Iroquois Journey: An Anthropologist Remembers

1. Upstaters in Suburbia and at Home

one Upstaters in Suburbia and at Home My career as an Iroquoianist may have been foretold three generations before my birth. The Fentons of Conewango Valley in western New York and the family of Amos Snow of the Seneca Nation had kept up an association going back to the 1860s. The Fenton farm on Flat Iron Road lay halfway between the Cattaraugus and Allegany reservations of the Seneca Nation, and Seneca families “going to the other side,” as they said, camped on the hemlock ridge at the back of the farm. One bitter winter morning, my father’s father at chore time reported to his widowed mother that smoke was rising from the ridge. His mother suggested that he go see how the Indians were faring. He took an ax and went afoot, intending to split up some firewood he had felled. He found an Indian family encamped in a lean-to they had constructed of hemlock boughs: a man, an old woman, and a young woman with a newborn baby. They were shivering. When my grandfather returned to the house at noon for dinner , he reported what he had seen to his mother, who insisted that he hitch the team to the pung, fill the bed with straw, throw in a buffalo robe, and go fetch that family to the warm farmhouse. By suppertime she had installed the Indian family in the hired girl’s room off the kitchen. The Seneca family stayed for a week, until 2 | upstaters in suburbia and at home the weather permitted travel. When they departed, the old woman thanked my great-grandmother for shelter, sustenance, and hospitality , saying it was the first time they had been invited to sleep and eat in a white home. It was the Indian custom, she added, to bind a friendship with a present, whereupon she unfolded an old burden strap, an obvious heirloom. It was decorated with dyed deer hair and porcupine-quill embroidery worked in a geometric pattern and edged with seed beads. She handed it to my great-grandmother, Fanny Carr, widow of Captain William, the seafarer. The Seneca hunter was Amos Snow, a stout, jovial fellow who became a lifelong friend of my grandfather: a companion on squirrel- and pigeon-shooting expeditions, a fellow trotting-horse fancier, as well as being good for sharing labor on the farm. On occasion Amos would show up with his young family. At some point he entrusted to my grandfather two old wooden False Faces that he produced from under the wagon seat.1 My grandfather kept them in a round wooden cheese box (see Fenton, False Faces, 1987). Later, Amos left a string of purple wampum that commemorated some event long since forgotten. These items, however they came to us, comprised the nucleus of an ethnological collection that was kept in the attic in a special room known as the “Indian collection ,” where I was privileged to climb steep stairs of a rainy summer afternoon. When visitors, sometimes Indians, came to the farm, I was allowed to tag along and listen. Among the guests were Warren King Morehead from Andover Academy, on his way to the Ohio mounds; Arthur C. Parker, then the New York state archaeologist; and M. R. Harrington, then of the American Museum of Natural History. Their comments aroused my curiosity. Both of my parents hailed from southwestern New York State. My father, John William Fenton (1876–1939), grew up on the family farm in Conewango Valley, Cattaraugus County. My mother, Anna Belle Nourse (1873–1949), spent her girlhood in Mayville, the county seat of adjacent Chautauqua County in the remote corner of the state and home of the Chautauqua Institution, which afforded cultural advantages in music and the arts. They met at Fredonia Normal School, ancestor of the present state college of that name, where they were trained to teach at the elementary level, and they both found employment in the New York City school system in 1901. Mother landed at ps 9 in a bluestocking district on Riverside Drive, where she would become principal. upstaters in suburbia and at home | 3 Father taught the children of recent immigrants at ps 158 on the upper East Side and ingratiated himself with their parents, of whom some became dealers in antiques and art objects. Father’s talent was in painting and drawing, which he improved by study at the Parson’s school...