USA > New York > Monroe County > Landmarks of Monroe County, New York : containing followed by brief historical sketches of the towns of the county with biography and family history > Part 2
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THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.
translation to heaven, where he stayed for some time in the enjoy- ment of angelic hospitality and whence he looked down upon the earth to behold the misery of his people, recalls the Koran, with Mahomet's temporary ascent, while the tenderness with which the practice of hu- manity toward the most helpless of beings is inculcated would seem to find its inspiration in the New Testament Yet in all of Handsome Lake's teachings, as far as they have been reported, and in all the ex- position of them by his successors, who continued his ministrations down to forty years ago, there was no mention made of any sacred writings and no allusion whatever to any of the distinctive dogmas of the Christian theology.
The religion was that of pure morality and benevolence, and it pur- ported to be based on the old faith of the Indians, which it did not contravene in any way, but rather elaborated, and sought to turn into channels of right living. The revelation started out with the strongest denunciation of firewater, the drinking of which was declared to be a crime, absolutely forbidden by the great spirit, and one that would certainly be visited by eternal punishment in the next world ; the sanc- tity of marriage, with the necessity of the fidelity of both parties, was inculcated in the strongest manner ; the reciprocal duties of parents and children were clearly defined, and all hearers were exhorted to do good to each other-in fine, to practise the golden rule. This religion, if it can be considered sufficiently formal and concrete to merit that term, was preached by the Seneca prophet throughout all the reservations and at all the gatherings of Indians in this state, except those of the Christianised Oneidas and Tuscaroras. The result was amazing, the effect equaling that produced by any revivalist of modern times. Drunkenness was arrested in its course of national destruction, and for a time, at least, good order and outward morality took the place of the general depravity which, before that, had been growing rapidly worse. At the same time no attempt was made by this reformer, and probably he acted sagaciously in that, to change any of the former beliefs, except that those which tended toward cruelty were ignored, and therefore annulled. The ceremonial observances were not interfered with but were rather encouraged, as may be judged by the white dog sacrifice, mentioned above. While the hopes of Handsome Lake for the com-
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
plete regeneration of his people were never realised, either during his lifetime or afterward, there can be no doubt that their condition was materially, and probably permanently, elevated by the good message that he bore to them.
Only the crudest knowledge of the principles of architecture existed among the Iroquois. Individual wigwams, so noted in song and story, are largely the creation of romance. Among the Senecas, at least, the preference was for communal dwellings, the predecessors of the com- partment houses of the present day, rather than for separate habitations for each family. They were constructed by setting upright poles in the ground, fitting others to these horizontally by means of withes, and raising upon them a roof, sometimes arched, sometimes sloping, the whole frame, both top and sides, being covered with strips of bark, usually of elm, fastened with splints or strings. These tenements were from fifty to one hundred feet long by seventeen wide, and were divided into sections eight feet long by six wide, each of which was occupied by one family, no matter how many there were in it-more raised bunks being put into the walls of the chamber as the occupants increased in number. Through the long house ran a passage way, and in this the fires were kept, generally one for every four families, and, as there were no doors to the rooms, a fair degree of warmth was thus obtained, though at the expense of health, for there was no outlet for the smoke except holes in the roof, which were covered in rainy weather, and thus diseases of the eyes were very prevalent among the people. A cluster of these houses-sometimes twenty, sometimes more than a hundred-would make a village, which would be surrounded by pali- sades as a protection against sudden attack. The so- called " castles " of the Iroquois, whether upon the Genesee river or elsewhere, were only aggregations of houses, guarded in this manner. Of all the tribes the Senecas were the most numerous, counting, perhaps, 4,000 souls all told, and they were settled in four towns, one of which, the second in size, was in Monroe county. It was located two miles from where the village of Honeoye Falls, in the town of Mendon, now stands, and was called Totiakton. An English traveler, named Wentworth Greenhalgh, was there in 1677, and from his description of the houses the place could not have contained less than a thousand persons, probably a little more.
9
THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.
