USA > New York > The old New York frontier : its wars with Indians and Tories, its missionary schools, pioneers, and land titles, 1614-1800 > Part 2
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14
IROQUOIS AND SUSQUEHANNA
It is interesting to reflect that this federation of warlike people had for its capital a small village near Onondaga * Lake where general congresses were held, and the policy of the League agreed upon. To Onondaga, highways from the south, east, and west conveniently led. These men lived on the highest land of the continent east of the Mississippi. They were at the head-waters of great rivers, and thus were able to reach nations less powerful than themselves, whom repeatedly they brought into subjection. Past the confluence of the Unadilla and Susque- hanna rivers, messengers of peace or war, warriors going to battle and returning from victories in the south, made their way.
This strategic advantage in very notable manner was to serve the Indians in the eighteenth century when menaced by a conflict between Europeans- the English and the French-for possession of their country. No one understood the advantage better than the Indians themselves. At Onondaga they declared that " if the French should prevail so far as to attempt to drive us out of our country, we can with our old men, wives and children, come down the streams of the Mohawk River, the Dela- ware, both branches of the Susquehanna and the Potomac, to the English. If the English should expell us our country, we have a like conveyance to the French by the streams of St. Lawrence and Sorrell River, and if both should join, we can retire across the Lakes."
The Iroquois, though powerful as a confederacy, were never a numerous people. Just before the Revolution it is unlikely that they numbered more
* People of the mountain is the translation Dr. Beauchamp gives for Onondaga.
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
than 15,000 souls, if so many-hardly one-third the present population of Otsego County. When their influence was greatest, and they had not begun to suffer from the white man's vices, they are believed to have numbered perhaps 25,000, though never more. As late as 1873, official reports placed the total number then living at 13,660. At the close of the Revolution their population was considerably less than at the beginning; instead of 15,000 it probably did not equal the number returned in 1873. More of the Iroquois may, therefore, be living now than were living at the close of the Revolution .*
Those Iroquois lands of which this volume mainly treats, had been the property of the Mo- hawks and Oneidas.+ The Unadilla River and part of the present town of Unadilla, with perhaps all of it, were Oneida territory. Farther east were Mohawk lands. The Oneidas are known to have sold land as far east as Herkimer and Delhi. Evi- dence, however, which Morgan regards as safe, begins the line of division at a point five miles east of Utica and extends it directly south to Penn- sylvania, making Unadilla border-land between the two nations. Lands in several parts of Otsego County were sold by the Mohawks, but none lay as far west as Unadilla. John M. Brown, who went to Schoharie in 1750, says that after 1763 or
* Schoolcraft, writing in 1846, after taking a census, gave much lower estimates than any of these. At the beginning of the Revolution their number, he thought, was under 10,000, and in 1846 only 6,942. Of the latter total, 4,836 were then living in the United States and 3,843 in New York State alone. He thought their worldly condition at that time such as would promote a considerable increase within a short period.
t Mohawk, or the other form of the word, Maqua, has been com- monly defined as meaning bear. It has also been said to signify a man- eater. The word Oneida, means people of the stone.
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IROQUOIS AND SUSQUEHANNA
1764, the Mohawks claimed land as far south and west as the mouth of Schenevus Creek, and that it was only after establishing their claims that they made sales to Sir William Johnson. Beyond the Unadilla River and extending to the Chenango lay Oneida lands, but in this part of the province early in the eighteenth century a tract was granted to the Tuscaroras,* who had come up from their earlier home in the Carolinas, and thus made the six nations where before there had been five.
In the summer of 1608, one year before Hen- drick Hudson explored another great river, Captain John Smith made a tour of Chesapeake Bay as far north as the mouth of the Susquehanna. Here he met the Indians whose name this river bears. Writ- ing the word Sasquesahanocks, he called them "a mighty people and mortall enemies with the Was- sawoneks." They were "great and well-propor- tioned men," and " seemed like giants to the Eng- lish." He found them " of an honest and simple disposition, with much adoe restrained from adoring us as gods." George Alsop, who wrote sixty years later in a kind of extravagant language peculiar to him, described them as "cast into the mould of a most large and warlike deportment, the men being for the most part seven foot high in latitude, and in magnitude and bulk suitable to so high a pitch ; their voyce large and hollow, as ascending out of a cave, their gait and behaviour straight, stately and majestic, treading on the earth with as much pride, contempt and disdain to so sordid a centre as can be imagined from a creature derived from the same mould and earth." The stream which they inhab- ited and seldom departed from, except for war, Al-
* The accepted translation of this word is shirt-wearers.
