In Gotham's Shadow: Globalization and Community Change in Central New York

Chapter 2 An American Story

15 Chapter 2 An American Story For thousands of years, central New York was home to the Mohawk, Oneida, and Onondaga tribes. Part of the larger Iroquoian cultural group, they had first arrived in the Great Lakes region about 4000 B.C.E. (Tuck 1977). During the late sixteenth century five Iroquoian tribes, the Cayuga , Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca, formed the Iroquois Confederacy in order to bring peace to the territory and defend against attack from other Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes.1 The existence of the confederacy made the Iroquois a powerful force in the Great Lakes, and throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the confederacy traded furs with the Dutch, British, and French for such items as firearms and rum. The existence of the confederacy and other native populations were also construed as an impediment to the expansion of the colonies into the interior of the continent, including central New York. It is not surprising that policies at the time were aimed at dislocating the Iroquois from their ancestral homelands. The threat of European encroachment on Iroquois lands was a tense issue for decades before the American Revolution, even being commented upon in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which placed the western boundary of New York at the Unadilla River in Otsego County. The treaty stated that its purpose was to prevent those Intrusions and Encroachments of which we had so Long and Loudly Complained and to put a stop to the many fraudulent advantages which had so often taken us in Land affairs. (National Archives 1998a) When the American Revolution began in 1775, border raids on the part of Iroquois still loyal to Great Britain served as an excuse for the colonial military to attack the confederacy. In May 1779, General George 16 In Gotham’s Shadow Washington ordered that “parties should be detached to lay waste all settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed” (U.S. Library of Congress 31 May 1779; emphasis in original ). Later that year, American forces under James Clinton destroyed Iroquois villages in the Onondaga territory, and then turned their attention to the Susquehanna Valley (Fischer 1997; Graymont 1990). They built a dam at the future site of Cooperstown and then broke it, flooding the Iroquois fields downstream. They later met with another army led by General Sullivan, working his way up the Susquehanna from Pennsylvania. The army targeted not only warriors but also the native population as a whole, destroying “the villages of the Indians, slaughtering their livestock, and burning their fields” (Ellis et al. 1957: 116; see also Mulligan 1972). Peace could be obtained only after “you (Generals Clinton and Sullivan) have very thoroughly completed the destruction of their settlements . . . but you will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected” (USLOC 31 May 1779). In a campaign that foreshadowed Sherman’s march to the sea, two objectives were accomplished: the border raids occurred less frequently, and the Iroquois population was by and large suppressed in central New York. The dispossession of the Iroquois made the settlement of central New York by the Americans possible. Those natives who survived faced few options: to migrate west or to face poverty in the new communities springing up through upstate New York. The French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville summarized their plight: The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. To this day, Iroquois names animate the geography of New York, in places such as Oneonta and Oneida, in rivers such as the Mohawk and the Susquehanna, in lakes such as Canadarago and Otsego. And every year, the General Clinton Regatta celebrates the campaign of 1779 as hundreds of canoeists race from Cooperstown down the Susquehanna...