USA > New York > Wayne County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 4
USA > New York > Cayuga County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 4
USA > New York > Seneca County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 4
USA > New York > Ontario County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 4
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"I have even thought to live with you, but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, last spring, in cold blood and un- provoked, cut off all the relatives of Logan; not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of a human creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. Yet, do not harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one."
That plaintive call of woe is wrought in bronze upon Au- burn's monument to Logan's memory.
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Red Jacket: Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket as he was called by the British because of a red toac he always wore, was born about 1755 presumably at Canoga on the west side of Cayuga Lake. As a boy he resided on Lake Keuka and some claim he was born near Branchport. In civil life his name was Otetiana, meaning Always Ready. On his elevation as chief in the ranks of the Senecas, he received the name, Segoyewatha, meaning He Keeps Them Awake.
Little is known of his early career, but it is known he was never a warrior. When Sullivan's invasion came to the lake country, he advised retreat. But the fame of his eloquence was a by-word throughout Long House. The speech of Red Jacket at the great council of the confederated Indians, held at the mouth of the Detroit River in 1784, was supposed to have been his first public address. It is commonly believed that he was present at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784, opposing the treaty.
Red Jacket was among the fifty Indian chiefs who accepted an invitation from Washington to attend a conference in Phila- delphia in 1791. There he made one of the greatest addresses of his life and was presented with a great silver medal by Wash- ington, a token which he wore until his death.
The great orator had a deep rooted antipathy for Christian- ity, because of his experience with violated treaties and white treachery. One of his most famous speeches was made in 1805 at a council of Indians at Buffalo, when a missionary from Mas- sachusetts came to introduce faith.
"The Great Spirit will not punish us for what we do not know * * " " he said. "These Black Coats talk to the Great Spirit and ask light that we may see as they do, when they are blind themselves and quarrel about the light that guides them. These things we do not understand."
At one time he fell into discredit in his tribe, when enemies denounced him was a charge of witchcraft. At his trial, three hours of oration acquitted him.
In the War of 1812 the Senecas enlisted with the forces of the United States, with Red Jacket as a leader. He distinguished
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himself in action near Fort George on August 17, 1813, when the British were defeated. Prisoners, at his direction, were treated with humanity. As late as 1821 he protested against the intrusions of missionaries.
Until the day of his death he continued to enjoy distinction and always wore a great medal bestowed upon him by Washing- ton. He lived in a log cabin in a lonely spot near Buffalo, and scarcely a traveler passed that way without calling upon the chief so celebrated for his wisdom and oratory. Red Jacket un- derstood English well, but would never converse in it, nor reply to a speech in English until it had been translated to him. He died January 20, 1830, due to a broken heart over the losses of the hunting grounds of his people. He was buried on the Buffalo reservation and on October 9, 1884, the remains were removed and again laid to rest in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, with imposing ceremonies. A handsome monument was unveiled there June 22, 1891, in memory of the Indian Chiefs buried on the spot. Another monument to this orator is at Canoga.
Joseph Brandt: A savage marauder of the frontier, Joseph Brant, or Thayendanegea, as the Indians called him, has left a name whose recollection envisions slaughter, massacre, pillage, plunder, burning and devastation. As a war chief of the Mo- hawks he was a terror of the Finger Lakes a century and a half ago and no Indian played a greater part in the stirring events of the Revolution.
Brant's natural gifts were enhanced through circumstance. Because his sister, Molly, was the mistress of Sir William John- son, baronet and popular British Indian agent who died in 1774, he was provided with a fair English education at Lebanon, Con- necticut. Johnson gave him a responsible position in the Indian agency, which he held until the Revolution, when he fled to Mon- treal, was taken to Britain, presented to the nobility and was persuaded that ancient treaties of his people bound him as an ally to English arms.
The Indian came back to America to lead his dusky warriors against the colonists-a man of dauntless courage, lofty bearing and inhuman ferocity. Historians claim he was the Indian com-
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mander in the massacres of Wyoming and Cherry Valley. It was Brant who led the Indians at the battle of Newtown, with Col. John Butler, Indian land speculator, Tory and friend of Sir William Johnson, leading the Royalists. As the principal Iro- quois leader he harried the settlers on the Schoharie, Susque- hanna and Delaware rivers unmercifully.
