not been deemed necessary to resort to methods which did not exactly square up to the requirements of absolute honesty, yet for those who sometimes justify questionable methods on the ground that "the end justifies the means," it is of course easy to condone the transaction on the part of Mr. Morris. His strong arm and mighty services during the years of the war for independence can never be forgotten, and under the circum- stances it is best perhaps to "lay this flattering unction to our souls," and console ourselves with the comforting reflection that it was all
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overruled for the best interests of humanity. As for the Indians let us flatter ourselves that it was only one of those cases of the inevitable, so willed by the Great Spirit, and that in the happy hunting grounds they have met the sachems, chiefs, warriors, hunters, squaws and papooses of long ago in regions more fair and a country far more beau- tiful even than this paradise of the Senecas, which they once inhabited and over which at Big Tree they higgled for a few cents per acre, where all is peace and happiness, and age and decrepitude cannot come. But casting all reflections and observations aside, let us close by saying that the treaty of Big Tree was the key which unlocked the gates of this great empire of forest and opened it up to the light of civilization, and the glorious acts of peace. A great tide of immigration was anx- iously awaiting the issue, and hailed with delight the auspicious result.
The Holland Company, as it had now come to be called, hastened preparations for surveying; the transit meridian, the boundary line between its purchase and the Morris reserve, was established in the summer of 1798, by Joseph and Benjamin Elicott; the same season Augustus Porter ran the boundary lines of the several reservations; George Burgess made a traverse of the Genesee river from the great elm at the mouth of Canandaigua creek, to the Pennsylvania line, and many surveyors were soon employed in establishing meridians, and running township and sub-division lines. A land office was established at Batavia, maps of the tract were placed where they would do the most good, and glowing accounts of the wonderful new country, of its tim- ber, soil, climate, productions and water, were given in the leading journals.
Let us witness a transformation. An army appears; not with banners, but armed with hickory sticks, upon which are hung wedge- shaped pieces of glittering steel, thin and sharp. Its ranksare filled with stalwart men, with nerves of steel, steady purpose and strong will. It is followed by log sleds and lumber wagons, drawn mostly by oxen, and loaded with furniture becoming frontier life, and their wives and children. All at once, as if by magic, a thousand rude cabins appear in as many small openings in the woods. The merry ring of the set- tler's ax is heard, and crash on crash come thundering to the earth, the proud monarchs of the forest. Piles are made, fires are lighted, and the blackened soil and stumps are quickly succceeded by fields of golden
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grain. The clearings widen, comfortable log dwellings and school- houses appear; saw and grist and carding mills are erected, roads are opened, streams are bridged, stores are put up at the corners; postoffices and post-routes are established; the stage and boat horns succeed the war-whoop and the wild yell of exultation of the Senecas, only soon to be succeeded by the whistle of the locomotive, and the rattle and roar of the railroad cars; and today the territory of the Holland purchase and Morris reserve interlaced with more miles of railway than it had of main Indian trails at the time of the Big Tree treaty, and the country is covered with a network of telegraph, telephone and trolley wires, which is truly wonderful. Before 1850 the last howl of the last wolf had been heard, the deer disappeared before rifle of the pioneer, and the panther and bear retreated to more secluded regions, and today the log dwelling and the log school-house are among "the things that were, but are not."
The mighty power of Niagara has been harnessed, and made to subserve the purposes of man. Electricity has been impressed into service, and optimists discern within its limits, in the near future, the greatest manufacturing center of the world. Over 160 townships and distinct municipalities, hundreds of thriving villages, a full half-score of bustling cities, among them the second in the state, schools, churches, academies, seminaries, colleges and universities, scattered here and there, all conspire to give this territory a position everything considered, second to no other of like extent upon the continent. It is indeed a heritage of which we may be justly proud. Let us be thankful for the high privilege of living here today, and fondly cherish the hope that the hundred years to come will abound more and more with the evidences of material, social and religious prosperity, and that when the bi-cen- tennial of the Big Tree treaty shall appear upon the dial of the centur- ies, our successors may have as good if not better cause for grateful commemoration than we have today.
REMARKS OF MR. GEORGE ROGERS HOWELL
m® R. PRESIDENT, Ladies and Gentlemen :- I have come from Albany to present for your inspection some Indian treaties to be exhibited a little later. A descendant of Robert Mor- ris, whose treaty with the Indians we celebrate this day, Mr. Gouverneur Morris of Detroit, has requested me to present in his name to the Livingston County Historical Society this portrait of his ancestor. But before everything else I wish to present to the village of Geneseo my congratulations that it has in its midst an orchestra and a body of singers, all its own citizens, capable of giving such music as we have heard this afternoon, music which would have been creditable to any body of performers in any place.
