USA > New York > Genesee County > History of the Genesee country (western New York) comprising the counties of Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Chemung, Erie, Genesee, Livingston, Monroe, Niagara, Ontario, Orleans, Schuyler, Steuben, Wayne, Wyoming and Yates, Volume I > Part 29
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"The first edition of Seaver's Life of Mary Jemison was pub- lished in 1824 by James D. Bemis of Canandaigua. This little volume is now among the scarcest of American books. It con- tains some statements not to be found in later editions. Among them is this, from the lips of the White Woman:
" 'At the great treaty of Big Tree one of Allan's daughters claimed the land which he had sold to Morris. The claim was examined and decided against her in favor of Ogden, Trumbull and Rogers and others who were creditors of Robert Morris. Allan yet believed that his daughter had an indisputable right to the land in question and got me to go with Mother Farley, a half Indian woman, to assist him, by interceding with Morris for it, and to urge the propriety of her claim. We went to Thomas Morris, and having stated to him our business, he told us plainly that he had no land to give away, and that as the title was good, he never would allow Allan, nor his heirs, one foot, or words to that effect. We returned to Allan the answer we had received, and he, conceiving all further attempts to be use- less, went home.'
"When Allan visited him in Philadelphia, Robert Morris . knew perfectly well that Allan had no right to sell the land he offered, for it was not deeded to Allan, but to Allan's daughters. "In Doty's excellent History of Livingston County the state- ment is made that Allan gave Morris a warranty deed, but this
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I am convinced, is a mistake. He had no right to give a deed; and as a matter of fact there is no deed or other document on record. If Allan executed a paper of any kind, it was a contract or bill of sale of the improvements.
"I think there can be no doubt that Ebenezer Allan's daugh- ter was deliberately defrauded at the treaty of Big Tree. The white men took advantage of the ignorance of the Indians and forced the claim through. Robert Morris was well pleased with his son's management of this affair, and promised to give him one-half of the sixteen square miles of land. He was unable to keep his promise, however. As to Ebenezer Allan, it is fair to assume that the Bluebeard of the Border knew he had done a discreditable and dishonest thing, for otherwise he would have appeared at the treaty himself and substantiated the statements of his daughter, instead of sending Mary Jemison to plead pri- vately with Thomas Morris.
"In his account of the treaty-the account which all of our historians have adopted-Thomas Morris says as little as pos- sible about the means he used to influence the Indians after Red Jacket had raked up the council fire. He acknowledges that he argued with the warriors and women and distributed presents to the latter, and then says:
" 'For some days the chief women and warriors might be seen scattered about in little knots; after which I received a message informing me that the women and warriors would meet me in council and negotiate with me.'
"It is a fact, however, which I am able to prove, and which is now made public for the first time, that during this interval Thomas Morris and the representatives of the Holland Land Company were secretly bribing the warriors. They not only paid them money, but agreed to give them annuities so long as they lived. And it was by bribery, rather than by argument, that Morris brought about the reopening of the council, and finally secured the consent of the Indians to sell. It is not sur- prising, therefore, that Morris tells us nothing of this in his statement; and doubtless he was as careful to conceal the brib- ery from the Indians generally as he was to conceal it from the historians of western New York. I have in my possession copies of some of the original documents, proving beyond question the
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truth of my statements. Here, for instance, is a receipt acknowl- edging the payment of one of the annuities :
" 'Received of Messrs. Leroy, Bayard & McEvers and Thomas Morris, Esq., by the hands of Erastus Granger, the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, being in full for my annuity for the year 1801 due me by agreement with Robert Morris at Big Tree in September, 1797.
his " 'Corn (X) Planter.
mark
" 'In the presence of Jasper Parrish.'
"It is clear from this that Cornplanter's price was $250 a year so long as he lived, in addition to the cash payment at the treaty. Altogether, therefore, he received about $10,000 for his share in this transaction. Doubtless Thomas Morris felt that Cornplanter's services were worth the price, for it was Corn- planter who conducted the negotiations for the Indians after the council fire had been rekindled. Of course he was not the only one who was paid. Young King, the 'bearer of the smoking brand,' received an annuity of $100, or a total of $3,800. In later years, as he thought of the power he could have wielded at the treaty, it is probable that he marveled at his own modera- tion. Little Billy was another who sold himself. His price was the same as Young King's-$100 a year-and as Little Billy lived until 1834 he received $3,700. Pollard received $50 a year, or $2,200. Even the haughty Red Jacket consented to receive money and drew $100 a year. And so we might go on, if it were necessary, with these unpleasant details.
