USA > New York > The old New York frontier : its wars with Indians and Tories, its missionary schools, pioneers, and land titles, 1614-1800 > Part 3
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As early as 1748 Oghwaga had become a mission- ary station, and in the Revolution was a head-quarters for Joseph Brant. Among the apple-trees the first settlers ploughed up many Indian bones. The apple- trees produced fruit, fair and round, and often a
Oneaquaga, Oughquagy, Onoaughquagey, Ononghquage, Auquauga, Anaquaga, Oughquogey, Anaquegha, Onaquaga, Aughquagee, Ochquaga, Aughquagey, Oquaca, Oguaga, Anaquaqua, Oquage, and Okwaha. The form Okwaho is used in the Marcoux Dictionary, which gives the mean- ing wolf. This was a term applied to one of the Mohawk tribes. Gideon Hawley wrote Onohoghquage. Dr. O'Callaghan employed the form Oghquaga. For the present village in the town of Colesville, the spelling is Ouaquaga. At Deposit a hotel uses for its name the form Oquaga, which is also employed for a small lake of this name. The northerly branch of the Delaware has been called the Coquago branch. Wilkinson wrote Oquago, and Washington Anaquaga. Stone adopted the form Oghkwaga. Sir William Johnson wrote Oghquago-though not always. Brant, after the battle of Minisink, used the form Ogh- wage. Brant was a Mohawk Indian who knew how to spell. The word is pronounced in three syllables. In order to secure such pronun- ciation the author has taken the liberty of converting Brant's final "e" into an "a," making it Oghwaga. A. Cusick told Dr. Beauchamp he thought the word meant place of hulled-corn soup.
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INDIAN VILLAGES
pound in weight. Many curious trinkets were un- earthed, and near the old castle war-implements. The Indian path over Oghwaga mountain was plainly visible for more than sixty years after the Indians ceased to travel it. These Indians formed a large tribe. In 1770 they sent one hundred and twenty-four representatives to the congress at Ger- man Flatts. In 1772 some Indians living at Ogh- waga were known as the Ochtaghquanawecroones. The town lay on both sides of the river, just below a large bend in the stream. The present village of Windsor occupies a part of the site. Just below Oghwaga lay another town called Tuscarora.
The trails which followed the Susquehanna and its branches formed the great route to the south and west from Central New York. Into the most dis- tant regions the tribes of the Iroquois from the ear- liest ages had gone over this highway of their own building for purposes of war, plunder, and pleasure. Along the banks of this stream trails had been deeply worn by red men's feet. Generations had passed over them, and the white man, coming later, put them to use before constructing roads of his own. In many cases the white man's roads were actually built by widening the trails, as was the case with the present road from Sidney to Unadilla on the northern side of the river and the main thorough- fare of Oneonta .*
An Indian trail, as described by Morgan, was from twelve to eighteen inches wide, and was often worn to a depth of a foot where the soil yielded readily. In time of war, trained runners were em- ployed to carry messages to distant points. Along
* Formerly written Onoyarenton, and applied also to the creek of this name-its meaning, a stony place.
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
these well-worn paths relays of men were known to cover the space from Albany to Buffalo in three days. One Indian could run one hundred miles in a day. This extraordinary skill has been ascribed to the absence of horses in America before the com- ing of Europeans. Indians, from necessity, acquired the accomplishment of the horse. They did more. They performed feats which only the well-trained bicyclist can perform to-day. They made century runs.
The upper Susquehanna and its branches, includ- ing the Unadilla, penetrated lands in which dwelt or hunted Mohawks, Oneidas, and Onondagas, while the Chemung penetrated the lands of the Senecas. These rivers, uniting at Tioga Point to become one river, flowed down from a large territory in which dwelt the Iroquois nations. That territory, as Mor- gan points out, is shaped somewhat like a triangle, of which Tioga Point is the apex, while its base is the great central trail from the Hudson to Lake Erie. Thus in Indian times, as in our own, this lat- ter locality, the base of the triangle, possessed the greatest of all New York highways. Down these streams from the Long House of the Iroquois went almost every Indian who journeyed to the south, with Tioga the great central point of meeting.
