Dispossessing the Haudenosaunee
Inventing the Finger Lakes, Part One
History Starts with Story
The story exists, as so many do, in several versions. But they all involve the central premise that a couple hundred years ago, a farmer, chasing wayward cows that broke from the pasture, hears their bell across the river. He fords it, but as twilight encroaches, he is no closer to finding them as they have bedded down in some tall grasses. Gun in hand, he pauses near a large tree to listen, and in doing so, hears a disturbance above him. A large bear climbed down the tree, prompting the farmer to shoot and kill the bear. As he reloaded his gun, a second bear scuttled down the tree and scampered away. Now, this story can go one of two ways. It can be about the luck of a farmer who killed a bear, yielding a good amount of meat on par with beef; or it can be about the third bear who likewise climbed down the tree. Ready for this one, he felled it with a single shot. As he was reloading, a fourth and then a fifth bear came scrambling down and ran off. The farmer shot and killed two of five bears.
Now, this kind of story seems to be quite fantastic, a complete fabrication or at least the hyperbole of a story told over a couple beers. But this is a story found in the book History of Cortland County, published in 1885 with H. P. Smith listed as editor. The farmer in question was John Albright, who was scratching out a hard-won living from the old Military Lot 29 in East Homer, New York. This lot, nestled in the valley of the East Branch of the Tioghnioga River is today still rural, with a few houses and cemetery congregated at a respectful distance from the river. John Albright is buried there in East Homer Cemetery, having left this world in 1845 after living 85 years. More than half of those years were spend on his homestead in the wilderness that would become a rural paradise.
My question is: Why was John Albright there? What caused this man to leave his home in the Hudson Valley and move into the dense wolf- and bear-infested forests of the New York frontier? These seem like easy questions, but the first question is— What happened to the people who owned the land before he did?
The Unsurvey’d Interior
When we think of Manifest Destiny and the conquering of the Western Indians and the rugged, God-driven nature of the victorious men who accomplished this, we usually picture wagons in the Old West, sometime after the Civil War. Oregon Territory, or Montana, or Arizona. But in the 1790–1820 era, the Old West was the frontier of the original 13 Colonies, including New York State. Winning the Revolutionary War opened this land to colonization by thousands of white settlers, some of whom eventually moved farther west to Ohio or Michigan. The nascent American Dream was fueled by voracious settler appetites for land and its attendant natural resources. Indeed, even the New York frontier was a late-comer to this game, as English colonists pushed west from the Atlantic shores of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay starting in 1620. By the French & Indian War, they’d pushed all the way into the Mohawk River Valley and there was nothing that could stop them. Except for King George III.
We Made an Arrangement
The Haudenosaunee first encountered Europeans in their territory in the 16th Century when the French traveled up the St. Lawrence River. Over the next two centuries, the French were joined by the Dutch and the English. For the most part, the Mohawk dealt in conflict with the French while trading with the Dutch and then English. However, the Seneca and Onondaga were also subjects of French animosity. As demand for beaver pelts escalated, the Haudenosaunee erased much native competition, and even the French were forced to abandon dreams of taking over Iroquoia.
By the 1750s, the Mohawk were solid British allies, while the remaining nations were split between some few, generally Seneca, who supported the French ambitions and those who wanted to remain neutral or join the Mohawk in supporting the British. Both European nations wanted to expand into the Ohio River valley, but the Haudenosaunee believed they owned the lands. In 1754, when a young Virginia militiaman named George Washington blundered into sparking a war between Great Britain and France (officially declared by Britain in 1756) the Haudenosaunee supported the British. On one hand, the British believed the Haudenosaunee to be their subjects, in which case their territories belonged to the King. On the other, regardless of the Haudenosaunee’s actual sovereignty, they gave the British a defensive buffer from the French. Despite early French success, the combination of the British Army and colonial militias were too much.
