Tomahawks and Old Lace Tales of Western New York By ARCH MERRILL Reprinted from THE DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE ROCHESTER, NEW YORK PRINTED 1948 HENDERSON-MOSHER, INC. 228 SOUTH AVE. ROCHESTER, N. Y. Other Books by THE AUTHOR A RIVER RAMBLE THE LAKES COUNTRY THE RIDGE THE TOWPATH ROCHESTER SKETCH BOOK STAGECOACH TOWNS This page is blanl<. The Light Dims in the Long House HE white man in his pride has called this commonwealth T the Empire State. Before ever the white man saw it, it was an empire - the empire of the Iroquois Confederacy. The warriors of the Six Nations believed it had been conferred upon them by the Great Spirit. Certainly it was theirs by right of conquest. After long and gory struggles they had driven out or subjugated their tribal foes. For many moons they were masters of the state- from Niagara's thunder water to Long Island's farthest tip where the Atlantic pounded the sands of Montauk Point. It was their happy hunting ground - all the lordly mountains, all the rolling hills, the deep valleys where the tall grass waved; the slim, shimmering lakes and the rushing rivers . that bore the war canoes, the gorges and the glens where falling waters tinkled, the wooded flatlands beside the great inland seas. It was an empire studded with towns of log huts, surrounded by fields of corn and beans and orchards of apple, plum and peach. Its capitol was the great grey Long House built of elm bark that stood on the shores of Onondaga Lake. There day and night burned the Council Fire. There over the trails .came the sachems of the Nations to make the laws and determine the destiny of the Iroquois Confederacy. Centuries before Woodrow Wilson, here was a League of Nations. And the Indian League worked. In the beginning there were five Nations- the Senecas, the Cayugas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas and the Mohawks. The Tuscaroras, fugitives from the South, were late comers into the League. 5 Of all the Nations, none was more powerful, more populous, more warlike than the Senecas. To them was given the task of guarding the westerly frontier of the empire. Proudly they bore the title of Keepers of the Western Door of the Long House. Their eastern boundary was a line drawn roughly from the head of Great Sodus Bay to Tioga, Pa. On the West, the North and the South it was bounded only by the Senecas' capacity for conquest. * * * In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia lives a black bear of peculiar ferocity. For three centuries it has been called "The Sinnaker." It is a backwoods corruption of the proud name of Seneca. That name is an echo of an ancient fear- the terror that the marauding Keepers of the Western Door inspired in the hearts of the more peaceful and weaker tribes that surrounded the struggling young white colonies on the Seaboard. From their bases in Western New York, the Senecas ranged far and wide. In bloody warfare they had cleared their future domain of the Neuter Nation and the Eries, "The Cat People," and all but obliterated them. Then they struck dread to the hearts of tribes in such far places as the banks of the Illinois and the swamps of South Carolina. Back to their "castles" and their torture stakes in the Genesee Valley and the Finger Lakes country they dragged their captives and their spoils of war, like the Romans of old. The Senecas were "The Romans of the West." Then the "people with white faces" came, with their strange noisy guns that spat death; their gauds and baubles, their 6 trickery, their lust for land, their firewater to debauch the children of the forest. The white man came to respect the power of the Seneca Nation. France and England sought to make it a pawn in their great game of colonial empire. The French foolishly sought to humble the Senecas by force of arms. In 1687 the army of the Marquis Denonville came down from Montreal and after routing the Indians in a battle on the site of Victor, devastated the Seneca towns and crops. The Senecas built new towns farther inland. The French expedition merely aroused the lasting enmity of the tribes, a situation upon which the crafty British capitalized. So when the colonists rebelled against the Crown, the Senecas and most of the other Iroquois nations cast their lot with the British. * * * In 1779, George Washington, commander of the rebel army, faced a "Red" menace. It had naught to do with Russia. His problem concerned Redcoats and Redskins and the New York frontier. It was a dark hour in the Revolution. Three years of fighting a powerful enemy with indifferent success had drained the resources and sapped the strength of the colonists. The cities of New York and Philadelphia were in British hands. New York