The Susquehanna trails followed both sides of the stream ; the one taking the north bank meeting at the Unadilla River the Oneida trail coming from the north. Proceeding up the Susquehanna, one trail went on to Otsego Lake and Cherry Valley, while the other followed the Charlotte,* crossing
* The Indian name of this stream was Adaquetangie. When Sir Will- iam Johnson got his patent to the valley, he changed the name to Char- lotte as a compliment to the Queen of George III., Queen Victoria's grandmother.
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INDIAN VILLAGES
from the head of the stream to Cobleskill * and the Schoharie, + whence a trail ran along that stream to the Lower Castle of the Mohawks at Fort Hunter, and to Albany, with a branch following Catskill Creek to the Hudson River. For the Mohawk country, the Hudson River Valley and for lands east of the Hudson, here lay the most direct route west by the Susquehanna and Ohio, and south to Chesapeake Bay. On this subject of highways a truthful and pathetic speech was made in 1847 by Peter Wilson, a Cayuga chief, before the New York Historical Society, in these words :
The Empire State, as you love to call it, was once laced by our trails from Albany to Buffalo-trails that we had trod for centuries-trails worn so deep by the feet of the Iroquois that they became your roads of travel, as your possessions gradually eat into those of my people. Your roads still traverse those same lines of communication which bound one part of the Long House to the other. Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history ? Glad were your fathers to sit down upon the threshold of the Long House. Had our forefathers spurned you from it when the French were thundering at the opposite gate to get a passage through and drive you into the sea, whatever has been the fate of other Indians, the Iroquois might still have been a nation, and I, instead of pleading here, for the privilege of living within your bor- ders-I might have had a country.
* Originally Cobus Kill and of German origin. An Indian name for it, given by Dr. Beauchamp, is Otsgaragu, meaning Hemp Hill.
+ Many forms occur in earlier writings. Dr. Beauchamp gives the meaning, driftwood.
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III
The Coming of White Men 1614-1740
T HE Susquehanna Valley had been visited by Europeans several years before the Pilgrim Fathers made their landing at Plymouth. When Captain Christiaensen, the stur- dy Dutch navigator, in 1614, selected Albany as the site of a trading post and erected near there a fort, he acted on knowledge already acquired concerning its relation to those routes into the Indian country which converged near the confluence of the Mo- hawk and the Hudson. In that year or the next, two men, of whom one was named Kleynties, set out from Fort Orange (Albany) to explore the fur country, and crossing from the Mohawk to Otsego Lake, proceeded down the Susquehanna into Penn- sylvania. On the information these men secured was in part based that interesting piece of Dutch cartography called the Figurative Map, which shows not only the Connecticut, Hudson, and Mohawk rivers, but another stream, the home of " Sennecas" and " Minquas " (Mohawks).
The course of this stream, as shown on the map, does not conform to any stream we know, but there was only one river inhabited by Senecas and Mo- hawks beyond the river Mohawk. This was the Susquehanna and its branches. About forty years later (in 1659) another map, that of Visscher, pub-
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THE COMING OF WHITE MEN
lished at Amsterdam, gave a more accurate outline of a river which is unquestionably the upper Sus- quehanna and its branches. At its head, living on the shores of a lake, were men called "Canoo- makers." This lake appears to have been Otsego. On the Figurative Map is a marginal note in Dutch referring to "what Kleynties and his comrade have communicated to me respecting the locality of the rivers and the positions of the tribes which they found in their expedition from the Maquaas into the interior and along the new river down to the At the latter place lived enemies of Ogehage." * The " new river " was the Delaware. the Iroquois.
Another Dutchman soon explored the country farther south, one Hendrickson, Christiaensen's suc- cessor in command of the ship, who made discovery of " certain lands, a bay and three rivers " between the 38th and 40th degrees of parallel, making report as follows to the States General in August, 1616:
And did there trade with the inhabitants; said trade consisting of sables, furs, robes and other skins. He also traded for and bought from the Minquaes t three persons, being people belonging to this company, which three per- sons were employed in the service of the Mohawks and Mahicans, giving for them kettles, beads, and merchandise.
A visit to the head-waters of the Susquehanna was made in 1616 by Stephen Bruehle, whose pur- pose was part of a larger purpose entertained by the Dutch at that time to secure Indian warriors to aid them in a conflict with the French, who were then pressing down from Canada. From these warlike
* The Figurative Map was found in the archives at The Hague in 1841. + A Mohawk village appears on the Figurative Map, near the mouth of the Susquehanna.