The trail of the Iroquois was generally between a foot and fifteen inches wide, very seldom more than the greater breadth. It was not always direct from point to point, for not only did natural obstacles, like rocks, swamps or bends in a river, cause it to deflect from a straight line, but a wide divergence would almost invariably be made to avoid open spaces and seek the protecting covert of dense foliage, even of the nearly impenetrable forest. It is easy to locate the main trail or Indian highway through this state, for it ran from Buffalo eastwardly, crossing the Genesee at the present site of Avon, and terminating at the Hudson river a little below Albany, thus forming the path which was afterward used as the principal route of the white men till the Erie canal and the Central railroad came through, and which is still known as "the old state road." This was the Appian Way of the Iroquois, and along its course all messages from one nation of the confederacy to another were carried by swift runners who bore with astonishing rapidity the sum- mons to a council, the tidings of war or those of peace.
In addition to this there were countless other well-marked trails all over the territory, many of which have been traced out and are now known. Of those in this county some have always been preserved, but others owe their revelation to the patient assiduity of the late George H. Harris. The principal ones among them, in whatever direction they ran, struck the river at different points. One coming west from Can- andaigua followed the line of the Pittsford road till it got near Allen's creek,1 when it divided, one branch crossing Irondequoit creek and reaching the river at Brewer's landing, near the foot of the Ridge road. The other branch is now followed by East avenue in its course to Union street, where another break occurred, one line going to the ford near the weighlock and the other striking the river at the foot of Franklin street. From the ford of the river near Elmwood avenue a path ran northeast over Mt. Hope, mainly by the present Indian Trail avenue, to Mt. Hope avenue, thence by that road and St. Paul street till it met the trails mentioned above. A branch of this left the cemetery in an
1 This stream, on the east side of the Genesee, must not be confounded with Allan's creek, which empties into the river on the west side, at Scottsville. The latter, being named after Ebenezer Allan, should always be spelled as given here-not Allen's creek, though that form occurs frequently, even on the oldest maps of the county.
2
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
easterly direction and went around the Pinnacle hills, reaching Ironde- quoit creek a little further on.
On the west side there were many, though fewer, beaten tracks. Besides a trail going directly to the Niagara river along the Ridge road, one that was much more traveled came to the Genesee from the south- west by way of Scottsville and Chili, reaching the river at the Red creek ford in the present Genesee Valley park. Turning out from that point it branched into two or three lines, one of which took the general course of Genesee street and wound around the bends of Deep Hollow
creek in all its length till it reached Lake avenue. There it was joined by another trail that had come in a less circuitous line through Plymouth avenue, in order to strike the ancient spring that bubbled up where the First Presbyterian church now stands, the memory of the location being preserved by the name of the street and the alley. From the junction of Deep Hollow creek and Lake avenue the united paths pursued their way to the lake.
A few words may be in place concerning the Indian names associated with this county, their varieties and their meanings. The wide diver- gence in form among the various names of the same locality is owing, primarily, to the fact that the French, on hearing a word spoken, en- deavored to reproduce it in their own language, spelling it such a way that the sound would be the same, of course with a French pronuncia- tion. Not always, however, would the same word have the same sound, even to them, the quality of its utterance depending on the tribe of the Indian uttering it, for the Iroquois dialects, though easily intelligible by all the nations of the confederacy, had different vocalisations, the one from the other, so that a Mohawk and a Cayuga, for instance, would pronounce the same word in a manner quite unlike each other. Then the English nomenclature came in, and this was based on a variety of grounds-on the Dutch names for some places, especially in the eastern part of the state, as the Dutch had understood the Mohawks or the Delawares to pronounce them ; on the sound of words as they appeared to English ears when spoken by members of different tribes in the Five Nations, and on the sound of the French forms of the words when pro- nounced in English fashion.
