Who's Who in Steuben
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WHO'S WHO IN STEUBEN A Biographical Record of Many of the Prominent Residents of Steuben County, New York Together With An Introductory Chapter Entitled STEUBEN'S PLACE IN IDSTORY ~ By William M. Stuart Copyright 1935 by WILLIAM M. STUART Canisteo, N _y _ PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY F. II.. OWEN PUB. CO .. DANSVILLE. N. Y. STEUBEN'S PLACE IN HISTORY HE date is uncertain, but it was probably about the middle T of the seventeenth century, when the famed and dreaded Iroquois Confederacy, occupying most of what is now New York State, conquered the almost equally famous Delaware nation. Some historians say the Delawares were not conquered, but rather duped into signing a treaty which deprived them of the right of making war and reduced them to the status of women. In any event, the Delawares were thereafter forced to look to the Iroquois for protection from their enemies. This may ex plain why the Delawares never made war upon William Penn and his Quakers; they DARED not without the consent of the Iroquois. And this consent, for various reasons, was not forth coming. Shortly after the Delawares were forced, or duped, into mak ing their treaty with the Iroquois, a number of them set out in canoes for the country of their conquerors. They intended to found a village where they would indeed be under the protection of the fierce warriors of the North. Up the Susquehanna this party forced their canoes, into the Chemung, and :finally into the middle one of three streams whose confluence was at or near the place now called Painted Post. This stream was known as the Kanestio River, the name being variously translated as "Board on the water"; "Place of putting in of the canoes"; or merely, "Head of navigation." The Delawares came at last to a place where the narrow valley widened into broad natural prairies, a fit place to pasture horses and cattle. Here they landed and proceeded to build their homes, at :first doubtless merely wigwams. The Senecas-most westerly of the six tribes of the Iroquois-seem to have ignored these newcomers. Presently they forgot them. In the mean time news got abroad that K.. anestio Castle, as it presently came to be called, was a city of refuge for the lawless. To this place came refugees from many of the tribes east of the Mississippi; escaped slaves; footpads and highwaymen from the coast col- [ 3 ] onies; renegade Frenchmen from Canada; Yankees from Con necticut; Dutchmen from the Hudson Valley: all those whose misdeeds or love of adventure drove them from their former homes. And so time went on. The Senecas, :fiercest and most powerful tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy, had fought with many people, but they never con tested with stranger folk than the outlaws of Kanestio Castle. This forgotten battle took place in the valley of Canaseraga Creek, in the northwestern part of Steuben County, on the flats near the mouth of that darksome gorge now known as Stony Brook Glen. In this well-kept and popular state park crowds of happy people, unmindful of the locality's bloody history, now boil their co:ff ee over the stone :fireplaces, swim in the pool which has been made in the nearby creek, or wander for a mile up the wild and tree-studded canyon which is spanned by the Shawmut Railroad bridge. The invaders from Kanestio, polyglot in character, as we have noted, finally yielded before the ferocious onslaughts of the "Keepers of the Western Door" and sought refuge in the glen. Here some of them were hunted out and slain; but the majority fled up the narrow gorge, whose rocky walls towered hundreds of feet on either side, hid in the pine coppices, or in clefts of the adjacent rocks, and under the cloak of darkness made their way back to Kanestio Castle. A day or two after the fight a half breed Delaware girl was haled from a cave where she had been hiding while fearfully telling her beads-berries stripped from thorn bushes. The Senecas by no means came unscathed from the fray. They lost one of their best chiefs. The body of this leader was taken back a few miles and buried on a spot now occupied by the Lutheran Church of Dansville. The approximate date of this strange battle is fixed by the French, to whom we owe our first authentic knowledge of the Kanestio outlaws. It was in 1690 that Count Frontenac, Governor-General of Canada, learned that the territory of the Senecas was being raided by an uncouth people. In view of the fact that at the time-and indeed until after the French and Indian War-all New York from the Finger Lake region west, was claimed as a part of New France, he decided to investigate. He therefore dispatched an expedition composed of armor-clad soldiers, semi-nude Indians, and Jesuits in their clerical garb; all [ 4 ] being under the command of Sieur De Villiers. The total num ber of the party is uncertain, but it was sufficient. The miniature army left what is now Kingston, Ontario, Can ada, crossed Lake Ontario and skirted the southern shore until the mouth of the Genesee River was reached. In canoes they ascended that stream for a distance estimated as sixty miles (too generous a calculation, by the way) . At what is now known as Mount Morris they turned into Canaseraga Creek. After fol lowing this stream to a point probably beyond Dansville, they struck into an Indian trail which led over a high ridge and then along marshy ground for perhaps nine miles. Apparently they carried their canoes with them. At a spot now marked by the village of Arkport, they launched their craft in a small river which flowed in a southeasterly direction. They proceeded for about ten miles down a wide valley which for the most part was heavily wooded. They then saw and smelled the smoke of pine knots. They heard loud and discordant shouts, the barking of a legion of dogs. Passing the mouth of a small creek, they found a group of "several score of houses built of timber, each having four stone chimneys, ad joining a natural meadow of several hundred arpents." Kanestio Castle! From the houses poured a motley collection of persons. Con cerning them the historian of the expedition said: "A more worthless lot of renegades and villains, who had no hope of heaven or fear of hell, we never saw." Thus did the outlaws of Kanestio Castle, the flotsam of civil ization and the wilderness alike, first emerge into history. Awed by the impressive display of force which the invaders were able to muster, the "villains" and their slatternly female consorts looked silently upon the scene while De Villiers erected a cross, flung to the breeze the white banner of F ranee with its golden fleur de lis, proclaimed that the region belonged to Louis XIV, celebrated the mass, then resumed his journey, proceeding in a southwesterly direction, possibly along what is now Purdy Creek Valley, and so on to the headwaters of the Genesee. For seventy-two years thereafter the settlement which the French had called Ken-is-tio failed to appear in the chronicles of the period. Yet the character of its population did not change, at least for the better. Its location was known to the lawless of the coastal regions, and it continued to be a city of refuge to the rejected of men. Constantly was the population replenished by [ 5] wanderers from afar. Even some deserters from the British army came. These latter individuals superintended the construction of two forts which guarded the vailey from the east. Remains of these fortifications were in evidence when the :first white set tlers came, a few years after the Revolution. Indeed, the north eastern mud wall of one of them is yet faintly discernible. The outlaws must have initiated a municipal government of a sort, for it appears they had a chosen leader or chief. James Oliver Curwood, in his historical romance, The Plains of Abraham, states that the hero of the tale "came to Kanestio, whose chief was Matozee, or Yellow Bear." Possibly. The pe riod in the "Castle's" history covered by Curwood was 17 5 6. Eight years later the leader of the outlaws was Chief Atweetsera. It may have been because of the forts that the village was called a castle. However, it was a common practice thus to des ignate permanent settlements of the Iroquois, as distinguished from mere temporary camps. To the influence of the white men who lived there we can attribute the forts, the well-built cabins with four fireplaces in each, the orchard of fruit trees which still remained when the legitimate settlers came. In the year 1762 Kanestio again forged into public notice. Two Dutch traders from the Hudson, British subjects, came along one day and were promptly murdered by a brace of out laws from the Castle who apparently had stumbled upon them in the woods. News of this outrage leaked out, and Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, requested the Senecas to apprehend and deliver up to justice the ones concerned. The Iroquois chiefs were evasive. One of the murderers had fled to the Ohio, they claimed. And just why, they asked, should the people of the Long House be held responsible for the actions of the inhabitants of such a village as Kanestio, which was popu lated by "stragglers from all nations"? Sir William scorned to dilly-dally.