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
preparations dates the beginning of that alliance between the Six Nations and the white men of New York around which so much history thence- forth for a century and a half was to revolve. From it dates also the Indians' familiarity with fire-arms.
During the Dutch domination and the first years of English rule, many traders came into the valley. As the century was rounding well into its last quarter, not only the English at Albany, but an Englishman farther south, William Penn, began to show new and livelier interest in the territory. By that time its value in the fur trade had been amply demonstrated. When Dongan came over as Gov- ernor, new energy at once was infused into the ad- ministration. In 1683 Commissioners at Albany obtained for him an account of the river and its relations to the Indian settlements, their information coming from Europeans, or " Christians," as white men were then called, as well as from Indians. The Commissioners recommended that regular traders be sent out, to form camps or settlements along the valley. It was argued that these places would be much nearer the Indians than Albany was, " and consequently the Indians more inclinable to go there." The recommendation in part sprang from a desire to thwart certain efforts made by Penn to increase his trade, and in part from a desire to accede to the requests of Indians, but in the main Penn's ambition was the moving cause.
In a short time adventurous young men set out on journeys to the interior. Dongan, in 1686, re- quested the Indians to see that " neither French nor English go and live at the Susquehanna River, nor hunt nor trade amongst the brethren without my
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THE COMING OF WHITE MEN
pass and seal." Should any be found without such passports, he desired the Indians to " bring them to Albany and deliver them at the Town House, where care shall be taken for punishing them." He would not make exception in cases of white men married to squaws, " they being only spies upon the breth- ren." The reply was that " we dare not meddle therewith, for a man whose goods are taken from him will defend himself, which may create trouble or war." In the following year Dongan desired to se- cure royal authority for erecting " a campagne fort " upon the Susquehanna River, " where his Majesty shall think fit Mr. Penn's bounds shall terminate," and Dongan's ideas as to this point favored Wyalus- ing .*
Of the men sent out in Dongan's time we do not know the names. We have, however, the names of two men who, on June 7, 1701, crossed the western branch of the Unadilla River, then called Eghwagy Creek. They were David Schuyler and Captain Johannas Bleeker. They were not traders, but delegates on their way from Albany to Onondaga charged with counteracting French intrigues.
The next earliest names are those of German settlers, who in large companies, on three occasions, and perhaps four, passed down the valley on their way to Pennsylvania. They formed part of that large body of Palatines who have left so deep an im- pression on the Mohawk and Schoharie countries. They had originally left their homes on the Rhine in consequence of the devastation attending the wars of Louis XIV. In England they had met the five Indian chiefs taken over by Mayor Schuyler, who
* Dr. Beauchamp's rendering of this word is Home of the Old Warrior.
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
offered them land in America, and Queen Anne, who had given them food and shelter, advanced the money to pay their expenses across the sea.
Late in the year 1709, to the number of about 4,000, they set sail, and lived successively in New York, Livingston Manor, and Schenectady, a hun- dred and fifty families in 1714 taking up lands at a place called Weiserdorp, which is now known as Middleburg, in Schoharie County. These families were in a state of great poverty. One " borrowed a horse here, another there ; also a cow and plow har- ness," and during the first year they " made many meals on the wild potatoes and ground beans that grew in great abundance." A moving spirit among them was the elder Conrad Weiser.
When trouble arose over titles to their Schoharie lands, which were claimed by Robert Livingston and others, a serious wrangle ensued, resulting in the sending of a sheriff from New York to Weiser- dorp, a village of forty huts, constructed of logs, earth, and bark. A hostile reception awaited him, one of the incidents of which was an attack by a mob of women, led by Magdalene Zee (or Zeh), who car- ried the sheriff some distance on a rail, broke his ribs by pounding him with clubs, and otherwise did violence to him, the full details of which the present generation would not tolerate in print.
The Germans concluded to submit the matter to the English sovereign, and three men, including Weiser, were sent to London. While at sea, the ship was attacked by pirates and Weiser "three times tied up and floged, but would not confess to having money." On arrival, they found that Queen Anne had died and that news of their attack on the sheriff had seriously prejudiced their case. One of
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THE COMING OF WHITE MEN
Weiser's companions sailed for home in disgust and died at sea, while Weiser and the other were arrested and sent to prison-perhaps to the Tower, for Brown says Weiser spent a year in that ancient cas- tle. On being released the two men quarrelled. Weiser's son says the trouble was they " both had hard heads."
