Binder Page ______Name ______Period ______The Buffalo Creek Reservation Date ______

Revolutionary War and Aftermath for the Haudenosaunee- During the American Revolution, most of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy stayed ​ loyal to the British side, largely because of the friendship between the Mohawk ​ and the British agent, Sir William Johnson. ​ ​ In 1779, in retaliation for raids into from Loyalists and Haudenosaunee working together, the Patriot army struck back. sent two large armies into New York to attack the villages- one under General John Sullivan and one under ​ ​ General James Clinton. This campaign burned many longhouses, villages and crops, leaving ​ ​ thousands of Iroquois homeless and hungry. Thousands fled to the British held Fort Niagara ​ for safety and food. Life “after the whirlwind” would never be the same. After the war was over, Joseph Brant took many of the Mohawk into Loyalist Canada, where they settled around what is today Brantford, . Many of the Tuscarora settled near Niagara Falls, New York. Most of the Seneca, along with many Cayuga and Onondaga, ended up along Buffalo Creek. In 1794, the leaders of the Confederacy of Six Nations and the representatives of the met in Canandaigua, NY. There had been several misleading treaties and conflicts over the rights to land in what we now call , and President Washington did not want the Haudenosaunee to join the Indians in the Ohio River Valley who were continuing to fight the Americans. The result was the which made peace ​ ​ between the Haudenosaunee and the United States. The George Washington Belt is the wampum that was made to mark that treaty.

In 1797, the was made between representatives of the Seneca and ​ ​ ​ ​ the United States. In that treaty, the Seneca sold their rights to almost all of the land west of the Genesee River, except for ten “reservations.” In return the Seneca received $100,000, plus ​ ​ ​ payments to individual leaders. This treaty finally opened up Western New York to white settlement. Buffalo Creek Reservation- The Buffalo Creek Reservation on what is today Lackawanna, West Seneca, Elma, and ​ ​ Marilla, big parts of South Buffalo, and smaller parts of other adjacent towns. In 1817, it was estimated that there were 700 Seneca plus assorted people from other tribes living in various villages here.

Much of what we consider to be “traditional Iroquois” culture was already starting to change. Most visibly, the people living at Buffalo Creek were not living in longhouses any more. Instead, they mainly lived in simple log cabins, not very different from ones that white ​ ​ settlers would build when they moved in. The typical cabin consisted of one large room that was used for everything, from cooking and eating to sleeping. There were sometimes lofts used for storage and perhaps for sleeping too, but not much more. Food still came from both hunting and farming the “Three sisters” and the women were still responsible for the field work. The ​ ​ clothing that they wore included much European cloth. Councils were held by the sachems to conduct public business. According to one West ​ ​ ​ Seneca historian: “Those meetings required a great deal of time for deliberation, especially when related to business with outsiders. Missionaries requested permission to establish schools on the Reservation and to spread the Gospel; tavern operators applied for leases to set up stage stops along Reservation highways; lumbermen required rights to cut timber for the steady need of expanding Buffalo, and there were always speculators intent on negotiating treaties for purchase of land. Finally, there was ​ the annual round of business with the United States government, conducted through the local Indian agent.” ​