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
sop says was " called by their own name the Sus- quehannock River."
These Indians, the most powerful tribe in Mary- land, were among the fiercest enemies of the Iro- quois, by whom and by the white men of Virginia they were at last subdued. A greater enemy, how- ever, had been found in the small-pox, which in 1661 and later years reduced the number of the warriors from seven hundred to three hundred, and thenceforth for a hundred years they remained "a weak and dwindling people." The last remnant of them perished in 1753 in Lancaster Jail, " cruelly butchered by a mob." The famous orator Logan was their most celebrated chief.
The name Susquehanna is described by Simms as " an aboriginal word said to signify crooked river." * This interpretation has long survived, and perhaps to Cooper more than to anyone else is its survival due. Cooper gives that meaning in "The Pioneers." The word is not found in Iroquois dictionaries. It is not even an Iroquois word, although the name of an Iroquois stream and of a people who became allies of the Iroquois. It is, in fact, an Algon- quin word, and seems to have come from the Lenni Lenapes, or Delawares. Heckewelder, the mission- ary, says it is properly the word "Sisquehanne," and he advances the opinion that it came "from
* History of Schoharie County. Jephtha Root Simms was a native of Connecticut, and in 1829 was employed in New York City in a retail store. His health failing, he removed in 1832 to Schoharie County, where he went into business. He afterward became a toll-collector on the Erie Canal at Fultonville. Later he served as ticket-agent for the New York Central Road at Fort Plain, and at Fort Plain in 1883 he died at the age of seventy-six. Simms's History of Schoharie County was first published in 1845. Just before his death he brought out an en- larged edition in two volumes with a new title, The Frontiersmen. Mr. Simms all his life was an industrious collector of local material. He wrote entertainingly and told a story well.
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IROQUOIS AND SUSQUEHANNA
siska, meaning mud, and hanne, a stream." It had been overheard, he says, by some of the first set- tlers in times of high water in such expressions as " Jah ! Achsisquehanne," meaning how muddy the stream is. Authorities to whom the author appealed have cited Heckewelder's interpretation, and among them the late James C. Pilling, who devoted many years to a study of the Indian languages. Dr. Beau- champ, however, gives Quen-isch-achsch-gek-hanne as a word from which Heckewelder once thought Susquehanna might have been derived by corrup- tion. This word means "river with long reaches," which is a fair equivalent for "crooked river." It is certainly a more accurate description than "muddy stream."
The Iroquois had another name for the Susque- hanna, Ga-wa-no-wa-na-neh, which means " great isl- and," and to which Gehunda, the common word for river, was added to get Great Island River. At the mouth of the stream, lying squarely athwart it, is an island perhaps a mile long, that was formerly known as Palmer's Island, but later has been called Wat- son's Island. It lies exactly where lived the Sus- quehanna Indians. The mainland opposite has been found to be very rich in weapons, domestic utensils, etc., many thousands of specimens hav- ing been found, and sometimes as many as a hun- dred in a single place. On this island was made the first white settlement in that part of Mary- land some twenty-five or thirty years after Smith's visit. The Susquehanna is remarkable elsewhere for the number and size of its islands, especially in Pennsylvania. Where the Juniata flows in, exists an island of very unusual size. On the Guy Johnson map of the country of the Six Na-
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
tions appears a place in Pennsylvania called Great Island .*
A description of the upper valley was given in 1683 by Indian chiefs to James Graham and Will- iam Haig, agents of William Penn, who had arrived in Albany. From the Mohawk Valley to "the lake whence the Susquehanna river rises " they said the distance was " one day's journey," and from the lake "to the Susquehanna Castles," meaning the Indian towns in the Wyoming Valley, was ten days. From Oneida to " the kill which falls into the Sus- quehanna," this kill being the Unadilla River, was one and a half days' journey, and from the kill to its mouth was one day's journey.