In 1780 Brant surprised and burned Harpersfield and tor- mented the Mohawk Valley all summer with about 500 Indians. After the declaration of peace in 1782, this implacable chief tried to incite another war against the colonies and was a power- ful figure as late as 1795. In 1792 he had an interview with Washington.
Capt. Jeremiah Snyder thus described Brant: "He was a likely fellow of fierce aspect-tall, rather spare-well spoken and about thirty years of age. He wore moccasins elegantly trimmed with beads, leggins and breech-cloth of superfine blue, short green coat with silver epaulets, and a small laced round hat. He carried a silver mounted cutlass and was draped in a blanket of blue cloth, gorgeously decorated with a red border."
As the result of his service in the Revolution the British gave Brant a grant of land in 1785 at the western extremity of Lake Ontario in Canada, where he lived until his death, Novem- ber 24, 1807. Here he had forty negro slaves, cowed by the threat of the tomahawk should they attempt to escape. In the latter years of his life he received a captain's half pay from the British, together with presents which amounted to $2,500 a year. In age he studied Greek and translated a portion of the New Testament into the Mohawk tongue.
INDIAN CAPTIVES.
Grim tales of captivity among the Indians form one of the engrossing chapters of the history of Central New York pio- neers. Emblematic of experiences of numerous early settlers is the story of Indian capture that figures in the romance of Cayuga County's second white settler and his wife and his subse- quent suicide in the forest. It is a tale of love and labor and disappointment in a wilderness where savagery and white
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treachery combined to wear down the indomitable courage of the Revolutionary captain, Roswell Franklin.
When the soldier's first wife was murdered in Indian mas- sacre of Wyoming and his family captured, he little thought that it was but the beginning of a life and death struggle with the Six Nations of Central New York.
One morning in November, 1778, the family of a Mr. Lester at Nanticoke on the Susquehanna was awakened by the dread war whoop. A band of Senecas had come on its mission of death. Mr. Lester was murdered and his wife and little child taken into captivity.
The next year Captain Franklin joined the forces of General Sullivan in his drive into Central New York. When the troops reached the heart of the wilderness, Mrs. Lester came rushing into their camp with a child in her arms. She returned with the expedition and became Franklin's second wife. She was the first woman to have a home in Cayuga County, coming with the captain in 1789 to settle between Cayuga and Owasco Lakes.
After he had built his cabin, surveyors came, their measure- ments showing that through a previous mistake, Franklin's home and half of the improvements on what he supposed was his wood- land farm, lay inside the line of a Cayuga Indian reservation. Other settlers had by that time arrived and the Indians pro- tested. Governor Clinton ordered the whites off the reserved land. When the order was ignored, a posse of fifty men turned fourteen families adrift in the forest and burned their homes.
Franklin was near the line and petitioned the sheriff to let him remain until spring. This was granted, provided he could satisfy the Indians. Before the time had expired, Franklin had agreed with a neighbor to procure a title to that part of the lot not within the forbidden limits, with the understanding that the man was to have half the land for his trouble. It turned out that the whole of the 640 acres, which Franklin supposed was to be negotiated for, was bought under him and measures taken to dispossess him. Tired of carrying the burden he had borne so long and bravely, one spring day in 1792, Franklin took his gun into the woods and put a bullet through his brain.
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Though merely a voluntary exile among the Indians, Jacob Fredenburg, who fled in 1787 from Massachusetts to escape ar- rest for complicity in Shay's Rebellion, was one of the earliest whites to live among the Senecas. He came to hide himself among the Indians, stopping at what is now Penn Yan, Yates County, and built a log hut by Jacob's Brook. He was adopted into the tribe and remained with the red men for three years before returning East.