"An interesting and unpublished anecdote regarding these annuities is furnished by William C. Bryant, Esq., the scholarly Indianologist of Buffalo. It seems that the annuities were not always paid exactly on time, and the Indians were often worried. Millard Fillmore, subsequently President of the United States, said to Mr. Bryant :
" 'I don't remember seeing Cornplanter but on one occasion. He came to my office on Court Street, soon after my return from Washington, after congress had adjourned. He was a bowed, wrinkled, and decrepit old man. He was attended by two or three younger Indians. He produced a capacious bag, similar in size to an ordinary mail bag, and took out a venerable treaty,
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which he explained to me. He said that soon after the treaty was made the annuity was promptly paid-first it came when the tender blades of the corn broke from the mould; then it came when the stalks were as high as a child's knee; next it lingered till the grain was full and filled with milk, and now the stalks are dry and rustling and the Indians are very hungry for their money.'
"Robert Morris himself expected that the Indians would have to be bribed and indeed authorized this procedure. In his letter of instructions he said: 'Annuities of $20 to $60 may be given to influential chiefs to the extent of $250 or $300 per annum.' And again, 'Some dollars may be promised before the treaty and paid when finished, to the amount of $500 or $600, or if neces- sary $1,000 to the chiefs.'
"It is to be regretted that the warriors betrayed their people for money, but they were importuned unceasingly by the avari- cious, cunning, and unscrupulous whites. All sorts of plausible arguments and entreaties were made, and under the spells of the tempters the red men fell. The Indians were wrong, unques- tionably; but how can we censure them severely? Is there no bribery nowadays: Do our representatives, in our boasted civil- ization, never betray their constituents? Are not charges of corruption pending even now against men who hold high offices of trust and power? Let us, therefore, pass by, with what char- ity we may, the fault committed by the untutored children of the forest, and condemn those who tempted them.
"On the part of Robert Morris and Thomas Morris his son, the transaction was shameful. They, at least, could measure the breadth and depth of the iniquity, and the fact that they accom- plished by the corrupt use of money what they could not accom- plish by fair and honorable dealings must not only be admitted, but recorded to their great discredit.
"Though most of the Indians who gathered at Big Tree had participated in the inevitable horrors of border warfare we must judge them with charity. Let us not fall into the error so com- mon among the historians of America, of unduly praising the conduct of the whites and unduly exaggerating the evil passions of the Indians. We must bear in mind that the whites, as well as the Indians, used the scalping knife and applied the torch, and that both committed excesses that both lived to regret. Many
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of the Indians who negotiated with Morris were men of high character. They had been brave in war, and they were eloquent and wise in council. They were imbued with feelings of lofty patriotism, and they loved their homes and their families. The greeting of the patient wife at the end of a long and dangerous journey was returned with tenderness and love, and the laughter of the romping children was music in the warrior's ear. It was the Great Spirit who gave to these forest heroes the beans and the corn, the gentle rains of spring, the smiling sun of summer and the golden days of harvest; and in their leafy chapels the Indians offered up their prayers and thanked him for his goodness.
"'Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave, That their light canoes have vanish'd From off the crested wave; That 'mid the forest where they roam'd There rings no hunter's shout; But their name is on your waters, Ye may not wash it out.
"'Ye say their cone-like cabins, That cluster'd o'er the vale, Have fled away like wither'd leaves Before the autumn's gale; But their memory liveth on your hills Their baptism on your shore; Your everlasting rivers speak Their dialect of yore.'"
RED JACKET'S CABIN, SOUTH BUFFALO, AND RESIDENCE OF HORATIO JONES, THE INDIAN INTERPRETER,
CHAPTER XV. THREE REMARKABLE WOMEN.
BY CHARLES F. MILLIKEN.