This portrait of Robert Morris is a photograph of a portrait in oil made by Rembrandt Peale which is considered by the family to be the best of him in existence. It is, and will always be, valuable to the Society, as it represents a man and an event,-the man through whom came the possibility of your ancestors obtaining homes in this fertile valley, and the event, the passing of the title from the Indian to the white man. As we grade men Robert Morris was a great man. He was one to whom was given the ability to see avenues to great fortune in the undertaking of great affairs. These avenues are closed to the eyes of most men. I presume there are men before me who are not millionaires. Well, do not mourn over that as if you had failed to. improve the talents given you. You may rest assured that special talents are as necessary to perceive and recognize avenues to great wealth as truly as they are to a Mendelssohn to write those incompara- ble masterpieces of music that have charmed the world for genera- tions. Money making is an inborn gift, an endowment by the Almighty, and if you have it, though born in Podunk or Cranberry Center you will find your way to the centers of wealth and power and population. But if you have not this peculiar talent it is no fault of yours, and you can be just as happy without it, and make that wife in your home just as happy with your love and care and protection. Your children will love you as well, and the great Judge over all will be just as ready to receive you with the plandit "Well done" as if you had amassed millions. Now, then, Robert Morris was a man of large affairs, and in laying the foundations of a large personal fortune he opened up an immense tract of land to be converted from a wilder-
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ness to the famous grainfields of the Genesee valley. The forest through your labors and those of your ancestors has become the garden of the empire state.
But what a drama had just been enacted on the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia. Thirteen colonies had been governed by a king three thousand miles away across the water, and little cared king or ministry or parliament for the sufferings of an over-taxed people so long as the never-ceasing stream of taxes and tithes from the colonies flowed into the treasury at home. But the time for self- government had come, freedom was in the air, and the colonies declared their independence and became a nation. And then for a second time two nations were battling for the possession of half a continent. It was a life and death struggle, prolonged through suffer- ing and losses, where every home mourned a victim in the cause of liberty. When Great Britain in despair abandoned the field, the end of the war found the country impoverished and its population deci- mated. But a new nation had been born, where freedom had her home and flung wide open the doors to the oppressed throughout the world.
And then came the time to repair the damages of war. The young men began to look to the fertile fields to the west of the old frontiers. Here in New York dwelt the Six Nations, in mental and physical endowments the equals of the white race. If their moral condition was inferior, it was not so many hundred years ago when our ances- tors were no better. Recall to mind that scene in Charles Kingsley's Hereward the Wake, where, after the conquest of England by William .of Normandy, the Saxons are sent back to their homes in the fens of Lincolnshire in boats rowed by men whose eyes had been put out, directed by men whose hands had been lopped off. The Indian made one great mistake. He did not adopt the civilization of the white race. Emerson enjoins the man who aspires for better things to hitch his wagon to a star, but the poor Indian took to the woods. But the earth was not given as an inheritance to man for hunting. The human race long ago discovered it was easier to take one's dinner from the beef-barrel in the cellar than to seek it running wild in the woods. The earth does her best under cultivation and a race of hunters must always give way to tillers of the soil. Even now the solution of the Indian problem is, along with education, to assign land to them in severalty, and then compel them to adopt the ways of cizilization.
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Mr. Howell then exhibited three treaties:
1. A copy of the treaty of Robert Morris with the Indians Sept. 16, 1797, when for $100,000 he obtained possession of the tract of the Senecas. This was made in duplicate at the same time (1797) and deposited in the archives of the state.
2. A second treaty of the Senecas with the state of New York wherein they surrendered for $500 a strip of land a mile wide bordering the east bank of the Niagara river, of date Aug. 20, 1802.
3. The original treaty of the Oneidas Sept. 22, 1788, when they ceded all their lands except a small reservation for themselves to the state of New York to which is attached a belt of wampum. This was signed by the chiefs and sachems of the Oneidas. These deeds or treaties are all in the New York State Library.
AT THE BANQUET
ADDRESS BY TOASTMASTER S. E, HITCHCOCK
m® EMBERS of the Livingston County Historical Society, Guests, and Friends :- I shall trespass but a moment upon your patience owing to the lateness of the hour; but Ishould be false to my duty as well as to my inclination if I failed to give expression to the feeling which I know is at this moment upper- most in the minds of all present, that of sorrow for the enforced absence of our honored President. Detained by illness in a distant state, we know that his heart goes out to us in best wishes for our welfare and for the success of our celebration. And our thoughts go out to him laden with regret at his absence and wishes for his speedy restoration to health.