One white settler in Buffalo, by the name of Sam Welch, described how the people of Buffalo viewed their Seneca neighbors. He said it was common in the 1830s to see as many Indian men, women, and children on the streets of Buffalo as there were white people. When annual government payments were made to the Natives, they would come into Buffalo by the hundreds to settle their accounts with traders. The Seneca would also trade Indian-made goods, including smoke-tanned deerskin moccasins, shirts and leggings ornamented with colored beaver quill patterns, wallets, purses, belts, mittens, gloves, baskets, bows and arrows, birch bark novelties, and such foods as maple sugar, wild berries, horse radish, and herbs. Moccasins were especially valuable because they were commonly worn by white men, women and children of those days. Some Quakers were allowed to come on to the Buffalo Creek Reservation, to build a ​ ​ school and a mission, but they were not allowed to try to convert Indians. Still, they built a school in what is now South Buffalo, and tried to teach boys trades like farming, carpentry, shoemaking and blacksmithing, and tried to teach girls spinning, knitting and sewing, while teaching both to read and write. Another group, now known as the Ebenezers,was allowed to settle in what is now West ​ ​ Seneca. They were a group of German Protestants that wanted a place to create a religious community of their own, where their people could worship without being bothered by outside influences. It was this group that named the town “West Seneca” because the name “Seneca” had already been taken by a community in the Finger Lakes. However, the full story of the Ebenezers is best told at another time. Probably the best known person who lived on the Buffalo Creek Reservation was the Seneca chief known as . He got his red coat from the British when he supported ​ ​ them during the Revolution. During the War of 1812, he had encouraged the Seneca to stay neutral, and in his portraits, he is always shown wearing a large silver medal that was a gift to him from George Washington. He was known as a tremendous speaker, which was a very important skill in Haudenosaunee culture, and he was even known and respected among the white population because of his speech-making skills. In fact, his name in the Seneca language is “Sa-go-ye-wat-ha,” which means “He keeps them awake.” One historian of West Seneca wrote, “A real tragedy of his life was the lack of interpreters to adequately present his words with a quality of English suitable to match the range of his thoughts. The effectiveness of Indian figures of speech he used could only be properly evaluated by his own people.” Throughout his life, he defended the traditional ways of the Iroquois and argued against the white men buying or taking Native lands. He moved several times, but one of the places he lived was on Seneca Street, near the current West Seneca post office. An End to the Buffalo Creek Reservation Two things were beginning to spell the end for the Buffalo Creek Reservation. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that the town of Buffalo was going to grow very ​ ​ ​ rapidly into a city, and many people began to have an interest in the nearby land, which gained a great deal of value. In addition, when Congress passed the Act in 1830. It ​ ​ ​ gave President Andrew Jackson the ability to remove all Indians from east of the Mississippi ​ ​ ​ River. Land was being prepared in Wisconsin, and many of the moved there, ​ ​ but the Senecas at Buffalo Creek were not interested. In 1838, the Ogden Land Company, drew up what they called the Treaty of Buffalo Creek and they both tricked and forced Senecas ​ ​ to sign it. Sachems were pressed and badgered night and day by the representatives of the speculators in the land company. According to one historian, the sachems were “bribed, drugged, and plied with liquor” but they still voted no. He claimed that whites took Seneca men to Buffalo, penned them in an inn and declared that the Natives were now “chiefs” and, for pay, forced them to sign the treaty. Actual Seneca sachems who could not be bribed or gotten drunk were never there, but their names were forged on the treaty. “The Seneca had discovered the subtleness of a new form of warfare.” According to this treaty, the Seneca had given up all of their lands in New York. Quakers believed that God had created all people equally, and they had always tried to ​ ​ treat the Senecas with fairness as they lived among them on the reservation. These Quakers worked to expose the dishonesty of the treaty from 1838, and eventually got it to be undone. This saved several of the reservations, which remain in Seneca hands today, including the Cattaraugus and Allegany Reservations, south of Buffalo, and the to the north. The new Treaty of Buffalo Creek, which returned the Cattaraugus and Allegany ​ ​ Reservations to the control of the Senecas, also exempted the Seneca lands from “all taxes, and ​ ​ assessments for roads, highways, and other purposes.” That’s why there is no tax on sales made on the nearby Indian reservations today. In 1848, because of the distrust of the chiefs on the council system from these land deals, the Seneca voted to start a new government called the Seneca Nation of Indians (though some from the Tonawanda Reservation stayed with the traditional system) The Seneca Nation of Indians continues to run the Allegany and Cattaraugus Reservations with an elected government today. They work to protect the Seneca’s sovereignty over these lands, and will protest and ​ ​ ​ demonstrate when the state of New York or the federal government try to collect taxes or otherwise intrude on the land. The mostly white city of Salamanca, New York, is on land of ​ ​ the Allegany Reservation and is leased from the Seneca. More recently, the Seneca Nation of Indians has repurchased part of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, and has used the land to develop the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino, just a few blocks from downtown Buffalo and the ​ ​ rapidly developing area around Canalside.