Dissatisfaction in Schoharie grew apace and finally a general migration set in for Conestoga, Pa. The route chosen was the Charlotte and Susquehanna rivers. Thirty families are said by Rupp to have gone down in the summer of 1723, " a few months before Weiser's return." Some fifty others followed in 1725 and in 1729 another company departed.
At the mouth of the Charlotte they built canoes with which to make the remainder of the journey, felling trees for the purpose. The tree-stumps were long remembered by Susquehanna settlers for their association with this migration. Twenty-five years later when Sir William Johnson applied for a patent he wished it to begin "where the Germans made their canoes to go to Conestoga." Household goods were transported in the canoes, and the horses and cattle driven along the Indian trail. Brown says deliberately that after reaching Conestoga, twelve horses broke from their stable and wandered away. A year and a half later ten of them were found at Weiserdorp, three hundred miles from Conestoga.
The younger Conrad Weiser, who made this jour- ney, says there was want of leadership. Each man did as he pleased, " and their obstanacy has stood in their way ever since." Young Weiser rose to con- siderable eminence in Pennsylvania as an Indian agent, and his services to the Government were so important that Washington, standing at his grave
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
in 1793, remarked that these services had been ren- dered in a difficult period and posterity would not forget him.
The migration from Schoharie had an important influence on the future population of Pennsylvania and New York. Had these Palatines fared better in Schoharie, it is not unlikely that the upper Susque- hanna Valley would have been first peopled by that race instead of the Scotch-Irish, but the Palatines were not slow to inform their friends in the old country of their experience in New York and to ad- vise them to settle in Pennsylvania instead. Many of the Palatines never left Schoharie however, and many others remained to found thriving settlements along the valley of the Mohawk, of which enduring evidence survives in the geographical nomenclature. From that pioneer stock came the central patriotic figure in the battle of Oriskany-General Nicholas Herkimer.
About 1722 young men sent out by Governor Burnet had reached Oghwaga. Fifteen years later the importance of the valley as a highway to the South and West had become fully understood. In 1737 Cadwallader Colden, the Surveyor-General of the province, made an official report showing the importance that he attributed to it. " Goods may be carried," he said, " from this lake (Otsego) in bat- toes or flat-bottom vessels through Pennsylvania to Maryland and Virginia, the current of the river run- ning everywhere easy without any cataracts in all that long space." After describing the east and west branches of the Susquehanna, he added that " by either of these branches goods may be carried to the mountains, and I am told that the passage through the mountains to branches of the Mississippi which
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THE COMING OF WHITE MEN
issue on the west side of these mountains is neither long nor difficult, by which means inland navigation may be had to the Bay of Mexico." Twenty-five years later, at the close of the French War, Pouchot described the Susquehanna as " navigable almost from its source," and as " flowing through a beauti- ful valley filled with very fine timber."
It was not until the time of Johnson's trade activ- ity that men with large purposes were regularly established on the river. Johnson's policy in send- ing his agents to Oghwaga, which he preferred to Oswego because of the absence of competition, re- sulted in its own reward. He became the most suc- cessful trader in the province.
Johnson was a native of Ireland and a nephew of Sir Peter Warren, the owner of a large tract of land at the mouth of the Schoharie Creek, in what is now the town of Florida. Johnson had become War- ren's agent, and had engaged in the fur trade on his own account. Unlike the average trader of that time, Johnson was honest and fair in his dealings. Conspicuous for humanity, he won the regard of the Indians very early, and he retained it through life. He married a German wife, and soon found himself on the road to great success as a man of business. In 1739 he made plans for his trading post at Oghwaga. From this place trained agents were sent out along the net-work of trails, making contracts with the Indians at their own door-a method giving him vast advantage over the men who did business with Indians at Albany and Sche- nectady.