The English, in the majority of cases, adhered much more closely to
11
THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.
the Indian names than did the French, who sometimes gave purely fanciful or religious titles to localities and even to tribes. The appella- tions have not survived, but the geographical names in this vicinity, as we use them now, have come to us from the Indian through the French in at least as many cases as through the English. For instance, our great lake was spoken of by Father Hennepin, more than two centuries ago, as Ontario, which, he says, "is likewise called in the Iroquois language Skanadario, meaning 'a very pretty lake.'" Now the En- glish, although they sometimes called it Ontario, usually, and especially in official documents, denominated it Cadaracqui, which is probably only another form of Cataracouy (meaning "fort in the water "), which was the Iroquois name for the French Fort Frontenac, in Canada, where Kingston now stands. The application of the word was evidently misunderstood, for it had, obviously, nothing to do with the name of the lake, and it is fortunate for us that its misuse was not sufficiently established to prevent a reversion to Hennepin's euphonious appella- tion. The name of our river was pronounced, and therefore spelled by different writers, in a great variety of ways, from Chin-u-shio to its present form. How much of this wide variation is owing to dialectical peculiarities, and how much to slight shades of difference in meaning- for Indian names were always descriptive-it is impossible to tell, and it is enough to say that the word Genesee means "a beautiful, open valley." That word applied only to the upper part of the river ; from the rapids to where it empties into the lake it had a distinctive name, Casconchiagon, the signification of which is said to be "something alive in the kettle," but it is better to accept Morgan's simple definition of " under the falls."
The love of variety has had full play in the case of the word Ironde- quoit, which has been written, printed and commonly used in more than thirty widely different styles. Its true Seneca form, which ought to govern, though it never did, is O-nyui-da-on-da gwat, meaning “it goes aside, or turns out." Without wearying the reader by going too much into detail, it may be stated that its first appearance in print is on a map of the Jesuits, published in 1664, where it is given as Andia- tarontaouat. Twenty-three years later Denonville called it Ganniaga- tarontagouat ; during the last century the English twisted it into a
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
multitude of horrible shapes; in Gov. De Witt Clinton's time, seventy years ago, it was universally known as Gerundegut, and now we have it in a form that sounds as well as any other and that will probably never be changed, so that the tortured name may rest in peace. Oatka was the original Indian name of the west side Allan's creek, mentioned above, and a laudable effort has been made for a long time past to re- store the old appellation, which means " the opening." Honeoye signi- fies " a finger lying," or "a bent finger," alluding to the sharp turn in the creek of that name, where the Indian village of Totiakton stood. The word of the Senecas for their own nation-Nun- da- wa-o-no, meaning " a great hill people "-was never adopted or applied to them by the whites. Instead of that, the word that we use comes to us in a somewhat circuitous manner, for it appears first as Sennecas, on a Dutch map printed in 1614. The Dutch seem to have got it from the Algon- quins, but, as to what it signifies in the language of those people, eth- nologists are not agreed. The English settlers altered it to Sinnekees, and employed that form with remarkable unanimity till about the time of the Revolution, after which the Americans very sensibly adopted the present style. The French quite frequently, though not always, called the Senecas the Tsonnontouans, which is said to be a very ancient word whose meaning is unknown.
The Iroquois were the conquering people of this continent; no tribe or nation of their own color ever long withstood them. While they never, until a late period, and then only on short incursions, to terrify rather than to slaughter, carried their arms across the Hudson river, yet all the Algonquin tribes of New England, whether peaceful or war- like, were for centuries compelled to pay for their immunity by annual tribute, delivered to Mohawk heralds. In every other direction death and desolation followed the march of the Five Nations. Their cam- paigns were conducted, not for purposes of defense nor with the object of acquiring additional territory, but to gratify the thirst for blood that often seized them with uncontrollable power and to give them new captives, some to torture, some to enslave, some to adopt. Not content with subduing the Delawares, the Susquehannas and other nations in their vicinity, their warriors rushed westward across the Mississippi, and by setting one tribe against another with skillful falsehoods they pre-
13
THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.
