5.4: Childhood and Relics of Death in the Finger Lakes
Supplement to Endnotes
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Sophia Webster Lloyd, reflecting on her childhood near the Finger Lakes, remembered how each year -- in the same decades of George’s youth -- the plowshare turned up the “charred and blackened corn” from scorched-earth warfare. As a child she occasionally spoke with the remaining Indians about the horrific past of their parents and grandparents. “From lips that knew them” Lloyd heard “sad and painful stories of those starving Indians, from whom my childhood was but slightly removed.” As a girl she felt confused as to why the “quiet, peaceable, peculiar people” endured “with such resignation,” watching their forests being carved up and cultivated, and “our corn ripening even over their buried dead.”
On a hill in her town lay an ancient Indian burial ground where each spring, local farmers plowed up “treasures” which children gathered. The treasures were physical emblems that connected past violence with white families’ toil to convert conquered lands into prosperous farms. Old Indian graves still held their shape on the unbroken side of the hill. When children walked to district schools or academies, they weaved along the hillside and “meandered in and out of the depressions.”[1]
In her poem, “The Indian Warrior’s Grave" -- which Lloyd claimed was taken from her experience as a child -- she recalled how she and other local children were drawn to one particular hill marked by the graves of Indians. It had become a “familiar place” like, perhaps, the ruins by the Cole farm. Blooming flowers by the graves beckoned the children. But so did “death, a strange, mysterious power.” Though children would “cluster” around the graves in the day, with “trembling footsteps” they raced home in the twilight.
Many decades later, still moved by its eerie power, Lloyd wrote that one day, while gathering berries by an enchanted tree, local children discovered the body of an aged warrior with his “swarthy brow” pressed to the clay of what witnesses came to believe was the grave of his departed lover. Locals told one another that the buried woman was an Iroquois who was killed by a white soldier during the Revolution. As Lloyd remembered the story, the swarthy Indian had placed his dead lover in a grave and later planted a thorn tree above her. He then left to avenge her death. It was said that he, like many enraged warriors had done, revenged his sorrows upon the head of a white father or husband along the frontier.
Lloyd and her community might have made sense of the Indian cadaver by inventing the story about the murdered woman. But even if these exact details of the Indian’s love and revenge did not take place, Lloyd’s people repeated such stories about Indians’ tragic losses because they knew they could be true. Because such things had to have happened. The stories they told originated in knowledge about the intimate pain of past enemies. Lloyd claimed that though the Sullivan raids were a “matter of history,” there was a “peculiar vividness” to the past when it “speaks of the things with which one is familiar.” The sting of broken families could be felt in the daily and the ordinary.
The “whole vicinity,” Lloyd recalled, “teemed with legends of the Indians.”[2] Ossuaries and ancient burial grounds dotted the New York landscape, especially as one moved westward through and beyond the Finger Lakes. In the 1820s Joseph Smith, a farm boy from nearby Palmyra, claimed he recovered from a hillside golden plates that bore the record of an ancient Indian civilization. Early believers partly understood his Book of Mormon as a divine answer to a local, palpable mystery of the origins of a destroyed people. On a barren hill in nearby Canandaigua, whites marveled at large stones shaped like the heads of humans. Less than three miles north of the Cole farm was an ancient elliptical fortification about the size of three acres that puzzled locals, who over the decades pulled bones, pipes, pottery and “other artifacts” from its earthen base. Some locals even unearthed a human skeleton that appeared to have been buried facing southeast in a sitting posture. The fortification mound was only one of several in Seneca County. Even closer to the farm were three massive holes, one with a diameter of nearly fifteen feet and twenty deep. Near Lodi’s “Mill Creek” was a place locals knew as the Seneca’s “field of peace,” a sacred burial ground where Indians’ souls were “lulled by the murmuring waters” of the lake’s gentle waves. By the time Cole left his village to marry, locals had looted the graves of its “guns, knives, tomahawks, brass kettles and domestic articles.”[3]
George’s neighbors could hear the past too. On sweltering summer evenings along the shores of Seneca Lake, many swore they could hear pounding, like the muted firing of distant cannon, or the beating of Indian drums emanating from the lake. Whites around the lake told stories about a mysterious log, shaped like an Indian warrior named Agayentah. Seemingly drawn by some magical current the log appeared ominously before the booming began. Locals called it the “wandering Jew” or the “wandering chief”-- revealing, perhaps, the popular belief that Indian blood traced back to ancient Hebrews. The land of the vanquished Iroquois confederacy could not keep secrets about its past.[4]