Albany had become very unpopular with the Ind- ians. The younger Weiser records a conversation he once had with an Onondaga chief named Canas-
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
satego. " You know our practice," said the chief ; " if a white man in travelling through our country enters one of our cabins, we all treat him as I do you. We dry him, if he is wet ; we warm him if he is cold ; and give him meat and drink that he may allay his hunger and thirst, and we spread soft furs for him to rest and sleep on. We demand nothing in return. But if I go into a white man's house in Albany and ask for victuals and drink, they say, ' where is your money ?' and if I have none they say, 'get out, you Indian dog.'"
There is no dearth of testimony to show that Indians fared badly in bargains made at Albany. Peter Kalm, an observing traveller, who visited Albany in the middle of the eighteenth century, says, " many persons have assured me that the Indians are frequently cheated in disposing of their goods, es- pecially when they are in liquor, and that sometimes they do not get one-half or one-tenth of the value of their goods. I have been witness to several transac- tions of this kind." He refers to the " avarice and selfishness of the inhabitants of Albany " as well known. Few of the great fur traders have survived with good reputations. Parkman says many of them were " ruffians of the coarsest stamp, who vied with each other in rapacity, violence, and profligacy." They " cheated, cursed, and plundered the Indians and outraged their families."" Johnson was a very conspicuous exception to this too general rule.
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( From a portrait in the State Library, at Albany, that was copied from an original owned by Sir John Johnson. )
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PART II
Missionaries and the French War 1650-1769
I
Jesuits and Church of England Men 1650-1746
ages.
A FTER the first explorers, seeking to extend the fur trade, came the Jesuits, interested in promoting the spiritual welfare of the sav- The traders came from Fort Orange and New Amsterdam, the missionaries from the ancient St. Lawrence settlements of New France. Before 1650 these devoted men from the great northern valley had arrived on territory now a part of New York State, bringing with them stout and enterprising souls. Morgan declares that the zeal and devotion which they displayed are " unsurpassed in the his- tory of Christianity." They " traversed the forests of America alone and unprotected ; they dwelt in the depths of the wilderness without shelter and almost without raiment ; they passed the ordeal of Indian captivity and the fire of the torture; they suffered from hunger and violence, but in the midst of all they never forgot the mission with which they were intrusted."
Several of these men acquired distinction that has made their labors a part of American history. Among them were Isaac Jogues, Bruyar, Le Jeune, Brébeuf and Garnier. Later came Peter Milet, who had marked success with the Oneidas, among whom he passed many years, securing a firm hold on their devotion. While it is not unlikely that Jogues saw
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THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
some of the head-waters of the Susquehanna, for here were Mohawk hunting grounds, it is more probable that Jacques Bruyar actually came into that valley. He lived many years alternately among the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Mohawks, and was in the Iroquois lands for more than thirty years before the eigh- teenth century began. It was the fate of these mis- sionaries to lead roving lives like the Indians whom they sought to convert ; they adopted Indian dress and names, and were often supposed to be Indians, circumstances which must have taken more than one of them on journeys along the Susquehanna trails. Campbell says they often went with the Indians on distant and hazardous expeditions, where they " as- tonished their savage audiences with the splendor and imposing rites and ceremonies of the Roman Church."
The life of Father Jogues, better than perhaps any other story, illustrates the truth of Morgan's tribute. Made a captive by the Mohawks and taken to their valley, he was forced to undergo the terrible ordeal of running the gauntlet-" a narrow road to Paradise," Jogues called it. His left thumb was cut off by a woman who used a clam-shell for the purpose. He was made to lie all night on his back, with his feet and hands outstretched and tied to stakes, and while in this position children were allowed to place hot ashes and coals on his body. He was led in triumph from village to village, and in each was newly tortured. As he accompanied his captors to their hunting grounds, "shivering and half famished," says Parkman, "he followed them through the chill November forest and shared their wild bivouac in the depths of the wintry desolation." Because he would not partake of meat, chosen as
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JESUIT PRIESTS
an offering to one of their heathen divinities, he "starved in the midst of plenty." At night, when the savages made merry around their fire, he " crouched in a corner of the hut, gnawed by hun- ger and pierced to the bone with cold. He brought them fire wood like a squaw; he did their bidding without a murmur and patiently bore their abuse." Huron Indians, captives like himself, he converted. Ears of unhusked corn wet with dew were thrown to him for food, and with this dew he baptized his converts. Parkman adds that in a remote and lonely spot he "cut the bark in the form of a cross from the trunk of a great tree, and here he made his prayers."
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