State was a hotbed of Toryism. Of its population of 180,000, at least 80,000 were loyal to the Crown. In the Mohawk Valley the powerful Johnsons and Butlers had joined their white Rangers with the savage legions on the frontier. They had furnished muskets, blankets and firewater to the Indians. In return the great granary of the Iroquois helped feed the Northern armies of the King. 7 Of all the Indian allies of Britain, the most crafty and numerous were the Senecas. No Iroquois nation held so vast a potential storehouse of provisions or so strategic a territory. And there was a matter of revenge. In 1778 painted, whooping Senecas and equally ruthless Tories, led by the cold blooded Walter Butler, raided helpless settlements in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and butchered scores. No place on the frontier felt safe after that. Washington saw that there could be no decisive victory until the hinterland had been cleared of the Redskins and their Tory cohorts and their power destroyed. The American commander conceived a plan to strike the enemy in his stronghold, Central and Western New York. Succintly he stated his objectives to Congress: "It is proposed to carry the war to the heart of the Six Nations and to cut off their settlements, destroy the next year's crops and do every other mischief which time and circumstances will permit." An indifferent and faction-ridden Continental Congress quibb1ed about costs but finally authorized the invasion. Wash- ington chose General John Sullivan, a veteran New Hampshire officer, as its commander. He was a bold, resourceful and out- spoken man. The Sullivan campaign of 1779 was no mere cruel, punitive expedition, no minor border foray. It was one of the most extensive and important campaigns of the war. It engaged a third of the Continental Army and it cost the impoverished colonies one million dollars. Nearly 5,000 men, most of them seasoned campaigners, marched through the wilderness into the Indians' homeland in a crucial offensive that can be com- pared to Sherman's march to the sea in another war 85 years later. 8 The strategy of the campaign was devised by Washington himself, an old Indian fighter. The expedition was to be split into three divisions. The main force under Sullivan, was to come up the Susquehanna; another unit under General James Clinton was to approach by the Mohawk Valley and a third under Colonel Brodhead was to march from Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh). Sullivan and Clinton finally joined forces at Tioga but Brodhead never effected a union with the main body. He raided Indian settlements along the Allegheny River, however. The invasion was planned for early summer and was in· tended as a surprise. Washington had hoped that the enemy would be deluded into the belief that the thrust was to be at Canada. But the slowness in providing supplies, the lukewarm- ness of some colonists, notably the Pennsylvania Quakers, and other drawbacks caused Sullivan's division to lay in camp at Easton, Pa., from May until August. In the meantime the vigilant Indians had watched every move of the Yankee general and prepared to meet him. The Tory-Indian allies chose to make a stand in a bend of the Chemung River near Newtown, not far from the present site of Elmira. Some 1,500 strong, they threw up breastworks and waited the advance of Sullivan. The thunder of the American cannon, the mightiest they had ever faced, at first terrorized the savages who were trained to close combat tactics with tomahawk and musket, not to artillery warfare. Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief, rallied the broken ranks and the Indians fought bravely and skillfully until, outflanked and outnumbered, they were forced to retreat. The battle of Newtown was the turning point of the cam- paign. After that Sullivan's troops never came to grips with the fleeing Redskins and Redcoats. 9 Looking back at their lost paradise, the beaten Senecas saw in the sky that hazy early September of 1779 the smoke of their burning villages. One by one, French Catherine's Town (Mon- tour Falls) , Kendaia, Kanadesaga, (Geneva) , the stronghold of their hereditary king; Kanandaigue (Canandaigua), and finally Genesee Castle or Little Beard's Town ( Cuylerville), besides many smaller towns, were reduced to wind-blown ashes. Sullivan's men put to the torch the Indian villages of log huts, destroyed the standing crops of corn and beans, hacked down and girdled the fruit trees rich with their ripening burden. The granary that for so long had fed the army of the Crown was no more. George Washington's "Red" problem was solved. The broken Indian-Tory army found refuge at Fort Niagara, a British bastion of the frontier.