The names of three women of unique and tragic interest appear prominently in the story of the years just preceding and immediately following the opening to settlement of the so-called Genesee Country, one a half-breed "queen," one a founder of a religious cult and the third a white woman who spent her entire mature life among the Seneca Indians.
The "Queen" was "French Catherine," or Catherine Mon- tour, a daughter, it is believed, of Count Frontenac, by an Indian mother. She was taken when a child into the Seneca country and became the wife of a noted Indian sachem. She is sometimes confounded with her sister, "Queen Esther," the "fiend of Wyom- ing." She made her home near the head of Seneca Lake, at a place known as Catherine's Town, which was destroyed by Sulli- van's army in its punitive expedition into the Seneca country in 1779. Her name was given to one of the towns of Schuyler County, Catherine, and more recently she was honored when the village of Havana in that county changed its name to Montour.
The religious leader referred to was Jemima Wilkinson, who founded a new religious cult, led her little company of wor- shippers into the "great western wilderness" and in 1790 in what is now Yates County, established a New Jerusalem, where she died in 1819.
The "White Woman" was Mary Jemison, whose life with the Indians spanned events from the time that young George Wash- ington, as aid-de-camp of General Braddock, had his first experi- ence as a soldier, over the period of the succeeding French and Indian wars, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Inde- pendence, the war of the Revolution, the establishment of the union of states, and transformation of the western New York wilderness into the home of a numerous and prosperous people.
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The first printing of her story, as written by Dr. James Ever- ett Seaver, was done in Canandaigua in 1824, by J. D. Bemis and Co., a famous publishing firm of that day. In 1918, after a lapse of ninety-five years, the latest of twenty-one editions appeared, containing the original text, the notes of successive editors, with a final revision and much supplementary matter prepared by Dr. Charles D. Vail of Geneva. This was published in a hand- somely-illustrated and bound volume of 452 pages by the Ameri- can Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. And now word comes that the last named society is about to publish yet another edition of this classic work, making twenty-two in all. When the Vail revision was published it was called the twentieth, but since then an earlier edition, unlisted before, has turned up, making twenty-two in all, if we include the one now in press.
The intervening editions, printed in Howden, London, New York, Buffalo (2), New York again, and again London (3), bear the impress of four different revisers, Ebenezer Mix, Lewis Henry Morgan, William Prior Letchworth and Dr. Vail.
When Dr. Seaver undertook to write his account of Mary Jemison's life she was about eighty years of age, and he describes her as being very short in stature, considerably under the middle size, and standing tolerably erect, with her head bent forward, ap- parently from having been for a long time accustomed to carry heavy burdens with a strap placed across her forehead. Some idea of her physical stamina may be gained from the fact that she had "backed," as she said, all the boards used about her house from the mill on the outlet of Silver Lake, a distance of five miles. She spoke English plainly and distinctly with a little of the Irish emphasis. Her memory was good. She had the previous season planted, tended and gathered corn. She pounded her samp, cooked for herself, gathered and chopped wood, fed her cattle and poultry. Her dress was made and worn after the Indian fashion. Her home keeping must have been of rigid simplicity, as the house in which she lived was a one-story structure, only 20 by 26 feet in size. She was the mother of eight children, and, in 1823, at the time her "Life" was written, had thirty-nine grandchil- dren and fourteen great-grandchildren.
Mary Jemison was the daughter of Thomas and Jane Erwin Jemison, and she was born at sea as they were making the voy- age in a sailing vessel from Ireland to establish a new home in
MARY JEMISON, THE "WHITE WOMAN."
Bronze Statue Erected by William Pryor Letchworth at Glen Iris, Letch- worth Park. Dedicated September 19, 1910. Sculptor Henry K. Bush-Brown.
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America. That was in 1742 or 1743. Her early years were spent at her parents' farm home located on Marsh Creek, then a frontier settlement in Pennsylvania. All was peace and hap- piness with the little family until the outbreak of the French and Indian war. Then one pleasant day in the spring of 1758 (not 1755, as Dr. Seaver reports it), as they were engaged in their usual home duties the red terror of that day suddenly descended upon them.