* An interesting interpretation of the word Susquehanna has reached the author from the Iroquois village of Caughnawaga, above Montreal. He wrote to a French gentleman at that place to learn if the Marcoux Dic- tionary, preserved there in manuscript at the Jesuit Mission, could shed any light on the question. The gentleman replied that it gave none what- ever, but he kindly submitted the matter to a learned abbé from another place and forwarded the abbé's reply, which is as follows, translated from the French :
" We are here inclined to think the word is a corruption of Sequana, the Latin word for the Seine. It is the opinion of M. B., who is here on vacation, opinion which for him has passed to the state of a certain truth since the adhesion of a Paulist father which has just reached us, and assures us that the Sequana of the United States has, like that of France, at its mouth a harbor called Havre de Grace, and that it was the French Huguenots who, settling in that place, brought together the name of the city and the name of the river."
To establish this theory it would be necessary to show that French Huguenots settled at the mouth of the river at a time earlier than the ar- rival of Smith, and proof of this is wanting. A romantic name Muddy Stream certainly is not. River with the Long Reaches is much better. Best of all is Great Island River, the name bestowed upon the stream by those who owned it. And by that name it would be both fitting and agreeable for those who love it to have it known.
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II
Indian Villages in the Upper Valley
T HE Indian population on the upper Sus- quehanna was centred in small villages. It was never large. Parkman, in reference to the whole continent, has remarked that the Indians everywhere were few and scattered Even in parts thought to be well peopled, " one might sometimes journey for days together through the twilight for- est and meet no human form." Around the Sus- quehanna villages small clearings had usually been made. Apple-orchards had been planted and there were frequent corn-fields ; but otherwise the virgin territory bore few indications that men were dwell- ing upon it.
The foot of Otsego Lake was a favorite resort. In that fact Cooper found the origin of the word Otsego, the particular place where meetings were held being Council Rock. A meaning cited by Campbell * is " clear, deep water," but other writers, like Morgan, pass the word by without defining it. Dr. Beauchamp gives the forms Otesaga and Osten-
* Annals of Tryon County. The author of this work, William W. Campbell, was born in Cherry Valley in 1806, and died in 1881. He was graduated from Union College, read law with Judge Kent, and practised in New York, where, in 1849, he was appointed a Justice of the Superior Court. From 1857 until 1865 he was a Judge of the State Supreme Court for the Sixth District. He also served a term in Con- gress. His Annals were published in 1831, and a revised edition with a new title, Border Warfare, in 1849. A third edition came out
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
ha, and says they are traditionally supposed to refer to Council Rock. In crossing from the Mohawk to the Susquehanna, Indians regularly came by way of this lake.
The rock had unquestionably been a favorite haunt of theirs. Cooper describes it as " a large iso- lated stone that rested on the bottom of the lake, apparently left there when the waters tore away the earth from around it, in forcing for themselves a pas- sage down the river." The trees that overhung it formed " a noble and appropriate canopy to a seat that had held many a forest chieftain during the long succession of unknown ages in which America and all it contained existed apart as a world by itself." In times of extreme low water the rock now appears as an oval cone about nine feet in diameter one way and six the other. From the bed on which it rests it rises about four and a half feet. When the water is extremely high the rock is covered.
It is clear that the Indians did not know the lake by the name Otsego. In Dongan's time they called it " the lake whence the Susquehanna takes its rise." Colden, in 1738, referred to it in similar terms. The Mohawk chief Abraham, in 1745, described certain lands to William Johnson as lying " at the head of Susquehanna Lake," and an Onondaga orator at Johnson Hall, in 1765, called it "Cherry Valley Lake." In letters written from the lake in 1765,
in 1880 from the printing-office of John L. Sawyer, of Cherry Valley. Judge Campbell was the father of the late Douglas Campbell, author of The Puritan in Holland, England and America, published in 1892. Judge Campbell wrote his Annals while studying law in Cherry Valley. He occupied a room in the Cherry Valley Academy, afterward converted into a hotel, and burned in July, 1894. In that building, in the summer of 1892, the author had the pleasure of meeting his widow. Of all books devoted to the early history of the Susquehanna Valley, Campbell's An- nals, the first important one to be published, is perhaps first in intrinsic charm. Stone's work is largely devoted to other parts of the country.