One hundred years ago today the Genesee Valley was the scene of a momentous event. It was the dawning of what we, in the hurry and bustle of the closing hours of the nineteenth century, call civilization. It was the closing of the deep and solemn reign of the civilization of Nature. It was the passing of this valley into the hands of the white man, who should cause it to teem with busy towns and fruitful fields. It was the passing out of the hands of those to whom the Almighty had intrusted it, so far as we know, since the morning stars sang together.
Gathered as we are gathered in commemoration, it is fitting that our thoughts should be carried directly to that great event, and I therefore propose asour first toast, "The Treaty of Big Tree-Its Moral and Material Influence."
RESPONSE BY COL. JOHN R. STRANG
The Treaty of Big Tree-Its Moral and Material Influence.
T HE OPENING of Western New York to settlement and civiliza- tion did not in precise terms depend upon the ratification of the Big Tree Treaty, because, before that was made in 1797, there was already a considerable settlement of white people within the limits of the lands transferred by it to Robert Morris, the first white settler in this town being as early as 1789, and several of the prominent early pioneers having purchased lands and taken up their residence within the town between that date and 1797. But its ratifi- cation was a throwing wide open of the gate for the advancing tide of settlement and civilization, in consequence of the ability thereafter to procure a perfect title to land which had theretofore been held by Mor- ris under an imperfect Indian title. After the purchase from the In- dians at the close of the War of the Revolution, the extinguishment of the Massachusetts title to large parts of the lands in Western New York, Morris had contracted to sell various portions of the vast tract so acquired, to various persons in this and other lands, binding himself to procure the extinguishment of the Indian title within a given period. As before remarked, the extinguishment of the Indian title made all these conveyances good, and the purchasers were able to hold and con- vey the entire fee of the lands. The attention of a large part of the Northern States, particularly New England and Pennsylvania, had been already called to the beauty and fertility of the land in the Gene- see Valley and other parts of Western New York, and no sooner was the treaty of Big Tree signed than the tide of emigration set in to Western New York, especially from New England, Pennsylvania and Maryland, and before the lapse of many years, large tracts of these fertile lands, which have since become the garden of the continent, passed into possession and occupancy of actual settlers from the states named.
It was the best class of population with which to found and estab- lish a new country, the settlers bringing with them the customs and habits of thrift and industry, and the moral and religious characteris- tics, which prevailed in the homes from which they came, added to which was the spirit of enterprise, which induced them to seek out and make their homes in this, then so distant a country. In after years
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other circumstances brought into their midst a large number of Scotch- Irish settlers, whole towns in Western New York coming to be inhab- ited by the latter, some of whom were from the parent country, and others from the eastern part of the state of New York. These various nationalities and classes of people soon assimilated and became a homo- geneous people, carefully rearing and nursing in their midst all that tended toward education, enlightenment and civilization, and as we trace down the years since the beginning of the century, we cannot fail to notice how the Valley of the Genesee, and indeed the whole of Western New York, has ever been prominent in educational matters and in all things which tended to lift up and ennoble the mass of the people. Commerce and manufactures soon had a steadfast foothold among them ; canals and railroads afforded them access to market and a means of intercommunication among themselves, and as the result, we have today in the western part of this state, a country of which every one of its citizens must be proud, which contains within the limits of the very land covered by the treaty of Big Tree, two of the most prosperous cities of the state, inhabited by at least half a million of people, to say nothing of the beautiful villages, hamlets and homes, with which the whole land is now covered.
In the few moments which I have at my disposal to respond to this toast, I cannot enter into details further, but have already given suffi- cient to indicate the moral and material influence which the ratifica- tion of the treaty of Big Tree had on Western New York, and must close by saying that the land which in 1797 was inhabited substantially only by Indians, and whose millions of fertile acres were unused and uncultivated, and under the foliage of whose forest trees this treaty was discussed and signed, has by the character, thrift and energy of its settlers, guided and directed by the first pioneers, become the home of education, civilization and refinement, and made to blossom as a rose.
RESPONSE BY HON, GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
Robert Morris-"A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed."