For what immediately followed let us rely on Mary Jemi- son's own words, as recorded by Dr. Seaver. "Breakfast," she is reported as saying, "was not yet ready, when we were alarmed by the discharge of a number of guns that seemed to be near. Mother and the woman before mentioned almost fainted at the report, and every one trembled with fear. On opening the door, the man and horse lay dead near the house, having just been shot
by the Indians. They first secured my father and then rushed into the house, and without the least resistance made pris- oners of my mother, Robert, Matthew, Betsey, the woman (a neighbor whose husband was at the time in Washington's army), and her three children, and myself, and then commenced plun- dering. My two brothers, Thomas and John, being at the barn, escaped and went to Virginia, where my grandfather Erwin then lived. The party that took us consisted of six Indians and four Frenchmen, who immediately commenced plundering as I just observed, and took what they considered most valuable; consist- ing principally of bread, meal and meat."
Then the plunderers went off in mad haste and Mrs. Jemi- son relates how in their flight through the forest the children were lashed with a whip to make them keep up. Of their journey all day long without a mouthful of food or a drop of palatable water, of their camp the next night without fire or shelter and of their forced travel the next day we must forego the details. The second night the captives were separated, Mary and one of the neighbor woman's children, a little boy, being led off into a thicket by one of the Indians.
The agony of the parting, which the parents realized was final, and the admonitions of the mother to her daughter not to attempt to escape, not to forget her own name or those of her parents, or the English tongue, or her prayers, are told in feeling words. Without following the story in its dreadful detail, it is
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enough to know that, soon after the two children were taken apart, the father and mother, two brothers, the sister and the woman and her two remaining children were all killed and scalped.
Thereafter, though fed and cared for in a kindly manner, the two surviving children suffered days of hardship and fatigue, and were the horrified observers of the Indian's method of clean- ing and drying the bloody scalps, which they recognized as being those torn from the heads of their murdered parents.
Finally the party arrived at Fort Duquesne, at the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny rivers. Here the two sur- viving children were separated, the boy being given to the French- men and the little Mary being turned over to two pleasant looking squaws of the Seneca tribe. Thence she was taken down the Ohio River, her tattered garments replaced by Indian attire, and being formally adopted as a sister according to Indian prac- tices by the two squaws, in the place of a brother recently fallen in battle, she was christened Deh-he-wa-mis, which being liter- ally interpreted means "The Two-Falling-Voices," or "Two Fe- males Letting Words Fall," a name the significance of which as applied to this little forlorn orphan it is difficult to fathom. After the season for hunting and harvesting had passed, the Indians with whom Mary's home had been thus made, went up to Fort Pitt which had been captured by the English, and made peace with the victors. Mary confesses that when at this time she saw white people her heart "bounded" to be liberated and to be restored to her friends and her country, but her "sisters" becoming afraid that she might be taken from them, hurried to recross the river, took their bread out of the fire, and fled with her to their home on the Ohio.
After a number of years Mary's sisters gave her in marriage, according to Indian custom, to a Delaware by the name of She-nin-jee, whom she describes as "a noble man, large of stat- ure, elegant in his appearance, generous in his conduct, cour- ageous in war, a friend to peace and a great lover of justice," and, though he was an Indian, she came to love him and he made, she says, "an agreeable husband and a comfortable companion." They lived happily together until after several years, during a trip made to dispose of a store of furs, he was taken sick and died. In the meantime, her Indian brothers had induced her to
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accompany them back to their home on a river called Genishau (now called Genesee), where the family to which she belonged, a part of the Seneca tribe of Indians, lived in a village located near the site of the present Geneseo.
Of her journey to her new home, a distance of five or six hun- dred miles, accomplished in a period of approximately six months principally on foot and partly by canoe and partly on horseback through an almost pathless wilderness, she speaks as follows:
"My clothing was thin and illy calculated to defend me from the continually drenching rains with which I was daily completely wet, and at night, with nothing but my wet blanket to cover me. I had to sleep on the naked ground and generally without a shel- ter, save such as nature had provided. In addition to all that, I had to carry my child, then about nine months old, every step of the journey on my back or in my arms, and provide for his comfort and prevent his suffering, as far as my poverty of means would admit. Such was the fatigue that I sometimes felt that I thought it impossible for me to go through, and I would almost abandon the idea of even trying to proceed. My brothers were attentive, and at length, as I have stated, we reached our place of destination, in good health, and without having experienced a day's sickness from the time we left Yiskahwana."