During the dark days of Indian warfare in the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, preceding the Sullivan expedition, Luke Swetland was captured by Indians August 24, 1778, and taken in captivity to the Indian village of Kendaia on Seneca Lake, Seneca County, in the town of Romulus. There he remained a prisoner for one year and two days until released by the Sullivan expedition troops on September 5, 1779. Late in the fall of 1778, when a prisoner, Swetland sowed one quart of wheat, probably the first sown in Seneca County. He returned with the army to Pennsylvania where he died at Wyoming January 30, 1823, at the age of ninety-three.
Several early settlers of Romulus suffered Indian captivity during or after the Revolution, among them being Joseph Wyck- off and Kezia Foree, who afterward became his wife; Andrew McKnight and Mrs. Mary Swartout, wife of John Swartout.
Two of the pioneer settlers of Fayette in the same county were captured by Indians when they resided in Pennsylvania. They were Michael Vreeland, who located on the Canoga reser- vation and William Chatham, who settled a little to the north- ward. But the hardships failed to shorten their lives. Vreeland reached the age of eighty-one and Chatham ninety-six.
No Indian captive in Central New York's history had a more thrilling experience than that of Jasper Parrish, famous Indian interpreter, who was a prisoner for seven years. Today de- scendants of Parrish still live in Canandaigua, where his picture hangs in the Ontario County courthouse. Jasper Parrish was born in Connecticut in 1767 but his parents soon migrated to the headwaters of the Delaware in New York. On July 5, 1778, Jasper, then a boy of eleven while helping his father in the fields,
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was captured by Monsee Indians. For three months he was held in an Indian village when "Captain" Mounsh, his red cap- tor, took him to Chemung, where he was often beaten by the tribe.
Parrish was sold to a Delaware Indian family for $20 and taken to the Tioga River. Through the winter and spring of 1779 he lived with the Indians, being forced with other boys to jump through the ice into the river to "toughen him." When Sullivan's army fought the battle of Newtown in the fall of that year, Parrish was with the Indians who took him in their retreat to Fort Niagara. There British officers offered a guinea apiece for scalps of white Colonials. When the red men were drunk, Parrish barely saved his scalp by hiding through the night in the forest. At Niagara his master sold him for $20 to a portly Mohawk, named Captain David Hill by the British. He was held by this master five years and adopted into the Indian's family as a son.
The Indian moved to Lewiston, where he lived when the treaty of September, 1884, was arranged between the United States and the Iroquois. Two months later, in accordance with an agreement of the treaty, Jasper was delivered over to the United States forces with ninety-two other white prisoners. He traced his long lost family to Goshen, New York, reaching them when eighteen years old and unable to read or write and hardly able to speak English. He then enjoyed nine months' schooling before he was appointed Indian interpreter to the United States, by General Israel Chapin of Harfield, Massachusetts, Indian su- perintendent. Parrish opened his office at Canandaigua in 1792. Two years later President Washington called a council of all chiefs and sachems of the Six Nations at Canandaigua, Parrish covering much of the state in mobolizing the red men.
The assemblage opened at Canandaigua October 18, 1794, continuing to November 12, with 1,600 Indians attending. The red men to feed themselves killed as many as 100 deer a day. On November 12, 1794, the famous Pickering Treaty was signed by Timothy Pickering, U. S. commissioner ; Israel Chapin, Jas- per Parrish, a few other white men and fifty-nine Indians. That pact established final peace between the white man and the red.
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In 1803 Parrish was appointed U. S. sub-agent to the Six Na- tions, continuing in office down to the second term of President Andrew Jackson. He was also successively cornet, lieutenant and captain in the Fifth Division of the State Militia and a di- rector of the Bank of Onondaga County. He died in Canan- daigua in 1836 at the age of sixty-eight.
Another pioneer, who suffered the horrors of Indian captivity was Capt. Horatio Jones, the first white settler west of the Gene- see River, who in 1786 opened a trading post near Waterloo, Seneca County. He was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1763. In June, 1781, he enlisted in the Bedford Ranger, a command of U. S. riflemen. After a scout of a few days, one morning about sunrise, thirty-two Rangers including Jones en- countered about eighty Indians in a fog on the Ragstown branch of the Juniata River. The whites were ambushed, nine slain and eight taken captive, among the last being Jones. Only the fact that in fleeing the red men his moccasin string became un- tied and caught upon a log, throwing him, brought his capture.