IKE all great men, Robert Morris had his calumniators, but his whole life was open and above petty things, and his whole course during the trying time of our revolution showed him to be a man fearless in the path of duty, and too noble to deign to notice the trivial charges that are always the lot of public men. His patriotism and sacrifices for his country during the revolution, and his close friendship with Washington are matters of history, and it may well be said that our revolution might have failed without Wash- ington, but must have failed without Morris.
Both to the Colony of Pennsylvania and to the United States he gave his time and credit at great sacrifice to his own business interests and personal comfort, and he was always found ready in the time of need. On the formation of the government in 1781 he was unanimously elected Superintendent of Finances, at a time when the exhausted credit of the government threatened the most alarming consequences; when the army was utterly destitute of the necessary supplies of food and cloth- ing, and even the confidence of Washington was shaken, Robert Morris, upon his own credit, and from his own private resources, furnished those pecuniary means, without which all the physical force of the country would have been in vain.
The following letter conveying his sentiments in relation to the high trust reposed in him was submitted to Congress and is worthy of being produced here, also his formal acceptance of the office :
Philadelphia, 13th March, 1781.
His Excellency, the President of Congress-Sir : I had the honour to receive your excellency's letter of the twenty-first of last month, en- closing the act of congress of the twentieth, whereby I am appointed, by an unanimous election of that honourable body, to the important office of "Superintendent of Finance." Perfectly sensible of the honour done me by this strong mark of confidence from the sovereign author- ity of the United States, I feel myself bound to make the acknowledg- ments due by pursuing a conduct formed to answer the expectations of congress, and promote the public welfare. Were my abilities equal to my desire of serving America, I should have given an immediate determination after this appointment was made ; but, conscious of my own deficiences, time for consideration was absolutely necessary. Lit- tle, however, of the time which has elapsed, have I been able to devote to this subject, as the business before the legislature of Pennsylvania (wherein I have the honour of a seat,) has demanded, and continues to demand, my constant attendance.
HON. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
г.
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So far as the station of Superintendent of Finance, or indeed any other public station of office, applies to myself, I should, without the least hesitation have declined an acceptance ; for after upwards of twenty years assiduous application to business as a merchant, I find myself at that period when my mind, body, and inclination, combine to make me seek for relaxation and ease. Providence has so far smiled on my endeavors as to enable me to prepare for the indulgence of those feelings, in such manner as would be least injurious to the interests of my family. If, therefore, I accept this appointment, a sacrifice of that ease, of much social and domestic enjoyment, and of my material in- terests, must be the inevitable consequence : And, as my ambition was entirely gratified by my present situation and character in life, no motive of that kind can stimulate me to acceptance. Putting myself out of the question the sole motive is the public good ; and this motive, I confess, comes home to my feelings. The contest we are engaged in, appeared to me, in the first instance, just and necessary ; therefore I took an active part in it; as it became dangerous, I thought it the more glorious, and was stimulated to the greatest exertions in my power when the affairs of America were at the worst. Sensible of the want of arrangement in our monied affairs, the same considerations impel me to this undertaking, which I would embark in without hesi- tation, could I believe myself equal thereto ; but fearing this may not be the case, it becomes indispensably necessary to make such stipula- tions as may give ease to my feelings, aid to my exertions and tend to procure ample support to my conduct in office, so long as it is founded in, and guided by, a regard to the public prosperity.
In the first place, then, I am to inform congress, that the prepara- tory steps I had taken to procure to myself relaxation from business with least injury to the interests of my family, were by engaging in certain commercial establishments with persons in whom I had perfect confidence, as to their integrity, honour and abilities. These establish- ments I am bound in honour, and by contracts, to support to the extent agreed on. If, therefore, it be in the idea of congress, that the office of superintendent of finance is incompatible with commercial concerns and connexions, the point is settled ; for I cannot, on any consideration, consent to violate engagements, or depart from those principles of honour which it is my pride to be governed by. If, on the contrary, congress have elected me to this office under the expectation that my mercantile connexions and engagements were to continue, an express declaration of their sentiments should appear on the minutes, that no doubt may arise, or reflection be cast, on this score hereafter.
I also think it indispensably necessary that the appointment of all persons who are to act in my office, (under the same roof, or in imme- diate connexion with me,) should be made by myself; congress first agreeing that such secretaries, clerks or officers, so to be appointed, are necessary, and fixing the salaries for each. I conceive that it will be impossible to execute the duties of this office with effect, unless the absolute power of dismissing from office, or employment, all persons whatever that are concerned in the official expenditure of public monies, be committed to the superintendent of finance ; for, unless this power can be exercised without control, I have little hopes of efficacy in the business of reformation, which is probably the most essential
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