vented all alliances against themselves and inflicted blows upon the Illinois, the lowas and others that almost crushed those people out of existence. No distance was too great for their unwearied feet, and at various times they made sudden incursions into the South and South- west, striking the Catawbas in South Carolina, the Cherokees upon the Tennessee. In every instance they returned from their raids with the bloody trophies of their prowess, in the shape of long festoons of reek- ing scalps or, still worse, with troops of prisoners reserved for torment. Inhuman cruelty seems to have been imbedded in their very nature, and the evidence of this predominant characteristic rests not upon tradition or stories repeated from hearsay, but comes from the testi- mony of eye-witnesses, of impartial travelers. Greenhalgh, for instance, mentioned above, tells, briefly, how several of their captives, men, wo- men and children, were burned to death in his presence and in this im- mediate vicinity, tied to the stake for seven hours, while the flames were slowly fed, to lengthen the sufferings of the miserable victims to the utmost span of endurance. This, too, was done without any ex- pression of peculiar animosity, but only to gratify their love of witness- ing the agony of others.
Their sanguinary career of unbroken victory was the more surprising from the fact that the whole confederacy never numbered more than 15,000,1 with a fighting force of 2,600 at the outside, and of these not much more than half could be put into the field at any one time, as some must remain at home to guard the line of habitations that stretched across the state. It was only by the constant practice of the adoption of captives into the various tribes of the confederacy that the waste caused by their incessant fighting could be repaired. Strange as it may seem to us, these naturalised enemies soon became true and loyal
1 I make this estimate from a comparison of various authors. Parkman places the number at between 10,000 and 12,000. Previous writers made the number much greater, Morgan putting it as high as 25,000, and John Fiske is inclined to follow him without weighing the evidence. With all of Morgan's learning in Iroquois matters, his judgment on this point was based, in all proba- bility, on narratives obtained by him from the Indians, which are far from trustworthy. The only written authority that he cites is Greenhalgh, and that journalist gives no statistics of pop- ulation but only allows the inference that there were as many as 25,000 from the number of fires that he saw in some of the houses at Totiakton (Honeoye Falls), while, on the contrary, he makes the explicit statement that the number of Iroquois warriors was 2,150, those of the Senecas being 1,000, and these figures are incompatible with a total census of anything like 25,000. Parkman bases his estimate on the frequent computations given in the " Jesuit Relations " and on state- ments contained in the New York Colonial Documents.
.
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
citizens, and, so far as all information goes, they were never a source of weakness, never otherwise than efficient members of the family, the gens, the tribe or the forest commonwealth to which they owed their new allegiance. Occasionally one of these aliens might desert his adoptive colleagues during a raid into his own country and might re- turn to his former associates to fight on the side of his real kindred, but as a rule their natural feelings seem to have been smothered and their sympathies to have been with the nation of their adoption Often- times they would excel their captors in the fiendishness of their malice against other prisoners, and when Brebeuf, the most distinguished mar- tyr of the Huron missions, was burned by the Iroquois during one of their incursions into Canada, it was at the suggestion of a Huron captive, himself a Christian convert who had been baptised by Brebeuf, that the tormentors poured boiling water on the Jesuit's head, in derisive simu- lation of the ceremony which he had so often performed in kindness and in love.
Unlike most of the Indian race, the Iroquois waged war upon kindred tribes, their hatred against the Hurons, who, like themselves, were of the Dakota stock, being relentless and never abating till those unfortu- nates were annihilated as a distinct people, more than two centuries ago. The Genesee river had been at first the western boundary of the lands of the confederacy, beyond which lay the Neutral nation, stretch- ing across the Niagara river into Canada on the northern border of Lake Erie and called by their name because they strove to keep the peace between the Iroquois and the Hurons, to both of which nations they were related and against neither of which would they take up arms. South of the Neuters lay the Eries, or Nation of the Cat, whose lodges extended through the counties of Chautauqua and Cattaraugus and went west on the southern side of the lake. Directly south of the confederate tribes were the Andastes, or Susquehannas. These three were the only nations to make any determined stand against the all- conquering Iroquois, but their turn, like that of all the others, came at last. In 1650, after the nationality of the Hurons was destroyed, the Five Nations turned their apparently causeless fury upon the Neuters, assaulted their chief towns, put most of the inhabitants to death and adopted the remainder. Four years later the Eries were treated in a
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THE EXPLORERS AND THE JESUITS.