Without food, the Indians marched their captives for two days. When a bear was finally killed, Jones was given the en- trails. By night the captives were tied, marching by day until they reached what is now Nunda, Livingston County. Jones was forced to run the gauntlet, with clubs, tomahawks and stones hurled at him. Other captives were slaughtered. The man weathered the smallpox and was adopted into an Indian family, receiving the name Ta-e-da-o-qua, and was always claimed as a prisoner by his Indian cousin Ca-nun-quak or Blue Eyes.
Later the man eluded the Indians and after conducting the Waterloo trading post for a time removed to Geneva and located under a hill by Seneca Lake. He sold his first lot of furs to John Jacob Astor. In 1789, leaving Geneva, he settled near Beard's Creek in the town of Leicester, raised the first wheat west of the Genesee River and was the first white settler in the valley of that stream. In an Indian hut he found shelter the first year for his wife and three children. Appointed by Presi- dent Washington, he held the office of interpreter with the Iro- quois for forty years and died in 1836 at the age of seventy-five.
CHAPTER III
THE SULLIVAN CAMPAIGN.
OBJECT AND IMPORTANCE OF CAMPAIGN-THE THIRD CONTINENTAL ARMY- PLAN OF CAMPAIGN-RESULTS OF INVASION-OBSTACLES TO PROJECT-FIRST BATTLE AT NEWTOWN-DEVASTATION OF REGION-SESQUICENTENNIAL CELEBRATED IN 1929.
To understand the most distinctive feature of Central New York's earliest history, one must understand the significance and scope of the Sullivan campaign of 1779. Dozens of thriving communities of the present occupy sites of Indian villages de- stroyed in that great military movement. And today there are more Sullivan markers within Central New York than there are memorials for all other historical events combined. The summary of the campaign here given is compiled from more than two score journals, histories and other documents and presents in chronological order the troop movements over the sites of present-day towns.
A tale of reckless daring against a lurking foe in a forest wilderness; of the threat of starvation, of court-martials to check desertions; of the match of wits between the war chiefs of the greatest Indian confederacy in history and some of Wash- ington's most famous generals-the story of how a third of the Continental Army in Central New York struck a blow for Ameri- can Independence, with results matching those of the battles of Yorktown and Saratoga,-that, in brief, is the story of the Sul- livan Expedition of 1779.
Tortuous miles across rivers and over mountains under the sinister eyes of Indian runners; dying cattle diminishing the army's food supply; pack horses that fell in the forest trails un- able to stand the toil of the plodding soldiers, shirtless, ragged and hungry-these were but incidents of that great western
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movement in the Revolution that historians are now describing as one of the most stirring achievements of Washington in the war for freedom.
Historians and casual readers have often questioned the seeming ruthlessness with which the colonists, blazing the path of the new republic, trampled down every vestige of the dom- ination of the conquerors of two centuries. But the Sullivan campaign was more than a cruel, punitive expedition. The vigor and decisiveness of the methods employed merely reflect what Washington and his counsellors considered the necessities cre- ated by the conditions in the New York Colony.
In 1778 had occurred the famous massacre at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Cherry Valley, New York, in which men, women and children of the families of many of Sullivan's sol- diers had fallen before the tomahawk. New York was a hot bed of Torryism. Of the state's population of 180,000, it is esti- mated that 80,000 were Tories or British Loyalists. These ene- mies of the new republic were constantly instigating the great Iroquois Confederacy to invade the frontier settlements like a cloud of death.
Washington knew that the war so far was a "stale-mate," and that peace was but a matter of time. He saw that victory would be a hollow one, if only a fringe of colonists along the Atlantic seaboard was to be the prize of war. The Sullivan cam- paign was to deal a death blow to Toryism and Indian menace on the western frontier and then to stake out a claim for the great inland empire in the rich hinterland clear to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.
With sword and flame the land was cleared of its former owners. The determination of a despairing republic was behind the destruction. The soldiers themselves had undergone suffer- ing that made them bitter. We are told that they had no meat, little flour or salt and that they lived on boiled or roasted corn, and every fourth man was obliged to sit up all night and grate corn for a sort of hominy.