The British victory was made official at the 1763 Treat of Paris. France ceded all lands east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, including the previously disputed Ohio lands. This did not please the Haudenosaunee, who could see that British migration into those lands would limit their own strength and surround their homeland. To alleviate this threat, the Haudenosaunee pressed for official action. In response to all the changes from French to British administration stemming from the Treaty of Paris, King George issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763. A line of demarcation was created limiting British settlement in what was termed Indian Land. According to the British, they owned this land but allowed the local nations to remain in control. From the British perspective, the line of demarcation banned settlement, temporarily, but not movement. Importantly, the Proclamation banned British subjects from acquiring Native land, either in purchase or grant unless the Crown approved.
For the colonists, this situation was both intolerable and untenable. They felt that they had gone to war for access to French land, not to support ridiculous rules made across the ocean by men with no clue about the local situations. For the Natives, and particularly the Haudenosaunee, an imaginary line on a map would not keep colonists out of their lands. Already the Mohawk coexisted with the British, the Nation having granted large parcels to various favored British citizens like Sir William Johnson. Johnson, who considered himself a Baron, favored bringing in more settlers who would feed his coffers. Even though the Proclamation Line supposedly protected the rest of the Six Nations from settlement, this was uneasy times for America’s Natives. At the western edge of British North America, Pontiac’s Rebellion showed how fragile the concept of Native sovereignty actually was.
Finally, in 1768, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix codified the line between the Haudenosaunee League and the British. It ran mostly concurrent with the 1763 line in New York, and then veered sharply west to cede areas of Pennsylvania and western Virginia, including the Kentucky territory, to the British. The Haudenosaunee thought that this would keep the colonists at bay, especially since the Treaty superceded the royal decree and would be better enforced locally. We can never know if this would have worked long-term; what we do know is that even during the Revolutionary War, colonists worked their way up the Wyoming Valley, essentially knocking on Iroquoia’s back door.
The Patriots were optimistic that the Haudenosaunee might support their bid for independence. Benjamin Franklin had established a good rapport with Native leaders in 1754 when the never-enacted Albany Plan for Union was drafted. Prior to the French & Indian War, Major George Washington of the Virginia Militia had been appointed by Virginia Colonial Governor Robert Dinwiddie to make peace with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. During the war, Washington was advised by Tanacharison, known as the Half-King, who was a representative of the Seneca in Ohio territory. They were so close that Tanacharison bestowed the nickname Conotocaurius, meaning Town Destroyer upon the 21 year-old Washington. The name had originally been applied to Washington’s great-grandfather John in the late 1600s by the Susquehannock. Though probably a joke to the Half-King, this appellation would come back into play in the 1790s.
The Mohawk were clearly pro-British, but the other five nations were thought swayable. With much bitter debate, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy wanted to remain neutral, and many clans of the Onondaga and Cayuga did. The Mohawk and Seneca, who made up most of the warriors, both sided with the British. The Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. The Onondaga were officially neutral, but a brutal April 1779 attack on them by the Americans led many to side with the British. The Cayuga also supported the British or stayed neutral. In all cases, neutrality was tantamount to being openly anti-American, so the Patriots saw all Haudenosaunee outside the Oneida and Tuscarora as enemies.
With the official pause on settlement starting in 1763, reaffirmed in 1768, and war breaking out in 1775, it wasn’t until 1783 that the reality of whites settling Haudenosaunee lands became a reality. British and American officials met in Paris to conduct a treaty officially ending the war and drawing the lines that would cause enough trouble to wash over the land to the present day.
The main source of the troubles was the fact that the British basically abandoned the fate of the Haudenosaunee to the United States, who did not treat separately with them. In 1784, Joseph Brant, war chief of the Mohawk, led several thousand Haudenosaunee to Grand River, Ontario, where he had negotiated a grant of reserve lands. Nearly all Mohawk left with him, leaving their homeland in the Mohawk Valley to the Patriots.
I will delve more deeply into the thought process and legal maneuvers that created the Central New York Military Tract later, but over the course of the years from 1776 to 1790, various laws were enacted to reward American soldiers and also to resolve land claims. A series of interstate treaties involving New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania solidified the boundaries of New York State. A separate series of illegal treaties between New York and the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca Nations established reservation lands for each Nation by stealing their traditional homelands and offering negligible compensation in return. Though additional treaties would dispossess further each of those Nations, the stage is now set for the creation and opening of the Central New York Military Tract.