similar manner, as mentioned in the preceding pages, after which the territory of the Senecas extended to the Niagara, though they made no settlements or villages west of the Genesee, but were content with knowing that the country between the two rivers was an unpeopled wilderness. Finally the Andastes, who gave the confederates more trouble than the Neutrals and the Eries combined, were forced to suc- cumb after an intermittent contest stretching over twenty years, and the powerful league had no further opposition to its supremacy from any of its own race. Thenceforward its struggle was to be with the white men.
CHAPTER II.
THE EXPLORERS AND THE JESUITS.
Jacques Cartier -- Champlain -- His Wars with the Iroquois -- Etienne Brulé -- Jesuit Missions Established-The Seneca Mission -- Father Garnier and Father Raffeix -- La Salle's Visits -- Father Hennepin.
When were the Iroquois first seen by Europeans ? Possibly in 1535, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence and found a well settled and populous community of Indians at a place which they called Hochelaga and to which he gave the name that it now bears, Montreal. When he had sailed back to France the narrative of his discoveries did not excite sufficient interest to induce anyone to follow him till the beginning of the next century, when Samuel de Cham- plain came over, to be the real founder of Canada. He went, in 1603, to the same spot that Cartier had reached, and found it deserted, no trace remaining, even in the surrounding region, of all the red men who had swarmed there seventy years before. Many writers think that Cartier's Indians were Iroquois, who were afterward so harassed by the Adirondack tribe, of Algonquin stock, that they migrated across the lake shortly before the second coming of the French. The latest investigators, however, are convinced that those people were Hurons, who had moved eastward and then, from some unknown cause,
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
had concluded to return westward and had taken up their abode in the neighborhood of the lake that bears their name. Champlain met the Iroquois for the first time in 1609, when he, with two companions, accompanied a war party of combined Algonquins and Hurons that invaded New York and had a fight with the Mohawks near the lake that is still called after the famous soldier, explorer and governor. The expedition was successful, but Champlain's participation in it was of doubtful wisdom, for it sowed in the hearts of the Iroquois the seeds of that hatred which never left them till the French power in Canada was crushed in 1760. Six years after this battle, Champlain made another incursion, on a more extended scale, but his attack upon a palisaded town of the Onondagas was repulsed and he returned with his bar- barian army to Lake Huron.
It is quite probable that Etienne Brulé, the interpreter of Champlain, was the first white man who set foot within the limits of Monroe county. Brulé was dispatched to secure, for the campaign just men- tioned, the services of five hundred Carantouans, a tribe that may have been identical with the Andastes or Susquehannas. After reaching them, and failing in his direct mission by reason of the dila- toriness of those savages, who arrived at the scene of the conflict after the battle had taken place and the besiegers had departed, Brulé ex- plored the Susquehanna from its source to its mouth, and after two years of suffering among the Iroquois, to whom he gave himself up, he returned to Canada. In all these journeyings it is more than likely that he passed through this county, for it is apparent that he would have had to go out of his way to avoid it.
Much interest has always attached to the Roman Catholic missions among the Iroquois, but their labors in this county were not so exten- sive as elsewhere, and the exact location of the missions is exceedingly difficult to determine. This is because the " Jesuit Relations," 1 which are the final source of authority on this point, give the names of the Seneca villages in forms different from those used elsewhere, and the
1 This valuable series of works, which has never been fully translated into English, consists of a number of reports made by prominent members of the Jesuit missions in North America to the superior of the order in Paris, giving a full account of the various Indian tribes among which the writers labored and of all things directly or remotely connected with them The first one was written in 1611, by Father Pierre Biard, and the last one, so far as is known, by Father Dablon, in 1679.
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