The journey ended, she was kindly received by her Indian mother and sisters, for whom she grew to have sincere affection. There came a time a year or so later when she had the oppor- tunity with other captives among the Indians to return to her white friends, but she preferred to remain with the tribe, and when her decision had been confirmed by the chiefs in council, her brother informed those who would have released her that rather than have her taken by force he would kill her with his own hands! But for some reason, perhaps for the ransom money it is said the English had offered for return of captives, the old king of the tribe declared his purpose to take her, willy-nilly, to Fort Niagara.
At this juncture her Indian sister came to her rescue, and sending her and her little son off to hide themselves, arranged to signal the final conclusion of the matter. If it turned out that she was to be killed, her sister was to bake a small cake and lay it at the door on the outside of the cabin. If when all was silent and she had crept to the door and found no cake, she was to
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understand that all was well and she was to open the door and go in. If the cake was there Mary was to take her child and flee to a distance. She found the cake and fled as arranged. The king not finding her went to Niagara with the prisoners he had already secured.
When her son Thomas was three or four years old, her first husband being dead, Mary married another Indian, "Hio-ka- too," commonly called Gardeau. Her life for the next few years, like those of the Seneca tribe in general, was uneventful. The Senecas lived in peace for the twelve years that passed between the collapse in 1764 of the conspiracy of Pontiac, in which they were involved, and the war of the Revolution, during the first two years of which they remained neutral, but into which, in 1777, they were finally drawn on the side of the English. During this interval, she says, she and her family lived in contentment. "No people [to quote the narrative] can live more happily than the Indians did in times of peace, before the introduction of spirituous liquors amongst them. Their lives were a continual round of pleasures. Their wants were few and easily satisfied, and their cares were only for today, the bounds of their calculations for future comfort not extending to the incal- culable uncertainties of tomorrow." In this connection, Mary testified to the good moral character of the red men among whom her lot was cast, to their fidelity, to their honesty, to their chastity.
But she did not hide the fact that in time of war, when their passions were aroused, they were blood-thirsty and cruel in the extreme. It was following their entry into the war of the Revo- lution, that they took fiendish part in the massacre at Cherry Valley and in other forays against white settlers. The details of their torture of prisoners, as shown in the case of Lieutenant Thomas Boyd, whom they captured in a skirmish with a detach- ment of Sullivan's army near Conesus Lake, in 1779, were too shocking and cruel to describe in this connection.
Hio-ka-too, with whom she lived for nearly fifty years and to whom she bore six children, two sons and four daughters, gave her according to Indian customs all the kindness and attention that were her due as his wife. Nevertheless he was a warrior who never showed mercy and did not hesitate to inflict diabolical torture upon prisoners of war. An own cousin to Farmer's
THOMAS JEMISON (SO-SUN-DO-WAAH) Grandson of Mary Jemison, the White Woman.
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Brother, a chief much respected by the whites as well as by the Indians, Hio-ka-too was a brave warrior, skilled in the use of the tomahawk and the scalping knife, and he prided himself on his prowess in battle and on his ingenuity in inventing and relent- lessness in carrying out barbarous cruelties. And yet Mary says he was faithful and generous to his friends, uniformly treated her with tenderness and never offered her an insult. In 1811, after four years of sickness with consumption, he died at the great age of 103 years as nearly as the time could be estimated. He was about six feet four inches in height. He boasted of having engaged in no less than seventeen campaigns, four of which were in the Cherokee war, until at last, tired of war, he returned with a great number of scalps to his family on the Genesee.
Following the invasion of the Genesee Country by General Sullivan's army and the destruction of the Indians' means of subsistence, a destruction so complete, Mary Jemison reports, that when the Indians would have returned to their homes they found not a mouthful of any kind of sustenance left, "not even enough to keep a child one day from perishing with hunger," she immediately took two of her little children on her back, bade the other three follow and proceeded to the Gardeau flats on the Gen- esee River, where she afterwards made her home.
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