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COUNCIL ROCK, OTSEGO LAKE ( An ancient Indian rendezvous. )
INDIAN VILLAGES
missionaries called it Otsego Lake, which is perhaps the earliest use of the name on record. On the Augsburg map of the province, dated 1777, oc- curs the form " Lake Assega," which would imply that the name had then found official acceptance. Excellent hunting and fishing were here to be ob- tained. The first settlers on the site of Coopers- town found arrow-heads and stone hatchets in great abundance. The apple-trees were of large size. Cooper thought the place had been more or less fre- quented by Indian traders for a century before the regular settlement began. The English early rec- ognized the Susquehanna as a gate-way to the South. In 1721 the King was advised to erect a fort near where the river flows out of the lake.
Remains of ancient villages on the river at points. below Cooperstown have often been discovered. Small relics in considerable numbers have been pre- served in private hands. Perhaps the largest col- lection ever made was the one destroyed in the Oneonta Normal School fire in the winter of 1892- 93. It had been formed by W. E. Yager, and numbered somewhere about 1,500 specimens. It was the only loss by that fire which State appropria- tions have not been able to replace. In 1892 on a farm near the old Goodyear Mills was found a cup of clay that had been used for melting lead. An- other find in the same place was a pipe-bowl.
When Gideon Hawley came down the valley in 1753, he found at the mouth of Schenevus Creek,* or the Charlotte, a village of some size, then inhabited and called Towanoendlough, which
* Generally said to have been named after an Indian who lived on the stream, but A. Cusick told Dr. Beauchamp that the word meant first hoeing of corn. The form Sheniba occurs on a map dated 1790.
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
was the frontier town of the Mohawks. Here, some years ago, in a time of flood, many signs of an Indian burial-place were washed to the surface.
Harvey Baker has described a village that existed west of the mouth of the Charlotte on the lands now owned by the Slades, and including the adja- cent Beam's Island, on which is a mound supposed to contain the remains of an Indian chief named Alagatinga. An apple-orchard flourished here.
What appears to have been another rather large village stood at the mouth of Otego * Creek. It had orchards extending along the northern side of the river, embracing lands afterward known as the Van Woert, Calkins, and Stoughton Alger farms. Several miles down the river, just above the mouth of Sand Hill Creek, is a whirlpool which the Ind- ians called Kaghneantasis, meaning where the water goes round.
About one mile below Unadilla Village on the north side of the river, long existed a heap of stones, called the Indian Monument. Gideon Hawley thought the pile was due to an Indian cus- tom of throwing a stone to the spot when passing, as a recognition of the existence of a supreme being. William A. Fry, of Sidney, remembered that in 1830 an Indian arrived at the Hough farm to cast a stone upon the pile. The Indian said if the act were neglected by his tribe in any one year, the tribe would become extinct-a belief pointing to fear of God. A heap of stones similar to this was used by surveyors for one of the corners of Tryon County at a place now embraced in Schoharie. The stones were small and flat, and there were many thousands
* Wauteghe was the eighteenth-century form of this word. Later it was called Adiga, and then the form Atege occurs.
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INDIAN VILLAGES
of them. Two miles farther down the river was an old Indian camping-ground. David McMaster, who was born there, remembered that in his boy- hood arrow-heads were very common in a garden attached to his father's house.
The mouth of the Unadilla River was long a favorite resort of hunters. The hill on the Una- dilla side was frequently burned over in the autumn, and hence got the name of Burnt Hill. It has since been called Mount Moses, and by that name is called in the original survey made in 1791 for the river-road running at its base. On the Sidney side of the stream, in 1772, existed an ancient fort which the Indians declared had been erected "five hundred summers ago." It contained three acres of land enclosed by a mound, and ditch.
David Cusick, the Tuscarora Indian who wrote a history of the Six Nations, * went over the site of this fort in 1800, and says it was built by Sau-rau- roh-wah, an Indian of great stature, with the strength of ten ordinary men. This giant carried on war against his enemies along the Susquehanna. He would lie in ambush near the path, "and whenever the people are passing he shoots them." He "used a plump arrow, which was so violent that it would break the body in two parts."
Sau-rau-roh-wah became so troublesome that plans were laid to destroy him. A favorite dish of his, including huckleberries, was taken to him by three warriors, and while he was eating it one of them with a club, which had been concealed under a blanket, dealt him a terrific blow on the head.