Like the land, locals too had the violent past only partially buried within. All across America, memories taken from the frontier could strike children to the core. Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, a captain during the Revolution, had waged war against Indians before and during the struggle for independence. On the Kentucky frontier, he was ambushed and murdered by an Indian. Lincoln’s own father, Thomas, who was only a young boy, watched in horror. Thomas -- who stood petrified -- would have been abducted or killed if his older brother Mordecai had not bolted for a nearby rifle, took hasty aim and killed the attacker. Lincoln claimed that no other legend from his youth was so deeply “imprinted upon my mind and memory.” It mattered little that he had not witnessed it. Legends of the frontier’s “dark and bloody ground” made deep marks.[5]
Local histories of the Finger Lakes, written decades after the first white settlers arrived, give a sense of the potent memories that locals passed down. A few years after the Coles arrived, white settlers along the nearby Cayuga Lake had a standoff with “old Indian John,” one of the Indians who had been “permitted to roam freely among the white inhabitants and receive aid and kindness from all.” Old John had formed a hunting partnership with a white settler, Mr. George Phadoc. As whites remembered it, Old John, seized with jealousy, shot Phadoc after a hunting expedition in which Phadoc bested John in killing prey. (Some accounts had it that Phadoc altered the sights of Indian John’s musket.) After local whites finally cornered John -- who had killed another man in the drama -- he was tried and condemned to hang.
On hanging day, an “immense concourse” of people, including women and children, came from many miles by boat, wagon, horseback, and foot. A pastor preached that it was not too late for John: “Jesus Christ came into the world to save just such miserable, ignorant, dying sinners as thou art.” John looked on without expression. When the oxcart was drawn away from under him, locals remembered his feet futilely clinging to every last inch of the cart’s planks. A local doctor dissected John’s body and kept his skeleton for many years. As one local recounted it, the episode had a “wholesome effect upon the Indians yet lingereing in this region.” The largest portion “removed immediately” while the “few” who remained “became in a degree useful laborers.” As late as 1857, an author claimed that mothers in the area still told the tale to their “little ones.”[6]
Local histories would recall that an elderly woman, Mrs. Franklin, had lived across the narrow width of Cayuga Lake, only a few miles by a wooden bridge. After her first husband had been slaughtered at Wyoming, the Indians carried her and her young boy into captivity. When the boy couldn’t keep pace they murdered him. When months later, they discovered she was pregnant, they abandoned her in the wilderness where alone she gave birth and soon buried her baby that she could not keep alive. Some years after getting rescued, she married a “Captain Franklin,” whose wife had been killed by Indians. Many of his children were captured by Indians and later recovered. His infant boy, Ichabod never returned. The remarried couple settled on the Military Tract before the land had been issued to soldiers. After surveyors ruled his lands to be part owned by a veteran, and part of the Cayuga Indian reservation, Franklin was double-crossed by a friend who, with a fellow speculator, purchased most of the land that Franklin had improved. The old Captain shot himself using a stick to set off his gun. His two sons, one of them crippled in the arms, remained to farm a small plot owned by the Indians.[7]
There was Peter Smith, Jr., who had traveled from Wyoming County, Pennsylvania to Ovid in 1789, a year or so before the Coles arrived. He sowed three acres of wheat, and returned the next year to the little town with his father and sister. They were all that was left of his family after the Wyoming massacre where his mother, brother and older sister had been butchered. His father Peter, Sr. had fought in the French and Indian War. For the Smiths, encounters with Indian violence had become a rite of passage into manhood.[8]
On the eve of George Cole’s birth, locals were still untangling the past. In “about the year 1825” during an election, just a few miles away from the Cole farm at Kelly’s Corners, a veteran from the Revolution, John Emmons, threw a rope around a beam at a public polling station and strung up a “Mr. Van Wagener” by the neck. The elderly Emmons hoisted the dangling Van Wagoner, nearly killing the old man. Villagers in the region had believed that Van Wagoner had taken part along with Indians in the raids at Cherry Valley and Wyoming. As the rumors went, after Van Wagoner and his warriors massacred a household of innocents, the Indians supposedly discovered a tiny child in a cradle. Yet, “with their scalping knives still dripping with blood of the slain” the Indians yielded -- perhaps from compassion or maybe with plans to adopt the baby into the tribe. As local tellers told it, VanWagener then bolted into the scene and drove a bayonet through the infant’s heart. In the town he was known as “the man who killed the child.”[9]
In and around the childhood home of George Cole, there were stories about Indians and the troubling past of how the village Lodi came to be.
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