But with this army, representing English, Irish, Scotch, Ger- man, Dutch and other nationalities, the most extensive, carefully
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planned and important offensive American military movement in the whole of the Revolution was brought to a successful climax. And on the operation, the impoverished colonies spent a million dollars.
Before the ever advancing columns of Colonials' forty Indian villages fell in ashes and hundreds of acres of waving grain and ripening orchards were leveled. But the expedition brought greater results than that alone.
It crushed the Six Nations so that never again did the Iro- quois make war as a confederacy.
It thwarted an impending British attack from the west.
It shook the confidence of the Indian in his British allies.
It-laid more towns in ashes than had ever been destroyed on this continent before.
It snatched from Britain a food supply intended for an ad- vancing western column and threw upon the English the burden of feeding their red allies, stripped of all means of sustenance.
It removed a menace from the rear-Indians, Tories, Hes- sians, Canadian Rangers here in the west that was far more annoying than the formidable forces of Clinton and Howe.
Finally, as a result of Washington's farsighted diplomacy, it won for the Colonists a great western territory that was to place them in a commanding position when later the war should end and peace terms and lands be decided about the conference table. It was this last consequence of the campaign that formed the opening wedge in gaining for the new republic the thousands of square miles westward to the Mississippi.
To understand the significance of this drive into the wilder- ness, it is necessary first to take a glance at the position of the Colonists at the time it opened. Four years of conflict had drawn heavily upon their resources. The darkness before the dawn was upon the land. So deep was the gloom that the December before the summer expedition of Sullivan, Washington had written: "Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous and deplorable condition than they have been since the commencement of the war."
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Dissensions and party feuds had broken out in Congress and numerous of the great figures of 1776 had withdrawn from its halls. Mourning the self-seeking, the revelry, the idleness at the Capitol, Washington himself wrote to the National Congress: "An assembly, a concert, a dinner, a supper that will cost three or four hundred pounds will not only take off men from acting in their (the public) business, but even from thinking of it, while a great part of the officers of our army are quitting the service, and the more virtuous few, rather than do this, are sinking by slow degrees into beggary and want."
It was in the midst of such anxieties, that Washington framed the policy for the Sullivan campaign of 1779-defensive tactics along the Atlantic and the shifting of a third of the entire army then holding back the British, to push into the western forest and crush the Indians, Tories, refugees and Rangers which had harassed the frontier settlements and were aiding the British in planning a campaign eastward from Fort Niagara.
Washington himself explicitly outlined the plan of the cam- paign: "It is proposed to carry the war into the heart of the country of the Six Nations, to cut off their settlements, destroy their next year's crops and do them every other mischief which time and circumstances will permit." Washington's orders to Sullivan declare "the immediate objects are the total destruction of the hostile tribes of the Six Nations and the devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible." Sullivan was directed to "lay waste all the settlements around, so that the country may not only be over- run but destroyed."
Evidence of the magnitude of the campaign as viewed by Washington, in his words to the president of Congress: "The council are fully sensible of the importance of success in the pres- ent expedition, and the fatal mischiefs which would attend a defeat. We should perhaps lose an army and our frontier would be deluged in blood."
For a year Congress had favored an invasion of Canada and Lafayette looked with favor upon such a move. But during the same period Washington had been formulating his plans for
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striking at the heart of the Long House of the Iroquois in Central New York and at one blow crushing the original lords of the western wilderness and winning the great country westward for- ever from the British. At his insistence, Congress on February 27, 1779, authorized him to take steps toward launching the campaign.
To carry war into the heart of enemy country, Washington knew he must have a leader of the highest type. More as a mili- tary formality than with intent that the appointment should be accepted, Washington offered the command of the expedition to General Gates, because of his seniority and rank. Gates was a man fond of display, applause and prominence, but not of hard work or danger. He declined. In his rejection of the appoint- ment he said: "The man who undertakes the Indian service should enjoy youth and strength, requisites I do not possess. It therefore grieves me that your Excellency should offer me the only command to which I am entirely unequal."
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