* Cusick's work is not held in esteem by historians, but is interesting as showing something of the character of Indian tradition. Parkman describes it as containing "a few grains of truth inextricably mingled with a tangled mass of absurdities."
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
Running out of the fort the giant rushed toward the river, but " sank in the mire which was near the bank." The warriors then overtook and killed him on the spot. They "spoiled his house and obtained a large quantity of skin, etc., and the fort was ruined ever since." Cusick attempts to fix the date of this incident, making it eight hundred or a thousand years before Columbus landed, which would mean 500 or 700 of our era. The value of these dates is of the very slightest.
Until recent years there existed at Sidney an Indian relic known as the Knoll. It was level on top, some fifteen feet high, and across the top meas- ured about ten rods. A portion of it was irrever- ently carted away by the builders of the Ontario and Western Railroad, for use in rearing an embank- ment. Bones and other remains were found there, but they did not stay the hands of the spoilers. Directly across the river is another elevation of ground in which Indian relics have been unearthed.
The name Unadilla was originally applied not only as now to the Unadilla side of the two rivers, but to lands across them included in the towns of Sidney and Bainbridge. It was a term for all the territory adjacent to the confluence and now inter- sected by the boundaries of three counties. When the need arose for a more definite name for the Sidney side, the names Johnston Settlement before the Revolution, and Susquehanna Flats after it, were brought into use. These terms were employed for about thirty years, and were then superseded by the name Sidney.
One of the meanings assigned to Unadilla by local tradition is " Pleasant Valley." It has also been said to stand for some kind of a stream. The
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INDIAN VILLAGES
meaning given by Morgan, our best authority, is " place of meeting," which refers to the meeting of the two streams. The word has been spelled in many ways. As in the Fort Stanwix deed, we find Tianaderha, so Gideon Hawley, in 1753, wrote Tey- Richard Smith cites the form Tuna- onadelhough.
derrah. Other forms are Cheonadilha and Deuna- dilla, while Unendilla and Unideally are common. Joseph Brant, in a letter to Persefer Carr, wrote " Tunadilla." All these forms resulted from the white man's efforts to put into writing the word as pronounced by various tribes. The form Unadilla comes nearest to the Oneida dialect, which has the charm of greater softness than the others. Stone is at a loss to understand why the pioneers were not content to accept as final the spelling adopted by an educated Indian like Brant .*
Near Afton, on an island, was a village called Cunahunta, a word sometimes written Conihunto, and Gunnegunter, but most important of all these Indian settlements was Oghwaga,} where at the
* The reader will be impressed with the likeness of the form Teyona delhough to the name of another Indian village referred to by Gideon Hawley as Towanoendalough, which also was a place where trails and streams met. A word much like it, Teondaloga, was ap- plied by the Indians to Fort Hunter, the place where the Schoharie joins the Mohawk, the meaning of which was, where two streams come to- gether. Another form for the Fort Hunter place is Iconderoga, which closely resembles Ticonderoga. Other words in Iroquois dialects for places at the junction of two streams are Tiorunda, now Fishkill; Ti- osarande, now Luzerne, and Tiogen, now Tioga Point. Between Teyon- adelhough and Teondaloga there is very close resemblance. Each is the English spelling of a Mohawk utterance, and they seem originally to have been the same word. The present spelling of Unadilla was adopted when the town was formed. In the Poor Master's book of 1793 it is written as we write it now. How long the name had been in use before Hawley used it is, of course, matter of conjecture. But it was the name of a place before it ever was applied to a stream. In 1683 the Indians called the river " the Kill which falls into the Susquehanna." The stream had obviously at that time received no name.
t Spelled in almost every conceivable manner. Among the forms are
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
time of the Revolution existed the largest Indian town in the valley, with an orchard, a church, a fort, and many other signs of civilization. It was long a central trading post for the Susquehanna and Dela- ware rivers, where Indians from the Far West and South met traders from Albany and Schenectady, who, for furs, gave in exchange guns, powder, blankets, and knives. This importance of Ogh- waga began very early-before 1650 I think-and probably as soon as the Dutch had become well established as traders in Albany. The Oghwaga Indians were detachments from the Mohawks, Oneidas, and other tribes, and in 1757 the place had become what Stone calls "an aboriginal Port Royal, where many of the Six Nations who had become disgusted with the politics of their several cantons were in the habit of settling."
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